Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 27, 2007 8:10:46 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: 1984 + 22
For Blair, it's child's play to make us all criminals
Henry Porter
London Observer, April 1, 2007
http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2007/010407Blair.htm
... Reputation, like political legacy, is not the possession of the
individual to fashion how he or she likes. It is public property
and each one of us has to live with that. Even Tony Blair.
Last week, an important part of the Prime Minister's Operation
Legacy was published in a policy review document called 'Building
on progress: security, crime and justice'. It is a dreary work and
reading it, I remembered HL Mencken on President Warren Harding's
use of English. 'It reminds me of a string of wet sponges,' wrote
Mencken. 'It reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds
me of stale bean soup... it is so bad that a sort of grandeur
creeps into it. It drags itself up out of a dark abyss of pish and
crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and
bumble. It is flap & doodle. It is balder & dash.'
Perhaps that's a little unfair because the review document does
contain an awful lot that establishes the Prime Minister's
character -- his obsessions with antisocial behaviour and crime
that have been responsible for the 53 law and order bills since
1997, the creation of 3,000 new criminal offences and a rise in the
prison population to a record 80,299.
Some have been tempted to see the review as a liberal adjustment,
but read it closely and you'll find all the old fixations about the
control of the British public and 'bottom-up citizen
accountability', a gargoyle of a phrase that leers at you demanding
proof of your identity, your innocence, and your worth to the state.
Instead, it is for the government to demonstrate its worth to us,
and we are all innocent until proven guilty by a normal court of
law. <"The people should not be afraid of their government," as
'V' said. "It is the government that should be afraid of its people.">
There is something Maoist in the review's exhortation. Think of the
lunacy in China when Mao ordered the people into the fields to bang
drums and tins so that the birds could never settle and therefore
died of exhaustion and you have the tenor of this report. It is
both self-congratulatory and demanding. As long as one bird is
alive, none of us can rest. We must press on eradicating all crime
and ensuring against the slightest possibility of deviancy.
We are told that every child in the country will be assessed to see
if they are likely to turn to crime. Those that comply to a profile
set by some grim determinist working for the government will be
'actively managed' by youth justice workers and local social
services. This is what Blair meant by being tough on the causes of
crime.
In the introduction, he says: 'It was never this government's
belief that poverty and deprivation were excuses for crime.' Note
the use of the word 'excuse' in this context, rather than the
expected 'cause'. It lets the government off the hook about poverty
being a contributing factor in crime.
What kind of intervention will the state contemplate? Fatherly
chats on responsibility and homework, or will children end up being
taken from problem families for a period of special attention and
re-education? The implications are sinister; it seems clear that
the government is taking too much upon itself. That is the common
theme. On page 46, the review says: 'Citizens are asked to accept
the gathering of greater levels of information and intelligence in
the knowledge that this will facilitate improvements in public
safety and law.' Which is to say we must all expect to be under
total surveillance from the cradle to the grave.
The review mentions ID cards, mobile fingerprint readers, crowd
scanners and an expansion of the DNA database of people who have
committed no crime. There will be iPods and mobile phones that will
work only when they sense one person's fingerprints. So we will be
required to give Apple or Nokia fingerprints before buying a piece
of equipment.
There will be automatic visual recognition cameras - no better way
of controlling the population in times when the government is under
pressure - and we read of virtual courts, in which a 'video-link
technology could allow for hearings where a defendant is dealt with
at the police station'.
This is utterly wrong. Such a court would not have the chance to
examine the defendant in person, to assess his circumstances and
character, the likelihood of his telling the truth or the treatment
he may have received in the police cells. A video link hides much,
for you can never tell what is going on off-camera, what threats
are made, what prompts are being held up.
We must perhaps accept that the back-room boys in Blair's blue sky
lab may be indulging the Prime Minister with these control
fantasies at the same time as seeking to throw this part of his
legacy forward into the political culture of the future. We must
accept also that they may mean well despite the leaden evidence of
autocratic mania.
In all this, there is a very large mystery. At the same time as
arguing for the necessity of this 21st-century version of the
police state, the report also does a pretty good job of telling us
about Blair's great success. 'Crime has fallen 35 per cent since
1997', with 'six million fewer offences committed each year'. And:
'Offences brought to justice increased by 37 per cent from March
2002 to September 2006.' It even admits to the perception gap: 'Two-
thirds of the public believe that crime has been rising' when there
has, in fact, 'been a significant fall in crime levels since 1997'.
Who has kept this state of siege alive in the minds of the public?
The Blair government. How else would the Prime Minister have
managed to mount the assault on our liberty that he has?
That is certainly part of his legacy. There is another element
which is more hidden or, rather, it is one that we have become used
to, and that is the widespread confusion in Blair's administration
between state and government. Senior civil servants complain how
Blair and his ministers refuse to recognise that in order to
function properly they must keep the politics of government at
arm's length. Blair's administration thinks of itself as the
embodiment of the state. Therefore, everyone who works for the
state works for the government.
