Councils use Big Brother anti-terror law to wage war on dog shit
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), part of the government’s anti-terror drive, gave councils the power to use surveillance and to access phone and e-mail records. It’s also the law that makes BT’s plans to monitor every website its customers visit, in order to place targeted advertisements, illegal. Not that BT gives a damn. It’s happy to flout the law, because it’s big enough for the law not to be applied to it by its political allies. The RIPA was allegedly brought in to help fight terrorism, but Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton has written to councils warning them that overzealous use of the powers could alienate the public, and not to use the anti-terror law for ‘trivial offences’ such as dog fouling.
tags: anti-terrorism, Big Brother, crime, crowds, democracy, dog shit, elections, ignorance, law, legislation, street cleaning, votesShock resignation is a wake-up call to the British people
David Davis’ resignation from his job as MP and Shadow Home Secretary yesterday, forcing a by-election in which he will stand again in protest over the issue of the 42 day detention of suspected terrorists, surprised everyone.
In two notoriously opportunistic and hard-nosed professions, politics and the media, in both of which personal convictions in the 21st Century are too often limited to expressing passionately-held beliefs over which restaurant serves the best caviare, it’s no wonder that we’ve since seen a plethora of career politicians on all sides, and political commentators, utterly incapable of understanding why Davis did what he did.
tags: 42 days, anti-terrorism, Big Brother, civil liberties, Conservatives, conviction, courage, David Davis, Labour, oppression, politics, state control, Tories
