Sunday, February 10, 2008

Bugging the buggers.

It’s good to know that in an uncertain world, there are some things you really can still rely on. No matter who you are, where you are, some bugger is monitoring you. Yes, a thousand bugs at day are being applied for in Britain according to the commissioner for the interception of communications (George Orwell eat your heart out ) by the police, Revenue, local government.

That’s a lot of bugs. It means that in a couple of decades, every adult in the nation will be electronically monitored - for their own safety and security, of course.Not a word spoken in Britain will go unrecorded. Doesn’t matter your religion, class or nationality, in the surveillance lottery, everyone’s a winner.

But it’s not just a bugger’s paradise. We are also the most watched country in the world. Britain has one quarter of all the worlds CCTV cameras, and they’re trained on you. The average citizens is videod 300 times a day. Forget digital television and YouTube. Just go into your backyard and perform - you’re on live TV.

But you do have to wonder about the sanity of the poor souls who have to listen and watch all this stuff. I mean, do they have special monitoring centres in the Midlands where thousands of bog-eyed buggers are tuning in to our dull and worthless lives 24/7 and taking notes? “07.30 am. M flushes loo and asks where his pants have gone”. What kind of cruelty is that? Must be even more boring than Big Brother.

And if, in due course, we are all going to be bugged , that will surely mean there is going to be a chronic lack of buggers. Perhaps we’ll all have to be forced into listening into each other because there won’t be enough of them to go round.

No wonder all that information about our medical records, immigration, tax and social security records is being found on dumped lap tops, lost computer discs, and jiffy-bags addressed to al Qaeda. The buggers are throwing it away so they don’t have to watch it all.

You can’t force people to do things that are injurious to their mental health. Health and Safety will have to start monitoring the monitors to ensure they aren’t break the law.

Now, of course, none of this would have come to light had it not emerged that an MP, Sadiq Khan, had been bugged while making a prison visit. This has caused outrage. Seems it’s fine for ever citizen in the land to become a target of the snooper state, but just don’t bug politicians. Well, they might be doing their expenses at the time, unintentionally accepting illegal campaign donations, or having intimate relations with their employees/family members. That would be a bug too far. This isn’t a police state, you know.

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