Had Enough Yet?

Democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be, is it?

The bloggosphere and the twittersphere is aflame today with the news that our darling government has instructed GCHQ to listen to all our phone calls and log all our emails, tweets and blogposts.

Yep. To catch a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of our society plotting against the government they have reacted swiftly: they now plan to eavesdrop on 62 million people. That should work well. Only last year we learnt that the police, using Stop and Search legislation, managed to arrest just 5 people out of the 400,000 they stopped and questioned. As initiatives go, this must surely rank as one of the worst ever.

Undeterred, the government will now repeat that exercise by storing billions of email and trillions of tweets in an attempt to locate those....what? Terrorists? BNP'ers? Racists? Benefit cheats? Illegal immigrants? Any of them? All of them?

Somebody once defined lunacy as repeating the same experiment and expecting different results. It is harder to find a more perfect example of that supreme stupidity than this latest violation of our rights.

As I wrote at Rosie's Hoose earlier:

"Rosie,

I am more than a little miffed by this latest move.

If the government, or its agents (the police, PF, or in England and Wales the CPS) thought I was up to no good, they must first obtain a search warrant to come to my home to go through my files, my paperwork, my drawers to look for evidence.

Why do they now assume they can bypass this vital protection simply because our files (and paperwork) are stored and sent electronically?

This is a gross violation of our rights and should be fought against.

If we, the great unwashed, simply stand idly by whilst they rake through our stuff, then we deserve it. We really do.

Time to wake up folks.

And once you are awake, stay awake. They will not be happy until there is a camera in every room in your home. Motorola have a couple of billion microchips (small enough to be delivered by a syringe) on the shelves and ready to go.

How much will you take? How many liberties will you let go of, before you will react?

Will you wait for that thousandth cut before fighting back?

Rights are not snatched away outright. They are eroded over time so that we don't notice. They are replaced with benefits.

Benefits are plastic.

Rights are solid gold.

Which do you want?

I've made my choice and I will fight all the way to hang on to them.

CR."

This latest rape, for that is all it is, must be fought with everything we can muster, for as long as we can fight, because if we do nothing, we truly deserve everything they do to us.

The government do not want us talking. That is dangerous for them. Freedom of speech is mighty fine, just as long as you are using government mandated speech. If you think about it, this all started back in 2006 with the smoking ban. What, (when you look at it openly and honestly), was its only achievement? Overwhelmingly, the ban served to shut down our pubs. Five years on it continues to do so at a rate of four pubs per day. Possibly more. Closing down pubs meant fewer people getting together to talk. Most conversations end up involving politics and that had to be discouraged.


Blair must have known what to do about our talking. So his government brought in that infantile legislation but he overlooked the internet. At least we could still get together virtually and continue the conversation. Moves were made by the last Labour government to wrest control of the conversation, but it was shot down by the LibDems and the Tories. The corpse was subsequently revived by the coagulation and will become animated very soon.


It seems that iDave is not so enamoured with us talking either. We are talking about the wrong things.


I maintain that the only way to stop the insanity is to use the two tools we can most readily access: we know them as Starve The Beast and Just Say No.

Both weapons are easy to deploy. Whenever you have the choice between adding to their war chest (which as we can see is being used against you, not for you), just....don't. Do without whatever it is that will add a few pence or a few pounds to the money they will spend on new repression tools.

Back this up by saying "No" when they send the begging letters.

If enough of us did this they would receive the message loudly and clearly.

Make them afraid.

Make them very afraid.

Remind them why they are there: to serve us. 

So I ask again: have you had enough yet?

If the answer is yes, then do something about it.


CR.