A Bug’s Life

Welcome to the Panopticon

I’ve watched all five series of The Wire (9.3 IMDB. Very much recommended) in their entirety, twice now, and finding myself unaccountably resistant to Netflix’s unrelenting smorgasbroad of tough as nails female homicide detectives, booby super snipers, deadly lady assassins, and put upon, but ultimately triumphant, girl bosses, I recently decided to jump in for a third time.

Launched on HBO in 2002, The Wire is, perhaps, the greatest crime series ever made.

The drama takes its name from the central McGuffin of the first series. The attempts by a maverick Baltimore police unit, made up of drunks, misfits, also rans, and rejects, to stay ahead of ever changing technology, and set up a wiretap on the phones of a tight, disciplined gang of West Baltimore drug dealers.

The problem for the cops is that they can’t just go round bugging the dealers’ phones willy-nilly. Because even drug dealers have rights. And so the cops must negotiate the many checks and balances, safeguards and protections, intentionally built into the system, to guarantee them.

For instance, before persuading an actual human judge to grant a wiretap, the police have to demonstrate that a specific crime is being committed.

This means that the police cannot not simply go on a ‘fishing expedition’. Pop a wiretap on a known criminal’s phone and hope something turns up.

The cops also have to demonstrate, in advance, that they have good reason to believe this specific crime is being committed by a specific person, and also that it is being committed using a specific phone.

The police then have to show that other investigative techniques have failed to secure the evidence they need, or otherwise demonstrate why they wouldn’t work.

And even once the wiretap is finally up, there are strict limits on its use. The police must stop listening if any call is deemed unrelated to criminal activity. While personal conversations, such as between a drug dealer and his mum, (sorry ‘moms’) are not to be recorded.

And finally any warrant obtained is not open ended. Evidence has to be gathered within a set time period. After which the wiretap must be closed down.

Today this aspect of the show feels like ancient history, quaint even.

‘Omar coming!! Omar coming!’ The much missed Michael K Williams as Omar Little in The Wire.

 Because in the intervening 25 years, (and yes I know America is not Great Britain. Thank you for your insight geography fans), we’ve gone from a society where no one even questioned a drug dealer’s right to privacy, to one where supposedly ‘progressive’ governments are giving themselves powers to listen to our phone conversations, read our messages, and effectively install bugs on our devices, permanently and without oversight, whether we’re even suspected of criminal activity, or not.

It’s a massive shift in the relationship between the individual and the state. And the worst part is that most of us are just shrugging, and going along with it.

Mainly because it is being leveraged by that most convenient, nefarious, and fake of all authoritarian excuses. That we must give up our rights, privacy, and personal sovereignty to ‘protect the children’.

The very same children which our ruling elites show zero interest in protecting, out in the real world.

(And if Deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell is sanctimoniously demanding if I am intending to ‘blow that little trumpet now, [and ] get that dog whistle out.’ Then yes Lucy, I very much am)

Just this week the EU passed legislation what critics are calling ‘Chat Control 1.0’.

Which grants Ursula Von Der Leyen the right, to outsource to internet service providers, the task of sifting through EU citizens’ private emails, and messages, to check they haven’t sent each other a spicy meme, noticed something inconvenient, or made a jokey observation, of which Deutschland’s desiccated diva of doom disapproves.

This is a power Brussels has been desperate to grant itself for years. But the plan has been repeatedly rejected as too draconian, even by the EU’s puppet parliament, each and every time it has been presented.

But when has democracy, ever been allowed to interdict the never ending Blitzkreig of repressive EU leglistaion?

On this occasion Ursula simply waited until half the MEPs were off on their holibobs and forced it through regardless.

But we’re not in the EU. So these rules won’t apply to us right?

Wrong.

Because back when she was Home Secretary pinch faced puritan Yvette Cooper gave the British state, through Section 121 of the Online Safety Act, the power to do exactly the same thing, to trawl through all our messages, and emails, anytime she likes, in the hope of finding evidence of dissent and wrongthink criminal behaviour and terrorist activity.

Of course OFCOM, the ‘media regulator,’ and stern faced enforcer of state censorship, is at pains to stress that I’m wrong, that I’m just peddling ‘fake news’.

It points out that no, the government does not have the power to bug our phones, but simply compels Big Tech to monitor our communications for ‘harmful’ content instead.

Sure. But that seems, to me at least, to be a deliberate, lawyerly obfuscation, as it effectively amounts to the same thing.

Of course the government is playing down this assault on British citizens’ right to privacy.

It assures us it will simply ‘scan’ our private communications, and personal photos, in a bid to ‘detect’ child porn and ‘identify’ terrorist activity.

‘Scanning’ sounds technical, dispassionate, and impersonal, as if this process will happen at one removed. The preserve of a fully automated AI system, trawling for ‘keywords’ or ‘digital markers’ on faceless, impartial servers, far away.

And sure, an anonymous algorithm will mark up anything it considers suspect, (thanks to brilliantly rubbish exPrime Minister Keir Starmer, Britain is now an ‘AI Superpower’ after all), but rest assured, once one of your personal photos has been ‘flagged’ as potentially containing, say, child pornography, it will be a flesh and blood police officer, or ‘highly trained’ (minimum wage) operative, who will actually be poring over the photo of your mum in a swimsuit, towelling down a naked toddler on the beach, and deciding if she’s a paedophile or not.

