Monday 2 April 2012

Sean Gabb versus the latest police state power grab

Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance, in dispute with Lord Carlisle (some kind of establishment flunky) over the latest Big Brother Surveillance Bill:
  1. Every year or so in England, a new "anti-terrorism" law is made. Every time, we are told how this is absolutely needed to protect our way of life, and that it will be used only against terrorists and other very bad people. Every one of these laws is mostly used against ordinary people. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, for example, is largely used by local authority snoops to see if people are following the recycling rules or living where they claim to live for school allocation purposes. The American extradition treaty is mostly used to deport men who have broken no law in this country to stand trial in some of the most corrupt and depraved jurisdictions in the common law world. There is no doubt this law would be used to enable persecutions of men who are, by no stretch of the imagination, terrorists.
  2. The police state that has been built up in England is almost uniquely incompetent. Any data about our communications aquired by the British State would certainly be put on unencrypted memory sticks and left on railway trains, or stolen by or sold to organised crime gangs and foreign security services. All promises of confidentiality should be regarded with the contempt they deserve.
  3. We are already living in a state of "anarcho-tyranny." Criminals who should be caught and locked away are kept out of prison, or undeported, in the name of human rights, and are given lavish financial support at our expense. The rest of us get taxed and regulated and spied on, and generally treated like the slaves of an absolute and arbitrary police state.
  4. We are told this new law is needed in a year that will see both the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth the Useless and the Olympic Games. Since the law will need to go through Commons and Lords, it cannot be ready in time. The stated excuse for the law must be a lie.
  5. In general, we are told that our masters need a police state so they can fight the "War on Terror." Really, they need the War on Terror as an excuse for the police state that have wanted since at least the 1970s.

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