Police Trawl Rubbish Tips For Lost Data
It was all going so well. In another year or two, Britain would be a tight little ship, with New Labour firmly back in power for their continuing thousand year rule and the people would be stitched up and trussed, hobbled and constrained by a state data bank which would control their every move and every aspect of their lives with no recourse for checking its validity or accuracy.
The dream of every Stalinist or tin-pot, banana republic dictator made real.
Except that someone forgot to mention that once you have collected all that data about your vassals, you need to keep it safe or it loses all its value.
It now emerges that, apart from losing the data on 25 million people, government departments routinely bandy our data about without a second thought for security and that it is available to almost anyone other than the people on whom it is held.
If you are a cleaner for an IT company and you say you need to see the personal details of everyone in the country, you will be given an unencrypted, non-password protected disc, which you can take home and keep, make copies of and forget to return for, oh, at least a year anyway.
If you are a company executive making massive investments, you can also have the privilege of knowing that all your financial affairs are published for all and sundry to examine.
The latest masterplan from this highly intelligent and effective government is to deploy police officers to scour through rubbish tips in the hope of finding the two lost data disks which brought all this woeful mismanagement to light in the first place.
The tip here is not to bother. If some policeman plod did actually find the discs, nobody would believe that they have not been copied and sold to criminals, paedophiles, terrorists or that dodgy bloke down the pub. They would also never be convinced that the same thing is not going to happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.
We know that the government is not capable of handling our data or anything else of value, except dodgy money which everyone pretends was OK because, well, we love money, we do, and it’s not agianst the law, is it, and anyway what are you going to do about it, eh? We know where you live and we can chuck you in jail under anti-terror laws, so shut it, scum!
Gordon Brown’s Britain: From Excitement To Incitement
It always seemed, with Tony Blair, that he was so obviously, so childishly desperate for everyone to love him that if somebody simply said, “Look, Tony, everybody hates you” it would be enough to cause him to storm off the world’s stage in a hissy fit.
In a way, this is exactly what happened, except he made the departure into a diva’s swansong which lasted for months and involved a lot of foreign travel for no particular purpose at taxpayers’ expense.
So, now that Gordon Brown’s future is on an incorrectible downward spiral and everyone has seen the new emperor’s lack of clothes, what is it going to take to make him leave office?
As soon as people new that Tony Blair was a liar, his days were numbered, but he managed to cling to office for ten years anyway. Gordon Brown is likely to condense that timescale. His time in the sun, his honeymoon, was only a few months and now it is all over.
His main claims to legitimacy have been competence and intellect. Now that both of those have been shown to be illusions, what does he have to offer?
The only straw he seems to be clinging to is to increase the powers of the state to snoop on, control and gather data on the people of Britain. He has not spotted that not only has the database state been shown to be very unsafe and leaky and not to be trusted, but that this is actually the straw which will break the camel’s back.
If he and New Labour had any chance of re-election, it would be by saying that all these plans of crushing state control and the fact that they make citizens less safe are going to be abandoned.
The New Labour Project died years ago when everyone saw that it was actually an Old Tory in disguise, but much worse in competence and with even less regard for ordinary people. The glamour of Tony Blair managed to conceal the stench of the corpse, but Gordon Brown has been trying to resuscitate it. The problem is that the miasma of hot air with which he has tried to give the kiss of life has not revived the corpse, but has fatally infected him.
So much so, that Henry Porter in The Guardian actually seems to be inciting the people to, if not riot, at least take some kind of direct action against the government and its march to totalitarianism. He had better be careful he is not hanged for sedition.
Brown’s Britain: Random Acts Of Salvation
There have been a lot of reports in various media recently which give warning of the risk that Britain is either sidling or hurtling into becoming an excessively authoritarian regime, which seems to be the precursor to it developing into a fully fledged police state.
With the recent loss of most of the nation’s personal data revealing the dizzying heights of incompetence which this government has achieved as it lurches from one crisis to another and the startlingly low level of even basic ability to manage anything without breaking it, there needs to be a reassessment of where people should look for salvation from their woes, mostly inflicted on them by this government of “none of the talents”.
Nobody with any sense will ever look at their government to protect them and keep them safe from harm, whether it is this collection of sad no-hopers or any other glossily brilliant bunch of shysters with a convincing patter.
Articles detailing the mendacious fecklessness of the ‘Brown Parliament’ are two a penny, but it is the comments which result from them in the national media which are interesting. A massive series of outraged responses follow, with posters patting each other on the back and coalescing into allegiances and factions or having tiffs over definitions of terms and who should ultimately be blamed for the current state of affairs. Amongst this hubbub there is the occasional suggestion of what should be done: how we should subvert or stop this juggernaut which is going to gradually crush us, bleed us dry of freedom and squeeze all resistance from us.
