"I hear what you say"

American Catholic bloggers sometimes refer to the major political blogs over there. Here in Blighty, it seems that the most successful one is Guy Fawkes which offers trenchant and irreverent comment. It is often highly amusing but I should insert a profanity warning here. Double it for the comments (often also very entertaining.) Have a look at his impressive list of readers from the January stats (404,427 page views Jan 2007) which includes over1000 hits from gsi.gov.uk, where the gsi stands for Government Secure Intranet.

Yesterday he had a post on e-petitions: Blair: I'm not listening. A petition calling for the Prime Minister to scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards got 28,000 signatures. Here is a the picture of the response from the Prime Minister:

Then there is the road pricing petition which got a 1.6 million signatories and crashed the website. Apparently, Blair intends to spam an email to all the signatories of that petition as well, to explain why he is right and they are all wrong.

As some commenters have observed, this is itself an warning of a further erosion of privacy. By signing an e-petition, you give your email address (and indeed your home address) to Number 10.

... and the ID card scheme will put the whole population onto the Police suspect list by allowing the fingerprint data to be used by the Police (cf. Collar the lot of us!.)

... and we are the world leaders in CCTV surveillance of the general public

... and your Oyster card can be monitored to check where you are going in London

... and your car's number plates

... etc. etc. etc.

For lots more on this theme, see Spy Blog.

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