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Former MI5 head Dame Stella Rimington issues a wake-up call, while Civil Liberties Examiner details the latest encroachment.
Dame Stella accused ministers of interfering with people’s privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.
“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.
“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.
You know, a lot of us over here have been saying exactly this at least since 2001: Our governments are doing the terrorists' work for them.
In a further blow to ministers, an international study by lawyers and judges accused countries such as Britain and America of “actively undermining” the law through the measures they have introduced to counter terrorism.
Sadly, Washington is the very last to figure this out ... assuming we grant them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it's mere lack of forethought at work, rather than malicious intent. Parliament is displaying its typical willful amnesia on the subject as well:
Britain, like the U.S. has a history of such domestic spying, and it always ends badly. Intelligence units tasked with watching terrorists inevitably include mere radicals among their targets, then simple political protesters and, ultimately, pretty much anybody who says something critical about the government. Among the past targets in the UK of domestic surveillance were Ewan MacColl, a Pete Seeger-ish folk singer with communist sympathies, John Lennon, and the band UB40.
The new British unit actually appears to be starting out with that far-reaching mission.
[...]
The move appears to be a revival of an effort to extend electronic surveillance powers that was shelved amidst public fury back in 2002. At the time, press reports described the retreat as "a humiliating climbdown," but the state is nothing if not patient.
And of course, it should probably be no surprise — given the history of mission creep of Britain's much-touted CCTV surveillance program — that the mission creep seems to be built into this new program right from the start.
Unfortunately, both the UK and US governments of the last half-century have displayed a distressing tendency to mistake George Orwell's 1984 for an instruction manual, rather than recognizing it as the cautionary tale it was intended as. The only unclear issue is whether this is the work of malice, or of mere stupidity. There are convincing arguments for both points of view.
Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire a dangerous servant and a terrible master.
— George Washington
Beware allowing that servant to become your master.
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nashua seems pretty gung ho lately with traffic cams, and i've seen mobile versions of the fixed cameras and "sensors" (mass/radiation detectors) in NH along rte 3 to manchester, as i've seen along rte 3 south in MA.
good times, good times.
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