The more Big brother watches us, the less he seems to see

The title of this post comes straight from Ross Clark’s book on the surveillance society: “The Road to Southend Pier”. In many ways, this is a worthwhile book, showing how the surveillance state –frighteningly omnipresent in theory- is in reality breathtakingly inefficient at takling crime in the conventional sense while creating new, spurious offences.

One passage seems ill thought through though: “For those

Yet more surveillance: a compulsory register for mobile phones

“More Light! –let the Party know everything”
(W.I.Lenin)
In yet another surveillance initiative, the government plans to register all users of mobile phones. To buy one, you will need a passport (or in future maybe an ID card!). Of course, given that increasing amounts of information are available to more and more people and organisations, limiting government power by controlling its access to information becomes less and less viable. This particular point is an exception though, since it could in principle allow the government real time tracking of citizens. This and the fact that just about any activity can be criminalised under some of the many, often arbitrary offenses introduced by the Blair and Brown regimes could make this law a good reason not to use mobile phones in the future.