It is the same attitude that allows the Prime Minister's strategy
groups to dream up the bossy, intrusive, controlling, presumptuous
and downright dangerous practices described in 'Building on
progress'. When Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, we will be
able to judge whether the review is Blair's legacy or New Labour's.
As to a proper memorial for the Prime Minister, a man I would
dearly love to be praising now, we must look no further than the
empty plinth in Trafalgar Square which falls inside the area where
spontaneous demonstration of any sort has been banned by Labour. A
modest bronze of an ordinary man, gagged and holding a blank
placard perhaps? Or a cascade of birds falling from the sky, each
one representing a lost right or freedom?
-----------
George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house
BOB GRAHAM
UK Daily Mail, April 1, 2007
http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2007/010407Orwell.htm
The Big Brother nightmare of George Orwell's 1984 has become a
reality - in the shadow of the author's former London home.
It may have taken a little longer than he predicted, but Orwell's
vision of a society where cameras and computers spy on every
person's movements is now here.
According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering
4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country -
and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that
each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.
Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror
image of Orwell's fictional world, created in the post-war Forties
in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington,
North London.
On the wall outside his former residence - flat number 27B - where
Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque
commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of
the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.
Orwell's view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under
24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.
The flat's rear windows are constantly viewed from two more
security cameras outside a conference centre in Canonbury Place.
In a lane, just off the square, close to Orwell's favourite pub,
the Compton Arms, a camera at the rear of a car dealership records
every person entering or leaving the pub.
Within a 200-yard radius of the flat, there are another 28 CCTV
cameras, together with hundreds of private, remote-controlled
security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and
offices.
The message is reminiscent of a 1949 poster to mark the launch of
Orwell's 1984: 'Big Brother is Watching You'.
In the Shriji grocery store in Canonbury Place, three cameras focus
on every person in the shop. Owner Minesh Amin explained: 'They are
for our security and safety. Without them, people would steal from
the shop. Although this is a nice area, there are always bad people
who cause trouble by stealing.'
Three doors away, in the dry-cleaning shop run by Malik Zafar, are
another two CCTV cameras.
'I need to know who is coming into my shop,' explained Mr Zafar,
who spent £400 on his security system.
This week, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) produced a report
highlighting the astonishing numbers of CCTV cameras in the country
and warned how such 'Big Brother tactics' could eventually put
lives at risk.
The RAE report warned any security system was 'vulnerable to abuse,
including bribery of staff and computer hackers gaining access to
it'. One of the report's authors, Professor Nigel Gilbert, claimed
the numbers of CCTV cameras now being used is so vast that further
installations should be stopped until the need for them is proven.
One fear is a nationwide standard for CCTV cameras which would make
it possible for all information gathered by individual cameras to
be shared - and accessed by anyone with the means to do so.
The RAE report follows a warning by the Government's Information
Commissioner Richard Thomas that excessive use of CCTV and other
information-gathering was 'creating a climate of suspicion'.
Orwell's England
Christopher S. Bentley
JBS, April 3, 2007
http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2007/030407Orwell.htm
Within 200 yards of flat number 27B, an unassuming fourth floor
North London apartment, there are 28 closed circuit television
(CCTV) cameras, their unblinking electronic eyes keeping a watch on
everything that happens in nearby Canonbury Square. According to
the British entertainment guide This Is London, the apartment's
"rear windows are constantly viewed from two more security cameras
outside a conference centre" nearby.
The chilling irony is that the apartment is the former home of
prescient novelist George Orwell. And it's a sign that the all
encompassing surveillance state envisioned by Orwell is all too
real in today's England.
The cameras outside of Orwell's home are part of a much bigger
problem. According to This Is London, "Britain has a staggering 4.2
million CCTV cameras — one for every 14 people in the country — and
20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each
person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily."
The British fetish for surveillance cameras is not unique. While
that country is home to some 20 percent of the world's CCTV
cameras, the United States has been installing them fast and
furious. They are already in practically every convenience store,
hotel, and big box retail store in America and police departments
nationwide are rushing to install traffic cameras and surveillance
cameras in as many locations as possible. In New York City, the New
York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) points out that a 2005 "survey
found 4176 cameras below Fourteenth Street, more than five times
the 769 cameras counted in that area in 1998."
The New York system is still expanding. According to the NYCLU,
"The New York City Police Department, spurred by the promise of $9
million in Federal Homeland Security grants and up to $81.5 million
in federal counter-terrorism funding, announced this year that it
plans to create 'a citywide system of closed-circuit televisions'
operated from a single control center." Other cities, large and
small, are following suit.
Meanwhile, back in Canonbury Square, dozens of security cameras
installed by the encroaching police state are keeping a close watch
on the plaque that identifies the home where Orwell wrote 1984, his
classic novel warning of the dangers of the totalitarian state.
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