I’ve written about the truly egregious totalitarian, Michael Cross before. On that occasion he was happy for our mobile numbers to be in the public domain. Now, via Al Jahom, my attention is unfortunately drawn to this nasty hypocrite’s latest drivel.
In one of the first Tintin books, our intrepid boy reporter hunts down the owner of a suspicious-looking car by going to the library and looking up its number plate in an impressive printed register. I’ve no idea if that’s still how they do things in Belgium, but in the UK it’s out of the question. The DVLA register of motor vehicle owners (strictly speaking, “keepers”) is not open to the public. Unless of course you’re a parking enforcement firm willing to invest £2.50 a time. The Daily Mail (and, to judge by the online comments, many of its readers) seems outraged that a public body should trade in this information.
So am I. As a free data campaigner, I believe that public bodies should charge only the “marginal cost” of distribution – in the age of the web, this means for free. In fact, I would like the DVLA database of vehicle keepers posted on the web, so that all of us – whether busybodies, neighbourhood campaigners or even intrepid boy reporters – can link every registered vehicle on our roads to a name and address.
Yup, you read it right, this shit-for-brains thinks that our personal and private information should be plastered about the web for anyone to see – even if they are busybodies. Never mind that we might not want busybodies to have access to it, Mr Stasi pants knows better. Indeed, he is pretty much opposed to things like personal privacy:
As ever, it’s a matter of balance between liberty, civic duty and privacy. My belief is that, at the moment, we’re tilted too far towards personal privacy. No doubt some readers will disagree.
Some readers do disagree – most of them, as a matter of fact. Clearly this is not something that bothers this totalitarian control freak. Nor is there any balance to be struck between liberty, civic duty and privacy. The information we provide to the DVLA is between us and that organisation and should not be accessible to anyone else (apart from the police), certainly not private parking companies and certainly not the local curtain twitchers. And, there is no civic duty involved. What a stupid, utterly moronic, evil little cunt.
The interesting thing being, is that this stupid, stupid, stupid article details all the reasons why it is a stupid, stupid, stupid article and why the idea is staggeringly outstandingly bad, without offering one single good reason for its implementation. Not fucking one – unless you count busybodying as a good idea, which the intellectually challenged Cross appears to do.
Michael Cross is not only a cunt of the first magnitude, not only a totalitarian fuckwit, but a stupid one, too. People like this enabled the Stasi to operate as efficiently as they did. Doubtless, somewhere once, a Mikhail Crosski was happily pulling the trigger to rid the Soviet Union of yet another counter-revolutionary. This man is nasty. That the Guardian pays him to spread his cancerous, misanthropic poison says as much about that organ as one needs to know. If ever you pause to wonder at the mentality that allows evil regimes to flourish, pick up a copy of the Guardian and all will be revealed.
Thankfully, the evil little shit is getting a well deserved pasting in the comments.
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Update: Cross responds in the comments.
… I’m not sure I can think of a compelling application for open DVLA data…
Because there isn’t one – not even the feeble example offered (finding a car with a smashed window). This comment does beg the obvious question; why write a whole article that calls for just that. Idiot!
But likewise, is there a compelling reason for keeping it secret, bearing in mind that the police and clamping firms can look it up anyway?
Quite apart from the examples Cross gives in his original article, we can add; stalkers, burglars, identity theft, vehicle cloning… Want me to go on?
One final observation; Cross appears to be unable to distingush between public information and private information held by a public organisation. Given this, he has no place campaigning on the issue.
Man, where do they find all these fevered, government-worshipping trash?
Can we partition the country?
.-= My last blog ..No guns for negroes =-.
Has the stupid boy never heard of ‘identity theft’? /Facepalm
The article is so stupid, I am inclined to think it a wind-up. Would Cross want his private address and phone number published alonside his article? I doubt it. I’m a licensed firearms holder. If I were seen loading a gun into by car, this proposal could put me at risk of being raided by criminals. Though I suppose Standartenfuehrer Cross’s answer to that would be to confiscate my guns. The man’s a cunt. Pure posion.
The information we provide to the DVLA is between us and that organisation and should not be accessible to anyone else (apart from the police), certainly not private parking companies and certainly not the local curtain twitchers. And, there is no civic duty involved.
This is the sort of common purpose drivel where they’re asking, in wide-eyed innocence, whether this measure shouldn’t be taken or this measure. They’re evil little mothers.
.-= My last blog ..Practical steps you, the reader, can take to make that difference =-.
Were this to happen, all that would happen is that people would register cars to business addresses or to P.O. boxes, and give a super-premium rate phone number (which forwards on to them) as the contact number. This is alrady quite a good idea if you have a luxury car, since quite a few gangs of robbers use number plate spotters to record luxury car number plates, then via a backhander to their local car-clamping friends they can find out where the car is kept at night and go burgle the place.
Register to a P.O. box, and you get a nice handy cut-out to foil such things.