Fight against terror 'spells end of privacy'

I guess that's that then.

"Privacy rights of innocent people will have to be sacrificed to give the security services access to a sweeping range of personal data, one of the architects of the government's national security strategy has warned.

Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data - including travel information, phone records and emails - held by public and private bodies and admits: "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.

His paper provides the most candid assessment yet of the scale of Whitehall's ambitions for a state database to track terrrorist groups. It argues that while the measures are essential, public trust will be maintained only if such intrusive surveillance is carried out within a strong framework of morality and human rights" (Guardian)

As we said before, it's like a child. In this case a child that wants to do something but is embarrassed or shy to do it, it keeps getting closer to what it wants to do, then runs away again and if asked by an adult the child would say 'no I don't want to do that thing' when it's transparently obvious to any adults in the room that is what the child is trying to do.

And this has been the way of the Labour regime in trying to create a new social order, a new police state and to send the world backwards in time.

Now, like the small child as it's closer to its goal of a truly a truly radical pleb grid it's getting so emboldened it can just declare what it wants to do off the back of its previous efforts and the mess itself it has pooped out all over the place even though it said at every stage it wasn't trying to do it.

And we've seen this across the board with all of this menu of state terror that Labour have sought to deploy from ID cards, to the traffic spying grid, to this mass communications database it now desires and on and on and on.

I should say this is not strictly the Guardian's take on this. The Guardian's view is that David Omand, who they describe as a 'key architect of the national security strategy as it is now" is demonstrating 'great honesty' in telling us what Whitehall want to do.

The only problem with that is the police and security services have always had provisions to snoop and gather information where necessary in cases of serious crimes.

In the end of course it's not a question of the endlessly-repeated mantra about "maintaining security". If a civil servant like Omand were actually interested in that then he would have done well to take the advice of his colleagues in their own now infamous and rather obvious (yet feebly obvious warnings) about the invasion of Iraq.

Furthermore there is progressively becoming very little at all to 'secure' in the UK, it now represents such a damaged waste land. I think the real question is what is Britain, what are you protecting ?

Omand says, "This is a hard choice, and goes against current calls to curb the so-called surveillance society - but it is greatly preferable to tinkering with the rule of law, or derogating from fundamental human rights."

But that's not quite correct is it. Firstly it's not a 'choice' between liberty and security that's a false choice, secondly these spying and surveillance grids are the total undermining of the rule of the law by their very nature and presence, that's the whole point.

But what's even worse and actually breathtaking in its egregiousness is this notion, shared by the likes of Omand and elected politicians in the Labour government itself, of 'inevitable progression' and that this is something people will eventually 'understand as necessary' and just 'need to get used to', and then 'everything will be alright'. All of which accompanies the notion that it's simply a matter of the technology existing that decides if it should be deployed.

I don't think you could construct a more ridiculous, insane and dangerous error if you wanted to.

And if that's the case terrorism remains firmly a necessary tool of deception and staggering self-deception.

Sir David Omand, who according to the Evening Standard, was "among those to decide that [Dr Kelly] should be pursued for talking to the media about the Government's dossier on Iraq's alleged WMD" should be truly ashamed.

He has no business writing reports like this. He should instead be grovelling on his knees, begging for forgiveness for being the supine ridiculous wretch he is and that he has been a factor in taking things as far as they have already.

Omand needs to explain his macabre interest in creating a police state under a radical regime, and stop wasting everybody's time in trying to rationalise it. Instead the fact that Omand and those supporting him have produced this document shows how dangerously out of step with reality they are.

Perhaps the best way of summing this up though is in the editorial that goes along with this in today's Guardian, which is jokingly self-conscious about this itself and starts with the now all too familiar sentence we've all seen many many times:

"Britain is not a police state, but.."

Surely that says it all.

'Ealing council' put cameras in baked bean cans to spy on residents say the Daily Mail

Daily Mail: "A local council is to use hidden cameras to catch residents who leave rubbish out on the wrong day. CCTV devices will be disguised inside objects such as baked bean cans and house bricks to film offenders"

Here we go again, look I would advise residents of Ealing to just crush these cans, but it's an interesting story that ties into the rubbish spying in general story. You will remember that was promoted as something that local councils were doing to appease EU rubbish targets, turns out of course as we speculated correctly here that wasn't quite the full story at all.

Now this case with Ealing and putting cameras in baked bean cans to spy on people putting their rubbish out is interesting, the Daily Mail spend their entire life shifting the blame for this stuff onto subordinates and cretins, in this case 'Will Brooks, the Tory councilor responsible for environment and transport'

So the question here is what power does a local councilor have ? Well very little really. And who is telling Will Brooks to endorse this ?

Now I do think the Daily Mail does some good work, but at the same time you get the firm impression on many issues, that the Daily Mail while appearing to complain about them, is just not telling us the full truth about anything that is really going on this country.

It is posing as a 'conservative' popular newspaper and on one level it kind of is, but at the same time it seems to be stripping out various personalities from stories and other times it is skewing and misdirecting the public about who is doing what, an example would be the headline 'Germans to put bugs in wheelie bins'.

At other times it (and its sister paper the Evening Standard) seem to be feeding the government with a mandate by complaining about things like crime and immigration which it must surely know that the regime will only use to declare legitimacy for things like ID cards, CCTV and ever-more draconian laws and so on. And there has been no other newspaper that has done more to feed the Blair/Brown domestic police-state agenda than the Daily Mail, which makes its frequent complaints about that seem almost ludicrous.

spying Ealing rubbish Daily Mail