If you’ve seen The Lives of Others, the Oscar-winning movie set in Communist East Germany, you’ll know how constrictive and oppressive it was living in a surveillance state where the authorities monitored your every move.
But hey, why watch the film when you can live it for real in Britain.
Here’s a tweet that gives a snapshot of where we’re at:
Just been at a hate crime event with the Met police + they told me something really useful.
If you’re on a bus + you witness a hate crime, if you give the police the number on the back of your Oyster/debit card, they can trace the bus + every passenger on it to find the culprit.
— Patrick Strudwick (@PatrickStrud) May 24, 2018
For me, the sinister part here is not that the police have the ability to track you down via the information on your Oyster card. [Though actually they don’t. Not if your Oyster card isn’t registered. And it’s the least law-abiding who are, it seems likely, the ones who are least likely to bother]. It’s the fact that the thing that really rocks their boat about these extraordinary Stasi-like powers they have is not that they can use them to track down terrorists or knife gangs or acid throwing thugs – but that they can use it to prosecute “hate crimes.”
Read the rest on Breitbart.