GeekLawyer’s Blog

Geeklawyer went to a talk in which the pioneering journalist Duncan Campbell disclosed the sudden mysterious unbidden (by the citizens that is) sprouting of a number plate camera in Sussex to a startled local audience. Geeklawyer has been aware of these for some time but now they seem to have hit the mainstream media.

These cameras have been introduced despite their ghastly privacy implications without any democratic debate. The police have just used residual policy powers to decide to introduce another leg of the surveillance society into which we are all being frogmarched by the Dear Leader. These new cameras will eventually be placed every few hundred yards on every significant road and will track and log your number plate 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It will also log people around you: in case you are associated with anyone dodgy - God forbid you should ever be seen behind more than two criminals in any one week. By recording how long it takes you to get from one camera to another, and knowing the exact distance between each camera, it will also be able to know your average speed. And if you happen to be in the vicinity of a crime you can expect to get a knock on the door by the police and asked to justify your presence nearby: are you a suspect or a witness? Of course “if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear.” Only criminals or the criminally naive could possibly object.

New Labour is desperate to deploy any gimmick it can in order to deflect us from its sleazy corrupt leader and his Asperger’s riddled closet homosexual successor Gordon ‘gay Gordon’ Brown. Automatic number plate recognition seems to be a jolly good wheeze: it’ll help ‘deny criminals the road‘; yea, of course it will. But really, is that enough to incur the expense and civil liberties damage? “Oh, well, did we say it’ll help catch terrorists?” They’ll be far too stupid to keep swapping plates of course and of course to prevent that we they must put a superduper government approved bug in your car, to identify you, sorry, the car. That’ll work. I mean really, who wouldn’t go for that?

It seems that, oddly, 1 million voters wouldn’t. And they appear to be using The Dear Leaders last democracy charade to say so. A million odd people have signed a petition against the cameras and an embarrassed government is now swearing blind that the damned Lowing Herd have stupidly ‘misunderstood’ the overwhelming benefits. Silly citizens.

The Government’s tactical blunder was to attach the cameras to their penchant for stealth taxes. The idea is that every time you recklessly drive at 31 mph in a 30 zone you will receive an automated ‘Hi valued client, how are you today?‘ letter from the DVLC. Had they stuck at quietly building their surveillance infrastructure they’d have got away with it. Now they have some serious talking to do.

Will they stop? will they bollocks. If two million people couldn’t stop them engaging in an illegal war in Iraq it is debatable whether one million voters will stop them from indulging in their totalitarian fantasies. Mind you, slimy Tony isn’t under orders from The Retard on this one, so who knows.