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No, not the monumentally vacuous, and indeed twatish, Channel 4 program - I'm taking about the surveillance society. Seems the UK has been rated as having one of the most intrusive state snooping apparatus in the world. On a par with China and Russia.

The question is - are your going to stand for it? What about when they start decreeing what you can and can't do in the privacy of your own home (or even think). What about when they proscribe your interests and views, as 'they' have deemed them inappropriate? Will that then rouse you from your apathy? We've already seen that supremely snotty cow (and Nu-Labour deputy) Harriet Harmon floating the idea of making illegal the purchase of sex - something that everyone here should be extremely concerned about.





Officer Dibble

The use of CCTV and the growing number of surveillance cameras deployed by the different arms of the state does not prevent crime - it merely detects some aspects of some crimes.

I have said it before Dibble, CCTV in this country does nowt for the citizen.
What use is CCTV when you have already been mugged, raped, assaulted etc....answer = fucking none.
the chances are the purpartrater (sp) will never be caught, remember that young lad shot in Liverpool? fat lot of good cctv did him, and the countless other victims. This government are shite at most things apart from information gathering, even then you can gn,tee they will lose it, when will ANY government put coppers back on the streets where they are supposed to be instead of riding round in warm motors waiting to finish thier shifts.
The price of propper coppering has got to be cheaper than wasting millions on CCTV and trying to solve the crime after it's happened, a high police presence is a massive deterrent to a 'wrong-un'.

Liz.

One reason why we don't see many Police patrolling our streets is because they are away attending 'diversity awareness' seminars.

Alice In Blunderland wrote:

> Well I certainly think CCTV has it's place and as the prior
> poster said can be used after the fact to help solve crimes- ok
> the offence has happened but it can help the police to know who
> they are looking for & lead to a conviction in court, it can
> also help prevent crimes, for instance some time back on
> Crimewatch a young woman was walking home late at night in a
> fairly remote area and was spotted by an off duty policeman who
> decided to phone in to the people monitoring and to his
> colleagues to get a car out to her as he was concerned, and not
> long after a guy picked her up over his shoulder and was
> walking off with her, the CCTV tracked where he was going and
> directed the police and he scarpered and was later caught as
> they had a good image of him.


Yes Alice, but you cant have CCTV everywhere she was lucky, Imagine it had not been there, also if you have a high police precence on the streets always, then it follows that crime will go down, it will just take some time.

I mentioned something on this a few days ago, and this fear is typical of todays society when it comes to prioritising threats.

You have a media that is obsessed with the dangers of waifs, skinny celebs and anorexia, when year after year our waist sizes, number of diabetes sufferers, and deaths from obesity related diseases increase at alarming rates.

As for 'Big Brother', well, Tesco, BT, Sky, Google, Yahoo and even your local double glazing company have more information on you than the government could ever wish for. Of course, it's only business, but do we live in a capitalistic economy now? I mean, really? Don't you think that big business has more influence with governments, within the EU and America, than it ever has in the past? Corporations decide political agendas these days, not politicians.

Every newspaper you read has business behind it, all with it's own political agenda, and backers to keep happy.

It's not a tyrannical government that will enforce a nightmare 'Big Brother' scenario, but a massive conglomerate of corporations that hide behind the smokescreen of a puppet government.

David Brent wasn't presenting the vid was he?

Sam, I wouldn?t fret to much about Tesco or BT. The very worst they want to do to you is sell you some inferior 'own brand' baked beans or sign you up for a wanky broadband package. They are not political ideologues that seek to impose an ideology or ?ism? on you, whether you like it or not. They will not drag you off at midnight in a Tesco?s delivery van and lock you in the cold store down at the old 24-hour shop for expressing a view that is anathema to them. If they do have a wicked world domination plan it is simply to sell you even more of their crap wares.

This idea of corporations taking over the world is one that is put about by those pretentious, over privileged, middleclass kids (tomorrow?s fat cats) who go and make a nuisance of themselves at G8 summits. Particularly if it?s being held in a tropical paradise with a nice beach to hand - well, you gotta chill with a cool Pina Colada after a hard days protesting, right?

But the prospect of corporations taking over the world doesn?t fill me with the same horror as the sanctimonious decrees of Harriet Harman and her elitist colleagues does. Hey, you can have a deal with corporations, they?re commercial organizations, they just want to make some wedge. You can?t have a deal with zealots and those fruitcakes that have imbued themselves with moral righteousness. Hence the direction of my article.



Officer Dibble