Shop Thy Neighbour

Meanwhile, the relentless march towards a total surveillance society continues. Two news stories in particular caught my eye in the last few days, and concatenating them together, you can see once again the machinery of government “spin” and misinformation being employed to make us all just a little bit more paranoid as we go about our daily round.

Apparently, MI5 and the security services generally are going to be asking if they can search people’s Facebook friends, on the offchance that one of them might be Osama Bin Laden. And in addition, the government is recruiting 60,000 “ordinary people” in the form of security guards, council officials and even shop assistants to be part of its new “front line” in the fight against an assumed increased threat of terrorism.

Now, leaving aside that any terrorists dumb enough to advertise the fact openly on Facebook, using their real names and listing “bombmaking” amongst their hobbies and interests, probably deserve to be arrested anyway, it is actually the second of those two stories that disturbs me more.

What we are recruiting here, is an army of neo-Stasis. Government informers, paid snitches, ready to denounce their neighbours for anti-social behaviour. Does this sound familiar? It certainly would do to Josef Stalin and Erich Hoenegger. Hitler would probably raise a distant eyebrow of recognition, whatever circle of Hell he currently resides in.

So once again, Britain, the country that I love, is being stolen away from me, inch by inch and yard by yard, by a sinister army of grey apparatchiks whose motto is “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. Well. I am sorry, but that is bollocks. I have nothing to hide, but I fear for what we are becoming, and it is not pretty.

“Oh,” but you say, “it’s worth it if it prevents one atrocity”. Will it though? Everyone with a brain cell knows that real terrorists – if they are forced to communicate over the internet – use encrypted peer to peer networks. If GCHQ hasn’t worked that one out yet, they should give up and open a whelk stall. And at the end of the day, God forbid, if there was another attempt at something like 7/7 in the UK, that, unfortunately, is the price we pay for living in a free democracy instead of a society that is just one large prison camp, where some of us are prisoners and some of us are guards, which seems to be the government’s preferred option right now.

So, I’ll take my chances thanks. Let me die in my footsteps, I will not go down in the ground, as a certain Robert Zimmerman once memorably said.

If the government wants to re-invent the Stasi, it should be asking itself where Stalin is now. And what happened to the Berlin Wall. Those who live by the snoop, die by the snoop.