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, votesEeny meeny miny mo, catch an iPod user, don’t let him go…
The G8 is, for those who don’t know, an international undemocratic gestalt made up of the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, they cook up new ways to manipulate and control people, trade, and money markets.
The G8 famously tell lies about how they’re going to tackle world poverty but then—after near enough promising on their mother’s graves—don’t do much at all other than make excuses. Now the G8 is cooking up draconian new copyright protection laws. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) between the US, EU, and Canada, will give border guards the right to seize our iPods and mobile phones whenever they suspect they contain illegal downloads.
tags: civil liberties, crime, Digital Rights Management, downloads, file-sharing, freedom, G8, games, Internet Service Providers, mp3, music, piracy, videoMan cuts car in half to spite petty bureaucrats
The unspoken motto of our political leaders, locally and nationally, and irrespective of party allegiances, could be said to be ‘fleece not protect’. One man in Gloucestershire had a novel response to his car, legally registered off the road and parked in his garden, being clamped for extending a mere few inches—less than a wheel length—onto the public road. The car was due to be scrapped, so he took an angle-grinder to it and cut it in half.
The car owner is reported as ‘glad to get one over’ on the enthusiastically punitive officials, describing them as ‘jobsworths’.
tags: bureaucrats, civil liberties, crime, jobsworths, local government, national government, penalties, politics, protest
