Today’s Telegraph carries a story about plans by the government to clamp down on our liberties even further using the unnecessary, overpriced, over rated, corrupt junket that is the Olympic Games in 2012 as an excuse.
A swathe of controversial “Big Brother” style crime-fighting techniques are to be introduced by the Government under the cover of the 2012 London Olympics, a leaked memo has revealed.
The document, drawn up by officials at the Home Office and sent to 10 Downing Street, paves the way for a much wider use of the police’s DNA database to identify suspects through their relatives.
Police are also to be empowered to scan postal packages to find drugs and to monitor an individual’s progress in even greater detail than they can today, by using advances in CCTV technology as well as electronic travel passes such as the Oyster cards in use in London.
Well, opting out of Oyster is a start. The idea of a pre-paid card is fair enough, one that tracks your journeys and keeps them on a database most certainly is not – hence my refusal to participate.
The memo, entitled No 10 Policy Working Group on Security, Crime and Justice, Technological Advances, asks: “To what extent should the expectation of liberty be eroded by legitimate intrusions in the interests of security of the wider public?”
If past experience is anything to go by, these evil bastards will stop at nothing in their efforts to erode our expectation of liberty. They have already gone too far by half, so the short answer is “none” and can we please have back those already stolen from us? The idea that what they are doing is in any way “legitimate” is stretching the English language to breaking point – much as they did with their use of the word “voluntary” to describe their compulsory identity card scheme.
It goes on to explore how to win over public opinion and concludes: “Increasing [public] support could be possible through the piloting of certain approaches in high-profile ways such as the London Olympics.”
I doubt they will have too much of a problem. It worked well enough for the Gestapo and more recently the water companies have enjoyed some success with their snitch lines during the hosepipe ban. The public will love it. Dobbing in someone for whom they have harboured some petty little grudge will make a welcome variation on the Big Brother theme and they will, doubtless, be stupid enough not to recognise the irony.
The games are expected to see millions of extra visitors to the capital in what will present the police with the biggest peacetime security threat on British soil.
Oh, bollocks! Hyperbole used to justify the reprehensible. The vast majority of people coming to this country will do so for the sport. Just as they have in other olympiads in other countries in recent years. Biggest peacetime threat to security, my arse! Unless, of course, one is completely paranoid and obsessive about threats from brown people.
It suggests that police will make much greater use of a technique known as “familial DNA” where a suspect whose details are not on the database can be traced through a family member whose details are already recorded. The memo states: “Records could be trawled more routinely to identify familial connections to crime scenes, providing a starting point to investigations through a family member that is on the database to a suspect that is not, for example.”
In other words, pluck any excuse from the ether and use it to push forward the criminalising of British citizens. Ah, but…
It admits: “Such use is clearly controversial and requires careful controls.”
Well, damn me! I wonder why that is? Not because it is a gross erosion of our basic liberties? These bastards look upon liberty as a dirty word, something to be sneered upon, brushed aside in the interests of the state and suppression of “terrorism” or whatever is the current percieved threat du jour.
Shami Chakribati seems increasingly to be a voice in the wilderness these days, but she remains valiant even so:
Fundamental debates about freedom and security belong in public and Parliament, and should not be left to the praetorian guard at Number 10.
It’s particularly worrying to hear that the London Olympics – supposed to be a celebration of our multicultural democracy – might be manipulated for political ends into part of the Home Secretary’s ‘make liberty history’ campaign.
Quite. I like that tag line, “make liberty history”.
Meanwhile, the home office is saying nothing. Well, they wouldn’t, would they?