The problem is that all of this is wheezing and wind. It will achieve nothing practical or useful. It might make those who post comments feel that they are part of the operation of resistance and change, part of the democratic process, if you like, but this is an illusion. Unfortunately, it is ‘full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’
If anything, it is slightly worse than useless, since it demonstrates to the government the impotence of those who are aware of New Labour’s slow march to making Britain a satellite corporatocracy of America, a test-bed for the re-introduction of an island slave economy. In doing so, it also gives succour to the government which sees how its own deceits can be exposed with impunity in an arena where words are assumed to have the same weight as actions.
If this ship of state was being captained by philosopher kings, the erudite, tangential and tangled arguments which tumble helter-skelter after an article has been posted and twist and writhe for a day or two before they exhaust themselves in aetiolated lassitude would give them pause for thought. As it is, our rulers regard mere citizens as their thralls. When we demonstrate that we cannot play the game by their rules, perhaps they are right to regard us collectively as a ship of fools.
The art or game of politics is a squalid, dishonest, but fundamentally pragmatic affair. It is about getting what you want done, rather than the frisson of enchanted delight at winning an argument through your nimble wits and greater knowledge. Talking about change does not make it happen.
There are, however, reasons to imagine that the government is heading for an inevitable and humiliating failure if it pursues this headlong course against its own people. This is due to the fact that all governments fail to notice that the world is changing around them. They are always fighting old and mainly lost battles. For a start, this government (or the tiny part of it which dictates policy and legislation) is attempting to pitch its fortunes with those of America, but has not noticed that America is a nation in terminal decline both financially and, as a consequence, in terms of its future position as world leader. If Britain wants the gloss of power by proxy, it should look to Asia and China, not the sick man of the world.
It may be true that all revolutions and uprisings in the past have been orchestrated by disaffected intellectuals who have harnessed the power of the crowd to achieve their ends, so it is logical that we look to see this pattern repeat itself if we are seeking someone “who will rid us of this meddlesome administration”, but perhaps it does not always work like that. Gordon Brown has said he wants democracy to work from the ground up, rather than government imposing its will from on high. Nobody imagines that he actually meant what he said, but it is what he will get none the less.
If Gordon Brown and this government want to interfere with and control every aspect of everyone’s lives, this can be done with people who fear the courts, fear the police cell and the alarmed looks from neighbours and passers-by. It works with people who fundamentally respect government and the rule of law, even when they see a government of infinite corruption regressing from democracy to totalitarianism. It works with people who are polite and
considerate and prefer peace to conflict. It works with people who will pore over a discussion and give someone the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, people who occupy government are none of these things.
Fortunately, most people are not like that either and the systems with which the government will have to work are not the well-oiled machines pretended by the spivs and pushers who are foisting them on a gullible and vacuous collection of politicians on the make.
It is in the financial interests of the companies which supply the technology for it not to work, even if they could make that happen, which they cannot. Its failures will be globally publicised and the
government ridiculed. The people who operate the systems will make continuous mistakes and blunders and the lives of everyone who interacts with any organ of the state will be plagued with daily disasters. The leviathan and sleek machine of database Britain will simply fail to work.
Through all of this, the posters on internet newspaper comment threads would cope with perfect equanimity. The rat-faced man you know by sight, however, who dumps his car across the entrance to a shop and sticks his feet out the window and throws a can through the sun-roof will not. You may, at a fevered peak of rage, mumble to someone, almost silently, “F*ck off” and skulk away with clenched and sweating fists. He will not even need to be in a temper to shout and spit the words into your face, with no implied asterisk but with missing exclamation mark supplied. He will do this to any uniformed, peak-capped jobsworth or strutting, jackbooted manikin of the state police because he is not like you.
The arguing parents and screaming children who have just been told they are stranded because their e-borders passport between Pimlico and Lambeth has been mysteriously hijacked by illegal cyber-immigrants and has, anyway, expired, will not saunter on their way with a merry whistle, but will create merry hell.
The vast mass of people, the ignored, the underclass, the poor, the beer-swilling, fag-smoking, expletive-shouting sea of people whose lives are daily exercises in actions rather than words will stop the march of the state and its acolytes for the simple reason that they are not constrained by being polite and not interested in reining in their temper for the sake of form.
The thug who swings his fists; the shouter who will not be silenced; the thousand acts of minor accident and sobotage; the whispers and the rumours; the garbled data entered; those who act and never think; the incompetent and incapable; the criminal and the reckless - these shall all be your salvation.
The lies and propaganda paraded as truth; the imbecile bureaucrats and jobsworths; the sticky-fingered functionaries; the skulking paymasters of the state; the psychologically challenged pygmies of government; the lying, lickspittle politicians of every stripe - witness these and challenge them at every turn.
The state does not take freedoms from its people: the people cede their liberties by being fractured and fragmented and devolving functions which are properly their own onto forever untrustworthy governments with only secret murmurs and hidden mummery.
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