Big Brother

Last week it was revealed that an MP has been bugged when visiting a constituent in jail (it was in 2005 and 2006.Good.Pretty soon we will know the truth about the death of JFK).

The constituent is a terrorist suspect and the US are asking for his extradition. The problems here are the fact that tapes cannot be used in court and of course an MP, a guardian of the British democracy, was twice bugged. But one can consider that it is OK to bug a terrorist suspect. If the police can prevent a terrorist attack, everybody is going to be happy. Of course they have to count on the stupidity of the suspect to give critical information from a jail. I think he can figure out that he is under tight surveillance.

This brings me to my second point.

According to the Times (of London, 6/02/08) they are 4, 2 million CCTV in Britain (reported by Liberty a human rights group). I think the UK is the world leader, by the way Australia is not bad either.

" Convert surveillance, once the stuff of John Le Carré novels and the business of the Stasi in Germany, is a constant reality in 21st-century in Britain."

For the Times many of the CCTV cameras are unregulated. And government agencies are spying on their users;

"You can be followed on your daily activities by men or women from the Office of Fair Trading, the Health and Safety Executive and the Rural Payments Agency"

Pretty soon I think everybody will watch everybody. Another example of the bizarre atmosphere is this case; yesterday a court awarded the five members of a band, the Caribbean Steel International, because they have been wrongly removed from the airplane they boarded en route to London. The reason is that a fellow passenger went to see the captain and said that they looked like terrorists. The five musicians are black and one of them is blind. So they appeared suspect because in the waiting lounge they were together but not in the plane. By the way the company is Ryanair and the plane was full so they could not sit wherever they wanted...

What a strange society we are living in, democratic, but... . The government and/or the parliament give powers to some agencies to investigate their consumers. Why? Because we want more profits, more profitability and more productivity. And in the same time as citizens we become paranoids. We are scared of a bench of crazy terrorists. Our freedom is reduced day by day and the sad thing is that we participate proudly and with enthusiasm.