A Peculiar Blog

I think it’s pretty much recognized by a lot of people that over the last several years Britain has been becoming more and more of a police state.  From closed circuit tv cameras all over the place not only in the cities but also watching the highways to passing laws that allow them to demand your encryption keys and passwords anytime they *think* they might have a cause (and throwing you in jail for two years if you don’t snap to and hand ’em over).

I honestly can’t tell you how many news items I’ve seen that very clearly show the progression of Britain towards a full blown Orwellian nightmare of a police state in which everybody and anybody is subject to being watched.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that government security types write their diaries with George Orwell’s 1984 promotional pens, not one bit.

Recently they’ve taken yet another step on this path, The British Home Office has, quietly put in place a plan that will allow police all over Britain to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant any time they decide to, never mind anything like privacy laws and whatnot.

This means that if the police or Mi5 decide that they can benefit by tapping your communications the could simply break into your home and / or office and install a hardware keylogger or perhaps keylogging software on your computer.  This would then record every single keystroke you typed.  The device or software could either store the information until it was retrieved or it could well use your internet connection to call home and send the information it’s collected.

If the suspect isn’t one to practice “safe hex”, they could send you an email with an attachment.  Once you you opened it, it would then install remotely controlled spyware.  If you’ve got a Wi-Fi setup at home and haven’t taken steps to make it and your computer secure, they could just sit somewhere nearby in a van and hack into the system through the insecure Wi-Fi and then have access to everything on your system.

And the list of possibilities goes on and on.  Another thing, this isn’t just restricted to Britain, it’s all over the EU as well with police and intelligence agencies expanding their use of “warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property”.

One last note.

Before you think to yourself, “I’m glad I live in America where we’ve got rights and they can’t do stuff like that.”, think again.

The Homeland Security Act, The Patriot Act, The Bush administration giving the NSA the green light to do all of that illegal, unconstitutional, warrantless wiretapping.

And while you’re saying, “Ah, but now we’ve got Obama in office and he’s gonna fix all that.”, think again.  Obama has already taken Bush’s side of the warrantless wiretapping mess and will no doubt continue it.  In fact, I think that if privacy, freedom and civil rights took a beating under Bush, Obama’s going to do more and worse.

I think it would be great to have a president that wouldn’t shit on freedom and the constitution but I really don’t know how you could get an Honest, honorable person elected.  I’ll admit that when he was first elected I thought Bush was the right man for the job.  I started seeing the truth shortly after 911 when the Homeland security act was passed by a Congress that never even bothered to READ the thing.  I saw more of it when the Patriot Act was passed. and so on and on.

I’ll close this with some quotes.  This first one I’ve quoted before but It’s worth reading again:

“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great
nation.  We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our
homeland.”

– Adolf Hitler, proposing the creation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
– George Bush, Talking about the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act.

And some more food for thought:

“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become
the instruments of tyranny at home.”

James Madison, fourth president of
the United States

And finally this one:

“There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.” -Ed Howdershelt

(by the way, I think it’s pretty clear that the first two haven’t done much good lately.  Anyone for the third?)