*Spookocracy in power. Terrorists and spooks are like Windows and Intel.
*Y'know, this isn't North Korea under discussion here – it's Britain, "Mother of Parliaments," "Britons never never shall be slaves," "man's home is his castle" and all that. It's not that the British don't already Echelon everything they can get their wavelengthy hands on, 'cause they do. This isn't an innovation, it's an attempt to give British spookocracy some modern transparency. Why they would wanna do that, and why nobody says anything about it... I dunno. It's who they are. It's like the British class system: strangers walk up, it's like: "Why are you doing this weird thing to yourselves?" and they just sort of blink and change the subject.
*I'm pretty sure most Britons would rather wig out about the gardening expenses of their MPs than contemplate universal surveillance, even though the fact that they clicked on this blogpost is gonna go somewhere in a cobwebby file in some damp, eldritch bunker that would impress even BLDGBLOG.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/nov/14/email-surveillance-election
"The government is playing a two-handed game over its plan to snoop on all our communication and internet activity. On the one hand, officials have put it about that the scheme has been indefinitely shelved because of concerns raised in the public consultation on the proposals. On the other, Home Office insiders assure me that the government has no intention of putting the scheme on hold. Any statements to the contrary are designed to mitigate the risk of a negative campaign in the run-up to the general election.
"The government quite rightly perceives an election risk because of its surveillance plans. It is, after all, proposing to reach deep into the private life of everyone in the nation. From your phone records and emails to your activity on social networking sites such as Facebook, the government wants to know everything you do. (((The real trouble comes when the government figures out what the government is doing, as in, say, Prince Charles' phone calls to his mistress. She's quite a nice lady, actually, so this is a technology that excels at making everybody involved feel ashamed of themselves. It's like a Giant Shame Machine.)))
"The scheme is a political disaster in the making. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems have positioned themselves with a reform agenda on privacy. The mere existence of a surveillance plan of this magnitude would have created the sort of clear blue water that no government would want. Bad enough that it has already created a surveillance society second to none in the democratic world; even worse if it was seen to be moving toward a North Korean model.
"The consultation in this scheme was a disreputable piece of work. The government tried to sell the snooping plans as if they were a range of vacuum cleaners. It offered a "do nothing" option, already dismissed by ministers; a ridiculously complex and unlawful option; and a "middle ground" option. The document offered no specific detail, primarily because officials and ministers had no clue what technology or techniques are available to spy on the public. It said nothing about safeguards, principally because the Home Office had no idea what it had to safeguard. And it was mute on specifics about risks, again because the government had no clue what it was trying to "protect" us from..."
(((You may wonder how all this is supposed to work, technically speaking. Well, taking a cue from the Americans, first one gets a power-source bigger than Salt Lake City, and...)))
