This is yet more proof, if proof were needed, that once again terrorism works. In the guise of preventing terrorism (and other crime, admittedly, but it's mainly terrorism they talk about) our 'Elected Leaders' are stampeding full tilt into a surveillance police state that Stalin would have wet himself over. To protect us from a threat from people who apparently are jealous of our freedoms (which I'm not at all convinced exists, or at least to an extent which would differentiate it to any meaningful degree from normal car accidents, smoking and alcohol related deaths, and so on), these people seem intent on simply removing those freedoms completely, thus neatly doing what the 'enemy' apparently desires. Then we're told its for our own good.

Consider. Within the next two to six years:

All movements of vehicles will be tracked at all times on roads everywhere in the country, and on private property (such as petrol stations, etc). The records will be kept for some years, so they can go fishing for things much later.

All electronic communications (email, web access, phone, sms, etc) will be logged and the records kept for years, etc, etc.

All citizens will be issued, at their expense, identity papers which will include dozens of details about them, including fingerprints, iris scans, digitised photos, NI number, address, DOB, and everything else that a neofascist somewhere can think of. All these details will be stored in a database which will be accessible to, basically, anyone who works for the government in any capacity at all. Incorrect details will be a finable offence, even if you had nothing to do with it. Eventually these papers will be mandatory, and living a normal life impossible without them anyway.

The last item was pushed through parliment, without any public vote or discussion worth speaking of, after a disinformation campaign of remarkable length.

The first item doesn't seem to have been discussed in public at all, apart from occasional mentions in some media.

The second item was more or less simply mandated by eurocrats and expanded on by the Blairites who felt it didn't go far enough.

So essentially the police (among others) will have the instant ability to know who you are, where you live, where you've been (at any time for the last couple of years), who you've talked to (at any time for the last couple of years), who has talked to you (at any time...), where you are now, and many other interesting facts. They won't need much, if any, reason to get these details, won't need to tell you that they're doing so, and you will have little comeback if/when something goes horribly wrong as a result of incorrect information.

In addition to these measures, the government has managed to equate in the minds of much of the populace ( the Sun reader type mainly) a desire for what used to be called a private life with an admission of something to hide, which may well be suspicious and proof of criminal intent. A conversation that Rob S and I had with a chav at paddington station a year ago shows how strong this feeling is among that segment of the population, all the more worrying because they have neither anything more to back it up than "they said", or any apparent ability to think it through and spot the flaws.

Essentially, it seems to be steadily eroding the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' and replacing it with 'criminal we haven't charged yet'. Yet, even so, people will still commit crimes, murders will happen just the same, terrorism attacks will go on. The clean-up rate may increase slightly, some types of fairly petty crime will become rare, but the serious or committed criminals will still succeed quite often. They always do. A lot of them are working for the government

For instance, the car tracking thing. Apparently it will stop stolen cars being used in committing other crimes, presumably because the owner will report the car as stolen and it will then be traced and stopped in short order. Leaving aside the inevitable official cockups that will prevent this actually happening in many cases, at least until it's too late, what happens when the owner of said stolen car is in the boot with a knife in his back? Criminal needs car for serious crime, criminal steals car, but now criminal eliminates witness.

Or, criminal borrows licence plates from same make, model, and colour of car as one he has access to, commits crime, puts plates back. Innocent person (defined officially as 'someone who hasn't committed a crime, yet') gets the blame. Much hilarity ensues.

This is all making me very unhappy. Could you guess?

pca