How town hall snoopers hijack anti-terror powers to >>

cwesti · How town hall snoopers hijack anti-terror powers to >>

Surveillance powers designed to track terrorists are being deployed by councils to crack down on littering, dog fouling and planning law breaches, a survey reveals.

Some councils have used the sweeping powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) more than 100 times in the last year to follow and watch residents or monitor their calls - often while dealing with the most minor of suspected offences.

22:03pm on 27th April 2008
Daily Mail>>

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/...cle_id=562409&in_page_id=1770

dots_thots

I was reading an article related to this happening in East Lancashire, not a million miles from where I am so I decided to comment on the site. I ended up giving a bit of a tirade in response to a very common return comment so I thought I'd post it here as I think it tackles the answer reasonably well. The discussion isn't just with me and one other, but those were the relevant bits. My bits are in blue...

We've become a nation of surveillance and spying, rules, regulation and taxation whilst our most basic freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carter and the Bill of Rights are constantly undermined. How incredibly far we've fallen... The amount of employment that doesn't come from public funding and taxation is shrinking all the time whilst at the same time the tax-payers who fund this are leaving the country in record amounts for precisely the reason of escaping this country's fall into delinquency; staffed by brainwashed robots with badges and brainwashed robots in office.

I hope the council workers responsible, right the way up the "chain of command" feel satisfied when our nation, which is technically bankrupt now, sits nursing its wounds, wondering where the productive people of society have gone, why their own rights have been stripped away and why their miserable sum of fiat currency (allowed them by government) no longer buys anything.

Sorry, but I think most of you are missing the point here.
There is no problem with anyone observing what you are doing, if you are doing nothing wrong.
If you work flexitime for the council and they observe you to be working the correct hours - fine...if you are trying to pull a fast one and you get caught, then it serves you right.

If you let your dog foul the pavement and don't clean it up, then you deserve to be caught.

And if you are a benefit cheat, again, you are doing something terrible and deserve to be caught out.

I am sick and tired of the do-gooders of this world who use "human rights" as a springboard to wage war against those who try to enforce us to do the right thing.

I consider myself to be a law-abiding, respectful citizen, and as such do not worry in the slightest if the authorities want to listen to my phone calls or record me going about my daily busines, because I am doing nothing wrong.

So my message to the council would be "well done" and "please continue". I want to live in a country where my hard-earned taxes don't pay for cheat's holidays, where anti-social idiots who spoil the environment I live in are caught and punished, and where my kids can play out safely on the streets without stepping in disgusting dog dirt.

I think you are missing the point. I am so tired of hearing your argument. It doesn't make sense because it assumes that the powers that be have always got our best interest at heart or that they are incapable of abusing power. History is replete with examples of tyranny. In fact, for most of human history, freedom has been a rare thing. If we allow our representatives to do things that use the letter of the law to commit GBH upon the spirit of the law, we will end up having someone imposing Draconian laws upon us no-one ever considered. If the government decided your political view points were illegal, suddenly the spectre of phone tapping wouldn't seem that innocent since you can be heard, caught and punished for doing what was perfectly legal before the decree. Immediately you are stripped of the ability to refuse, resist, organise and protest. More importantly, who in the world has the right to spy upon you in your own home!! How did we even allow this idea to be even remotely palatable? Our ancestors would be shocked at how much we'd forgotten or blithely ignored our past, and rightly so. We have had it too easy for too long and we've completely dropped our guard. Or should I say we have been undereducated out of it and otherwise distracted from it. I realise that is more emotive than the examples you used but I believe in principle they are inseparable.

We need a society where the guilty are punished and the innocent are protected rather than intimidated in case they may commit a crime. We have due process and a perfectly good rule of law written to protect individuals for any situation. We don't need more and more and more ad nauseum. You've fallen hook, line and sinker for the typical Hegelian dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis or problem, reaction, solution.

I imagine you see the crime and the "terror" and you see what you think is our way of life being threatened. Perversely, you're actually helping to destroy our way of life yourself by supporting actions that treat the innocent like criminals. It is better to let ten criminals free than imprison one innocent person. That used to be widely accepted. Even rules and regulations with perfectly honourable intentions are often used for completely the opposite. You only have to look at any of the provisions of the terrorism act. We were told they were for terrorists and would never be used for the public. In most cases the reality has been quite the opposite. So, whilst some laws are supposed to "keep us safe", we must defend liberty above safety and accept that reaching a tranquil state of utopia is unlikely. I'd rather live in a free society with crime and terrorism than a "safe" society without liberty.

Many of your reasons for "reacting", are no doubt because of crime and a lot of it these days stems from drug abuse. We could simply tackle the problem as a health issue which would massively reduce crime by removing the need to steal etc. and save the public what has been demonstrated to be incredible amounts of money or we can demand more crackdowns that help foster many related problems and create lucrative black markets. Billions spent and drugs are easier to get and stronger. It's no wonder, when Tony Blair lied about the poppy production in Afghanistan which was almost non-existent at the time of the invasion thanks to the Taleban but is now at record levels. You see the "problem", and "react" as intended, but you call for the "solution" like a punter being forced the magicians' chosen card.

