Invade Privacy and Let the Industry off Scot Free.

Two new legislation on the table and one announcement on the banking industry and to me it's totally back to front and completely out of touch with reality.

First of the bat are plans to ban smoking in cars where children are present. Who would ever say that smoking when your child is in the car is a delightful habit?! What father would protest this bill? No one can come out and say this is a bad idea or that it's ok to smoke with children are around. However without an argument for the negative it doesn't mean the government should legislate control over an individuals lifestyle choice. The car at the end of the day is a vehicle in which you lose all your privacy. Cameras watching your speed. Police watching your driving and holding the right to stop and search you whenever they want. Government and companies ensuring your car's innards are in respectable order and so forth. And all this is needed to ensure road safety and a high standard of public safety. However new technology which auto tracks your windscreen and watches you from afar has already been piloted across Britain. Putting away the mobile phone is a good idea but being fined for popping a sweet or switching the radio on is backdoor secret surveillance and dare I say, totalitarianism. You can't smoke at work, in the pub and rarely at home now everyone has jumped on the anti-smoking banned wagon (which I am part of btw). Now you can't even roll down your window and have a smoke when your stressed out from grid lock, the kids are screaming in the back seat and your wife just left you for spending to much time at work.

It's a horrible image but I don't think the government or police should be concerned with our private habits and indeed their role should be protecting not suppressing them.

Legislation number two is tougher regulation on Sun beds, or tanning salons as they are called now. Again what argument or specialist is going to stand up and defend the right to have artificially brown skin, but I question the government when they want to clamp down on unmanned salons and underage bronzing addicts when hedgefund managers, banking executives and the like are off gambling with the public's savings; and after losing them ask for a government handout. When looking around the commons it is more likely that the sun kissed skin of our right honourable MPs is not from overdosing on UV beds but from vacations in the Caribbean or Sunday afternoons sailing on their moats which they fiddled through tax payer funded expenses. It almost too ridiculous to believe.

Looks like today Darling will announce that regulation was not to blame for the financial crises. To an extent tough regulation in the UK would not have stopped a global economic turn down but it would mean our banks would not have been such a major part of it. Regulation is what's needed and its what the public want too. If someone commits a crime you may blame the police for not catching them before they done it but you never let the criminal get off scott free on the same presumption.

Liberty

I came across the article via the FCOs website.
http://www.newstatesman.com/law-and-reform/2009/03/police-state-rights-freedom

It is about how we are not entering a police state and modern liberty is not under threat. It is interesting and I agree with most of it. Primarily that there is no 'golden age' of liberty to which we can roll the state back to. Often putting institutional powers on the statute serves as a protection of society, giving a reference of norms and allocation and proprietary over powers. However I do think modern technology has the capacity to completely infiltrate our lives and provide surveillance for all manner of groups who wish to control, cajole, or pressure the public to act, behave, buy and ultimately think in a certain way. We need statute law and protection over the next generation where the battle for privacy will be fought. Namely email, Internet connections, text messaging and phone calls. We can not only define between citizen and criminal, we must define between citizen and suspect.

Surveillance

I used to think the phrase 'They're watching us, they control everything!' was reserved for a select group of people. Namely 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, UFO enthusiasts, Elvis spotters and the like. But in all serious how much can,or will, Britons take?

Off the top of my head I could name several government policies or actions since 2001 that have not only infringe on our freedoms but seek to severely undermine and curtail them. Just think now, just for a second, and I bet you can too. ID cards, DNA capture, bio-metric passports, detention for 28 days without charge (wait 90 days is what they want right?), refusal for freedom of information on MP's expenses (our employees mind), are just a few policies being continually pursued by the good new Labour Party. They see nothing wrong in denying European Union citizens entry into the UK, even if they are elected representatives, or allowing local councils (not the police) to monitor someones movement 24 hours a day. They are suspected of banning evidence in court cases because it may simply be embarrassing for them. They ask university lecturers and professors to report students who they suspect of academic misadventure. But when two subs collided in the English Chanel last week the extent of the damage was classified. Yet it is not like it was damaged in battle, and even if it was there isn't a precedent for not disclosing this information. We learned more about the crash from the French media than our own government. I'm sure the list could go on and on but the problem is compounded by the governments inability to keep the information they suck from us secret. The loss of 25 million individuals' data last year comes to mind.

Well, have you heard the latest operation Glasgow to take place on the Merseyside? Surveillance cameras with automatic face recognition. I'm sure the only thing holding back a national out rolling is the unreliability of previous face recognition software. The worst thing about it is that anyone detained by the police, regardless of whether they are charged or not, will be photographed and linked to the Surveillance network.

Why are we quiet about this?

The Convention on Modern Liberty is on in London this week. If I was home I'd be there.