Savage Popcorn

The latest wheeze in the Labour government’s War Against Sanity is to decide that anyone carrying a pre-pay mobile phone must be a terrorist - or as good as - so they’re building another database of mobile phone owners. That’s all owners of mobile phones, regardless of whether they have regular contract or a pre-pay phone.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

It can’t be long now until they realise that all crimes are comitted by living people and overreact accordingly.

A migrant, living in the UK, has this to say about the latest stunt dreamt up by the a government desperate to find a justification for their ID card plans:

[Y]our Labour Party has taken my biometrics and will force me to carry the papers my grandparents destroyed when they fled the Soviet Union. In living memory, my family has been chased from its home by governments whose policies and justification the Labour Party has aped. Your Labour Party has made me afraid in Britain, and has made me seriously reconsider my settlement here. I am the father of a British citizen and the husband of a British citizen. I pay my tax. I am a natural-born citizen of the Commonwealth. The Labour Party ought not to treat me — nor any other migrant — in a way that violates our fundamental liberties. The Labour Party is unmaking Britain, turning it into the surveillance society that Britain’s foremost prophet of doom, George Orwell, warned against. Labour admits that we migrants are only the first step, and that every indignity that they visit upon us will be visited upon you, too. If you want to live and thrive in a free country, you must defend us too: we must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately.

The migrant in question is Cory Doctorow, a Canadian author who is supporting himself but is no threat to anyone.

Much has been said about what is wrong with the government’s ID card scheme – it’s overly complex, unnecessarily intrusive, not properly costed and horrendously expensive. And for what? Why are the government so keen to introduce these things?

It’s a serious question, and one for which I have so far seen no answer: What does the Labour Party expect to achieve by introducing ID cards?

There are more slaves today than ever before in human history. In 2007, Slave Traders made more money than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined.

Call + Response is a campaigning documentary that goes deep undercover to the places where slavery is thriving - from the child brothels of Cambodia to the slave brick kilns of rural India – to expose the world’s 27 million dirtiest secrets.

The filmmakers are also creating interactive field projects for each aspect of human slavery: sex slavery, labor slavery, child soldiers and child slavery. All profits from the use of the film, DVD, soundtrack, iTunes downloads will be directed, by the viewers, to these projects with clear start and finish points (such as a landrover for a child soldier rehab camp, or sewing machines for a after-care training facility). Their goal is to fund and celebrate completed projects together in community and to close the loop by allowing viewers to become participants in the solution.

The film is the call, and they are asking for a response. Watch the trailer, post it and join their Facebook and MySpace groups. Do More.

The Odeon cinema chain has installed CCTV cameras in nine of its venues across the country to ensure “the safety and security of guests.” That’s guests who weren’t feeling either unsafe or insecure in the first place and who didn’t ask to be filmed while watching films.

How long before some bored foyer attendant decides to upload a little “user generated content” from some unfortunately amorous couple finding themselves on the wrong back row?

Steven Spielberg has resigned from his post of artistic adviser for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing accusing the Chinese authorities of not doing enough to pressure Sudan to end the “continuing human suffering” in Darfur.

Obviously, ultimate responsibility for the mass criminality in Darfur lies with the Sudanese government, but China has done rather nicely out of it. China imports two-thirds of Sudanese oil - estimated at 500,000 barrels a day, and does a brisk trade in arms sales to boot.

So kudos to Spielberg for deciding he wants nothing more to do with it.