If you have been reading your newspapers you will be aware that the police in Royston, a town in Hertfordshire have, for the past three years, been monitoring every car number plate entering and leaving the town. It does this through seven automatic number plate recognition cameras installed around the town. You will also be aware that the government wants to use cameras on the motorways to enable them to track our cars wherever they go. The excuse for this is that they want to scrap the road tax and charge us for the miles we use on the motorways.In addition, we have the government authorising GCHQ to hoover up all our email and phone communications and that they are planning to be able to pinpoint our exact location 24 hours a day by using technology to locate us through our mobile phones. All this is being done on the excuse of tackling crime and terrorism. As a result, every human being who lives and breathes in the United Kingdom is now, officially, a potential criminal and terrorist. This is a level of surveillance only dreamed about by Hitler and Stalin.
At the same time we are reading how the police have been fully aware for years of the illegal use private investigators by large companies and corporations to hack into phones and computers to gain our personal data. This involves banks, insurance companies, law firms, financial services organisations and pharmaceutical companies. However, the police justify refusing to act on this information of outright criminality and has classified the material as secret on the grounds that they wish 'to safeguard individuals’ human rights and protect the financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality' So, big business is being protected by the police for exactly the same criminal behaviour that the staff of the News of the World have been prosecuted for. Remember, the police were guilty of protecting the News of the World until they were forced to act by public outrage at the hacking of Millie Dowler's phone. This is the police acting as an agent for one particular section of society and establishing two types of law. It is pure class discrimination, and anyone who tries to deny this is quite simply an idiot, a scoundrel, or both.
The surveillance of the British people and the collusion of the police and politicians with outright criminality have reached the level of a crisis in this country. Our government and the police are behaving in an openly hostile attitude to the bulk of the population in order to protect and support a gang of criminals and thieves. You must be fed up by now with me reminding you who and what politicians and the police are, and what their roles and functions are. There is no justification imaginable for this type of surveillance in society by people who are elected to office by people like you and me who pay taxes for the support and maintenance of both the political class and the police. Both Parliament and the police are treating us like enemies of the state.
Anyone familiar with sociology will recognise how sociology tells us that crime is a necessary factor in the process of meaningful social change and how a society that successfully eradicated crime would not be worth living in. It would be quite intolerable. Crime must be tackled and kept at manageable and controllable levels, but crime is simply the ruling elite's opinion of what is good and bad behaviour and they often get it wrong. Thus, all laws are subject to challenge, and if necessary disobedience. St Thomas Aquinas tells us that we are not bound by unjust laws and John Locke tells us that should any government become destructive to the public good we should remove and replace it. Witchcraft was once the biggest crime you could commit and is now a harmless pastime because it was recognised that the laws against witchcraft were both stupid and unjust. Thus, all the people who refused to obey the laws on witchcraft were quite right to do so. My point is that all this surveillance has nothing to do with crime and terrorism, it is an indication of the neoliberal's obsession with control and with their determination that they will not tolerate any challenge to their domination. Crime and terrorism is the excuse but is not the reason. Britain is becoming more and more authoritarian and exclusive and is now seriously beginning to resemble a police state, You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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