Thy Circle Overhead, Analysing Our Heat Consumption

Today I came across this story, which I think says a great deal about Britain today.

A bloke has his home raided by the Police because they've identified what they think are suspcious patterns of heat movement from within. How have they come to this conclusion ? By using infra-red deat detention equipment from a Police helicopter. This leads them to conclude that the occupant is harbouring a cannabis factory. As it would do, I suppose, if you've got an ultra-suspicious mind and nothing better to think about.

And you thought they were looking for murderers...

So Plod breaks into this man's garage. They find nothing more than a wood-burning stove, used to heat a workshop. In forcing entry they leave a big hole in the garage door, which they patch up with a bit of loose-fitting chipboard. They don't bother to clear up the mess they've made. They stick a search warrant through the letter box along with a bit of paper which said they hadn't taken anything as evidence. And that's it. No apology. No post-raid phone call to say why they'd broken into the home of an innocent man. Not even a compensation form so that the occupant could claim for the damage - he had to go to the Police Station to get that.

So, faced with rising levels of violent crime and conveying an almost total disregard for victims of muggings, or for people whose houses have been burgled or whose cars have been broken into, the Police have, it seems, got the time and the money to go up in a bloody helicopter and monitor our heat consumption. (For God's sake, is there any way in which they are not watching us ?) And having found something they think might indicate use of a drug which might as well be legalised anyway, they've then got the time and resources to break into a locked garage, just so that they can find...nothing. But having then been shown to be totally wrong, they are incapable of an apology or of any practical help to make good the damage they've caused.

I used to respect and admire the Police. I used to think they were on my side, as an innocent law-abiding person. But my support of them has been corroded in recent years by stories such as this, which betray an overuse of power, a lack of respect for the people they're supposed to be protecting and absolutely dire prioritisation. And I'm not alone.

How Is This Legal ?

Via Old Holburn and Leg Iron comes news of how the government is allowing the police to log onto people’s computers and search them.

This means that the police have licence to read YOUR emails, your instant messages, your private documents (possibly containing passwords, account details etc). Without a warrant. Alternatively, they could install a “key-logging” device, so that they know what you’re typing. At any time. What’s more, this power is not just limited to the police in this country. It also applies to the authorities in any other EU country.

The safeguards, such that they are, appear to include an assertion that these measures can only be instigated in order to detect a “serious” crime, defined as one that carries a jail sentence of three years or more. And we all know what happens to "safeguards". They get changed, ignored, or conveniently forgotten. And that's only if they're any good in the first place, which these are not.

You know what stinks most of all about this particularly smelly destruction of our liberties ? It’s not that it represents a further dismantling of our freedoms and our rights to privacy in our own affairs, important though those are. It’s the way it’s being done.

You would think, would you not, that for the police to have this sort of power, they must have had it granted after full Parliamentary scrutiny and debate. And you would think that if Parliament had not given the police such authority, then acts such as hacking into our personal computers would be illegal. But no, not a bit of it. This has come about as a result of an EU directive agreed by the council of Ministers, which is as close to unaccountable as makes no difference. Under the Parliamentary system built up in the UK over hundreds of years, if politicians passed laws the public didn’t like, the public could get rid of them. What can we do if we don’t like this.? Correct; absolutely sweet nothing.

Cut And Dried Tyranny

You might think that offering regular customers a complementary glass of mulled wine is a fantastic marketing ploy for a hairdressers. You might think that it would spread a little goodwill and Christmas cheer. You might think that it's a completely harmless thing to do. And you might think that no one, but no one, could possibly object to it.

You'd be absolutely right on the first three counts. And spectacularly wrong on the fourth.

Norwich City Council (bastards) have written to every one of the city's 104 salons saying that to serve mulled wine you've got to have a licence. Failure to comply with this bureaucratic nonsense could land the salon owner with (get this):
..six months in prison (yes, I really did say "six months in prison"); .. ..
..a £20,000 fine,
..or,
..BOTH !

And, what's more, these fascist bullies are threatening to use undercover officers to catch salon owners out.

Students of the incessantly infantile behaviour exhibited by the State should will also appreciate the fact that they've sent this letter out four weeks before Christmas - doubtless too late for anyone to apply for a sodding licence.

Words are beginning to fail me when I attempt to describe how much I now hate the people in authority in this country. There is absolutely no harm whatsoever in giving customers a tipple when they come in out of the cold to get their hair done. God knows things are depressing enough as it is in this country right now. Why is it that all the people who have no life have to take it out on the rest of us by poking their noses into everybody else's ?

There is another point to be made here, which is that this is just the latest in a long line of crackdowns on the use of alcohol. Having used every tactic under the sun to target smokers, the State is now clearly setting its sight on anyone who likes a drink once in a while.

I guess the logic is that they tried combining economic ruin and Prohibition in the America of the 1920s, so they might us well try it here now.

The Orwellian Blueprint Becomes Reality

Earlier this month the Libertarian Party sent a copy of George Orwell's 1984 to every MP.

"To be taken as a warning, not as a blueprint", the accompanying notes said.

Well, too late, by the looks of it.

The City of Portsmouth (which also happens to have been the location of the story in the next article down about the idiot school teachers who wouldn't trust a mother's judgement) is having cameras with predictive software installed.

These supposedly intelligent cameras are meant to identify "suspicious" behaviour such as someone "loitering" or a car travelling too fast.