I look at history and I question the motives of the people who write the thousands of rules that are promulgated into law each year. Personally I believe we are in the very early stages of a police state in this nation. The private, run-for-profit central banks are stealing the value of our money via inflation by creating money out of debt; by lending money they don't have. The gold standard before 1971 and the end of the Bretton woods agreement still allowed fractional reserve lending but since that was abolished, Keynesian economics has created and allowed a situation where there is no restraint on government spending and our economy has been inflated to gargantuan and unsustainable proportions. Also, let me be clear. I am for neither Labour nor Conservative. I totally reject the false left-right paradigm. They are bank rolled by the same special interests.

As the transfer of wealth begins and the value of peoples hard earned savings disappears in a hyperinflation, there will be much disquiet. That is precisely why the public are being acclimatised to the militarisation of our police and the tightening of our laws. Habeas corpus is now almost totally eviscerated! Is that ok, because you have nothing to fear because you are innocent? People never get accused and then proven innocent do they!? Free speech, the very foundation of democracy, is attacked on all sides. To top it all off, we're handing powers to Europe that our politicians had no authority to do without a public referendum. Our system of government relies on the ability to change and revoke our laws. We hand over much of our sovereignty to the EU and then we actually have no way to undo that should minds be changed. That is criminal regardless of your views on Europe.

You mentioned human rights and I agree. I think most human rights are designed to protect the guilty, to punish the innocent but to restrict us personally.

If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights over at the UN:

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Articles 29 and 30 basically are provisions whereby, under circumstances vaguely decided by the UN, you actually have no rights. In fact Nazi Germany employed human rights legislation. Human rights and our rabid adoption of a lot of it, whilst doing some good on the surface in some cases, actually undermines many of our institutional rights and basic freedoms.

We must get used to being scanned, tracked, traced and taxed and ordered around like cattle. The power elite know that they need to control us to protect their vast technocracy and money cartel. Using Pavlovian psychology to turn us into chicken-necked telltales is all part of it. We are filmed everywhere, but you attempt to film the police and in many documented cases the police think that is illegal. Our public servants are beginning to become the masters and I really don't like it. And before you say something to the effect of "well if you don't like it you can leave", that is precisely what I am contemplating. Do I stay with the sinking ship or flee hopefully to a country where the public are more awake. Just for the record I am a law abiding citizen who has never been in trouble with the police.

I seriously hope you enjoy your future in Britain so you can be proud of the fact that while their ever more fascist rules crept oh so slowly into effect and your peers were increasingly punished and bankrupted, you managed to stay within the ever-narrowing "rule of law" and therefore had nothing to hide.

Seriously, I hope that dystopian vision never comes to fruition but I'm not very hopeful...

dots_thots

Blimey Paul, and I thought I was liberal. I agree with most of what you say, except I don't buy the conspiracy part. There are a lot of changes happening in our society that are leading it in the direction you describe, but there is no grand plan or guiding mind. It would need so many people on the inside that some renegade would let slip.

The government can't even organise whether there's going to be a 10p tax cut or a road tax hike, let alone organise a secret plan to use Pavlovian psychology for nefarious ends.

There is a problem, and there is sleepwalking going on, but it's an organic problem endemic in all of us, not a criminal mastermind.

For this reason I see no problem with catching fly-tippers using surveillance. Sure, sooner or later some council officer is going to overstep the line, but the outcome will be she finds out about an unfaithful partner, not the exposure of a police informant.

I appreciate your reply but I don't think it requires that many people to be honest. If you look at the Bilderberg group for example, 150ish of the worlds "leading lights" meet up. Until recently, that group was considered absolute conspiracy by the main stream media!

There have been an incredible amount of whistle blowers or renegades as you call them. The problem is they are completely ignored.

The other thing I'd like to make a distinction on is regarding government. You see, I believe central government is completely incompetent also, I actually think they are an irrelevancy. I'm not suggesting for a second that they steer society.

I'm talking about huge banking elites and industrial giants. David J. Rothkopf who considers himself amongst them, talks about the 6000ish people who actually have a real affect on world events. I can't confirm that but personally I don't think that is an unreasonable number. 6000 people is roughly 1 millionth of the population so it's not that unbelievable.

There is so much literature on the Rothschilds and Rockefellers etc... it's unbelievable. However, that isn't reflected in the media that people choose to pay attention to. The media has consistently been bought up since the end if the Vietnam war and I'm sure you know that it is now owned by a handful of companies.

The politicians are little more than PR people. Of them all a few sell their soul and run the ball down the field for the elite and then the baton is passed to the other team. I'm sure there are good people in government. They are either ignored, blocked by the civil service or compromised in some way, often over nothing important but something that would force them to leave office if exposed. You don't get into office without climbing the greasy pole. Once they get there, I think a lot find themselves in an impossible situation. It's not as bad in this country but in America where the most powerful political position lives, you have people spending $100 million for a job that pays $400,000 a year. That's suspicious to me.

The perverse thing about it is that it isn't even hidden. If you read their policy papers and auto-biographies they're often quite candid. Then there are documents such as the UN Biodiversity Assessment, or the minutes of Security & Prosperity Partnership agreement, the Pentagon P2OG plan, the recent 2007 MoD "The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme" document, the PNAC document "Rebuilding Americas Defenses". Then there's the policy papers of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. The list goes on and on... Most of all is the fractional reserve system which any of student of monetary history would be hard pushed to deny conspiracy. Just check out the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1912.

So I don't disagree with your point about government. I just don't think they have much say any more in an increasingly globalised economy.

Of course, I don't know whether any "plan apparent" is coordinated or if it's simply a case of like-minded people working together to a common goal. A bit like the Mafia if you will, they hate each other and compete but if their craps game is threatened they all buddy up together.