A Conversation for Talking Point: Privacy

What a riotous question

Post 1

Phoenician Trader

London burns while the police fiddle... with their twitter watching, RIPA requests of Blackberry messages, CCTV watching...

The riots stop and they start arresting people. Over 800 arrests in 3 days. Almost none on the ground during the riots.

Gone are the good old days of coppers grinding the face of the evil-doer into the bitumen saying "You're nicked son". Now it is a bunch of teenagers hanging around their homes sweating, awaiting for a couple of nice, young ladies in blue uniforms to come knocking sometime in the next 12 months.

In some ways this is much better - each arrest involves less violence, creates less resentment, cooler heads govern the process, fewer passions are inflamed and the cycle of violence reduces.

Obviously there is less symbolic cleaning the steets of scum by water cannon: the backslapping self-congratulations of the good and seeing the bad hurt badly in an orgy of police violence with plastic bullets (they are not real, they are plastic - nobody gets hurt in real life but don't try them at home).

However, this all depends on every email, every twitter, every Blackberry Messanger Message being available to the police to read. Every street having CCTV, every picture of every crime being posted to the web. Every neighbour looking at the photos ready to name and shame the person they live next too, with or nearby. It is a world where there is no privacy from authorities, your neighbours or the world.

smiley - lighthouse


Key: Complain about this post

What a riotous question

Write an Entry

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."

Write an entry
Read more