Voting TaKtiX

This is what I get for not clicking on the profiles of everyone that posts comments here. Random chance, was looking at one of my older posts and saw some comments from ‘Chris’, so I click his profile. Torquay it says. That’s where I live. There’s another political blogger in this little backwater. I look at his front page, he’s coherent and argues his cases with research and examples. I think I disagree with him on virtually everything except books (I prefer Pattern Recognition to Neuromancer if we’re talking Gibson), but he has but up a nice riposte to my and Paul’s posts on Demos a few posts down. I’ll try to write up a decent reply to him, and finish of my response to Martin’s article (Martin, never meant that to be the only post on your list, just the first). Oh, and reply to some of Ken’s comments; incidentally, have now, finally, added Ken to the blogroll, apologies for not doing so sooner Ken, especially given the contributions you’ve made here, thought out comments that I disagree with fundamentally are always welcome. I’ll be reorganisng the blogroll when I’ve got time, it’s got a bit big and clunky; I need a ‘friends and allies’ and a ‘favoured enemies’ section at the top.

In the meantime, I have another post to write on the story of the day, then I need to sleep, my downstairs neighbour had a party last night, and I got about 3 hours sleep, eyes not staying open. Chris? Where’s your local, might as well meet for a drink…

Just a quick post on the topic of privacy, and specifically freedom from the prying eyes of CCTV. Currently occurring in Liverpool is the trial of two Council workers accused of using CCTV to spy on a woman in her own flat.

Now as far as I can tell, this was an unfortunate occurrence where someone’s home was covered by the field of view of a camera usually used for more mundane purposes. Whilst I suppose this is unavoidable, and potentially could throw up lots of the usual questions about privacy and the right to not have ones photo taken, I’ll leave that for another time. This case seems reasonably clear-cut in condemning the actions of the voyeurs anyway, who dimmed the lights, projected the tape onto a screen, and invited the boys round.

The point of this thread is to highlight the beautiful irony of the whole situation. Because how were the peeping-toms caught? On the CCTV monitoring them of course. Sublime, absolutely sublime.

The watchmen, it seems, sometimes are being watched.

(A more thought out and less mocking thread on issues of privacy coming soon)