The "the innocent have nothing to fear" argument just doesn't wash with me anymore; not under this government. What are the odds that:

...we'll have a whole new set of offences about triggering the suspicions of security cameras;

...people get arrested and detained when they have committed no crime;

...these cameras will be used to gather information about the activities of those opposed to the government;

...the software will fail and alert police to wholly innocent behaviour;

...the information gathered will be lost / stolen / left on a train ?

Let's be clear. With a government like this one (which has invented almost one new criminal offence for every day that it's been in office) there is no advance in technology that cannot be used to impinge further on the freedoms of the people. These cameras can "detect" "suspicious" (whatever that means) behaviour. The next generation may be able to recognise faces, and microphones may recognise voices. Then the government would be able to watch you. Where ever you go, whatever you do. Whoever you do it with.

What's needed is a Bill of Rights that reins in the government's powers and abilities to snoop on its people. I blogged earlier in the week about the couple who'd had council cameras installed in their bedroom because there was a "suspicion" (note no offence) of maltreatment of a child. There's a lot more where that came from.

Watching Us In Bed

So the State has finally done it – they’ve got cameras into the bedroom.

The Daily Telegraph reports today that a local council – not named, doubtless to protect the guilty – put cameras into the bedroom of a couple “with learning difficulties” to look for evidence (there wasn’t any, as far as I can make out) that they were maltreating their baby (who sleeps in a separate room).

Say what you like about the Human Rights Act, but it does have its uses. It can – and did in this case – provide people with some protection against grotesque State intrusion. It shouldn’t have to, of course. Firstly there should be other legislation laid down with gives us recourse in cases like this, and secondly the State shouldn’t be allowed to install CCTV in our own homes in the first place.

In the wake of the Baby P case there are going to be all sorts of calls for closer monitoring of people by the State. They are calls we should resist. Without wishing to pre-empt the Balls Inquiry (or whatever it’s called) what appears to have happened in Harrngay is that officials could have spotted the signs of abuse, but missed them. In other words, it wasn’t the frequency or the extent of the surveillance that let Baby P down, but its quality. That is quite definitely not an excuse for invading the privacy of thousands of other families.

The arrogance with which some government officials go about their work is breathtaking. I can just imagine the smugness and voyeuristic excitement of the snooping Stalinists as they watched the first pictures coming back from this poor couple’s bedroom. I thank God that they’ve been told where to get off but mark my words, they’ll be back; spying on someone else’s bedroom or bathroom or toilet. And they’ll keep coming back until we as a nation decide we’ve had enough of it and make plain to our dear, elected leaders that they’ve gone too far. Or, better still, change our dear elected leaders into ones who don’t need telling.

It’s high time we fought back.

Remember, Remember

Two things have happened over the past 24 hours which I wish I'd taken part in. The first was a live webchat on Iain Dale's blog on the US election. He wanted volunteers to cover the major TV and radio channels. The second was far more significant in its own way; Old Holburn's "walk" in London.

Prevented by work commitments (and, in the second case, truth to tell, a fear of ending up in a police cell) I was forced instead to ponder from afar. I'm sure Iain Dale's webchat was a lot of fun. Old Holburn on the other hand, now according to Old Leg Iron, in the hands of the authorities, will have had an altogether different experience.

Old Holburn wanted to explore what would happen to anyone who walked into Parliament Square in eccentric dress and wearing a mask - and he appears to have found out the hard way. The harder facts will come out over the next few days (assuming he comes out first, of course) but on the face of it this is a damming indictment of life under ZaNu Labour. Ten blokes wearing masks sauntering up Whitehall were apparently enough to throw Brown's Bullies into a frenzy.

It is truly terrifying how powerful and omnipresent the government now is in this country. The level of behavioural compliance expected of individuals is frightening. It's only getting worse.

And it has to stop.

(Picture half-inched from Leg Iron / Old Holburn, who in turn half-inched it from Guido)

Engineering Reasons To Fine Us

There’s going to come a point where there’s nothing left for the State to fine us for.

The latest map-cap, draconian, bleed-the-bastards-till-they’re-dry scheme, dreamt up by the West Sussex branch of the Brown Dictatorship, is to issue fixed penalty notices to drivers who don’t switch their engines off when they’re sitting in traffic jams.

Apparently the Road Traffic (Vehicle Emissions) (Fixed Penalty) (England) Regulations give that State the right to “request” drivers to switch off vehicle engines when being run “unnecessarily”, and to issue fixed penalties of £20 to those drivers who refuse to co-operate. This ridiculous idea is going to be piloted in Shoreham-by-Sea and will, of course, by rolled out across the rest of England the moment it meets the standard government success criterion, namely “Does it give us another chance to tell everybody what to do ?”

It speaks volumes about the nature of the relationship between State and individual that a council is sufficiently resourced to police this kind of thing. It touches on a theme that Womble On Tour is only starting to wake up to – just how closely we are being watched. In this case we’ll have traffic wardens (sorry, Highways Agency Traffic Officers) crawling all over us the moment we get held up in a traffic jam.

If I was a car bore I could go on about the fact that if you keep turning the engine off and back on you can get through more petrol than if you just keep it running, or about the strain you’re likely to put on the battery etc., but instead I’ll just point out that with petrol at £1.10 per litre, people are quite capable of making up their own minds about when it makes sense to turn their engines off and don’t need some freedom-hating fascist in a peaked cap banging on their window.

I’m glad I’ve stopped biting my nails; I reckon there’s a fine coming for that, too.