I spy with my little eye….

With the news recently that cameras fitted to Police helmets were a Health & Safety hazard (There was some talk of them going on fire, apparently) this has not diminished the government’s (and local government) taste for spying on us.  Now I accept, of course, that our security forces, when they aren’t answering questions about torturing people, have to do the business and avert terrorists (and they do this rather well – this we accept.  There haven’t been any atrocities for some years in Britain, thankfully) … BUT it does seem that this surveillance business is now being done on a bewildering scale.

The Independent reports only today…

UK public spied on ’1,500 times a day’

“Police, councils and the intelligence services made more than 500,000 requests to access private emails and telephone records in the UK last year, according to an annual surveillance report.  The figures, compiled by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Paul Kennedy, found that about 1,500 surveillance requests were made every day in Britain. That is the annual equivalent to one in every 78 people being targeted. It included 1,500 approved applications from local councils.”

It was only a matter of time… a very short time, I suspect, before the ‘it beggars belief mob’ popped up..and they did.. in the form of the eternal political optimists… the Lib-Dems… who can beat the England cricket team by a long mile when it comes to winning anything of substance….

The Independent, hyperventilating…possibly because of the recent heat…. reports: “The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne seized on the figures, saying they “beggared belief,” warning that the UK appeared to have “sleepwalked into a surveillance state.”

I don’t know about you… but I find it all a bit creepy…. why do local authorities need these powers?  Stories are legion about jumped up officials in Town Halls up and down the country wasting public money, abusing The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 by spying on people who put their bins out early…or in an ‘improper manner’.  Are we going too far?  I think we may be.  I am, of course, not alone.  Various officials, including the Information Commissioner himself, believe we have gone too far.

Unfortunately, our politicos are rather absorbed at the moment poring over Boden catalogues for summer beachwear… or catching up on their accounting…. to be over bovvered about this at present…

I have come up with a solution…. I shall buy myself a burqa…. I can’t see anyone in government wishing to challenge the right to wear one…… can you? …