It will be human beings who are reading your personal What’s App messages, searching diligently for unjustified criticism of mass immigration, failure to adequately celebrate the joys of multiculturalism, cruel jokes about brave trans heroes, spicy far-right memes, and of course ‘Islamophobia’.

And ultimately it will be fallible, subjective, ideological human beings who will adjudicate whether what you have communicated, expressed, or simply thought, breaches the threshold of criminality.

Again, this is no conspiracy. We know that an ‘elite’ squad of busy body snoops highly trained officers has already been recruited to do just that.

Because the government has been busily boasting about it.

And we know that they will imprison people for personal, private WhatsApp messages between friends, because they’ve already done it.

You might be daft enough to assume that if the object of all this monitoring really is to apprehend terrorists, pedos, crooks, and rapists, then it might make sense to retain in prison, all the terrorists, pedos, crooks, and rapists, the police have already caught.

But far from it.

Just as priggish, just sacked, Justice Secretary David Lammy has been finding new and innovative reasons to lock up wrongthinkers, sceptics, biologists, history nerds, dissenters, angry tweeters, and ‘deniers’, without jury trials, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is purging the prisons of thousands upon thousands of actual scumbags, sex offenders, and convicted terrorists, leaving them free to once again stalk our grubby, phone thief infested, streets.

Mahmood, who masquerades as a common sense tribune of the people, is just as passionate about using AI to separate us from our rights, as she is at pretending she’s tough on asylum seekers.

Explaining in a recent interview with Digital ID fan, and former war monger, Tony Blair that

“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision [….] was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

As all budding Stalinists know, a panopticon is a special type of prison, featuring a central watch tower surrounded by a circular series of open walled cells. So that every inmate spends his entire life, under the constant, unblinking gaze of the authorities.

This glass house gulag our Labour Home Secretary’s, self professed vision for Britain.

Meanwhile, the BBC might be ditching viewers faster than Vickrum Digwas’ mum dumps a kirpan, but rather than address the evident dissatisfaction of its dwindling audience, by returning once again to its founding principles of impartiality, universality, and honesty, the once mighty BBC has come up with an alternative, better plan.

Make us watch it anyway.

Labour has now decided that voters curating their own YouTube feeds is a counter revolutionary act. And must be stopped.

For the good of the party country.

The government intends to force YouTube and other streaming services to promote, push, and prioritise, compromised, captured legacy mainstream media, and especially the BBC, on our individual home pages, regardless of our settings, interests, or stated preferences.

Forget personal choice, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (Why we are spending £7.6 billion a year on Lisa Nandy’s pointless ministry of free tickets remains beyond me) claims the new rules will make it easier for Britons to “discover trusted news sources” online.

But these news sources are no longer trusted, or indeed trustworthy.

Of course not.

The mainstream media has spent the last few years pumping out unhinged far-left orthodoxy, hysterical climate propaganda, racist anti-British rhetoric, extremist trans ideology, lunatic ‘toxic-male’ misandry, and smug ‘centrist dad’ claptrap, while force feeding us all manner of misinformation, about immigration, (plus some good stuff: credit where it’s due!) crime, the war in the Middle East, Donald Trump, the economy, and the illusory strength of ‘diversity’.

No wonder much of the BBC’s audience has fled to YouTube, X, and Substack to escape this partisan rubbish.

It’s an indictment of just how out of touch the BBC really is, that the cutpurse broadcaster demands £4bn of free money every year, and yet still can’t compete with The Critical Drinker.

Of course the idea isn’t just to push discredited regime voices to the top of your YouTube homepage. The idea is to marginalise, stigmatise, and ultimately remove ‘right wing,’ alternative, or dissenting voices like GB News from your feed altogether.

This is bad enough. But it’s about to get worse. Much worse.

Once these authoritarian new rules have been implemented. There are plans to roll out case by case censorship.

To ensure you’ll not riot the next time a Welsh choirboy stabs a kid, or an Islamist drives a van into some pedestrians.

Because the inconvenient fact that such atrocities ever occurred in the first place will be redacted, suppressed, hidden, and scrubbed from news sites (already happening), and your social media feeds. For your own good.

Again. You may think this is far fetched. And fair enough. Even as I write this, it sounds unbelievably dystopian to me.

But remember we’re talking about the British government here. A government which conspired to people-smuggle 24,000 Afghans, (24,000!!!) into the country under dead of night, and never told a soul.

And again, don’t take my word for it. The state is blatantly upfront about its intentions.

The Daily Telegraph recently reported that

Liz Kendall, the [since sacked] Technology Secretary, announced on Wednesday that social media firms would face new curbs during “times of crisis”, such as the Belfast attack, preventing them from disseminating content that may encourage disorder.

Exactly what sort of ‘crisis’?

Well it’s instructive that she was talking after an ‘asylum seeker’ tried to literally behead the friendly neighbour who had helped him move into his new, taxpayer funded flat.

The government’s clear intent is to impose a digital ‘D Notice’ on the entire internet, and remove troublesome stories from X, YouTube, and your social media feed, any time some inconvenient atrocity happens which contradicts its approved narrative.

All in the name of ‘social cohesion’.

Because people like Kendall clearly consider us low life gammon scum, flag shagging riff-raff, unwashed, uneducated vermin, always just one YouTube video away from riot, one meme away from attacking a mosque, storming an asylum hostel, or even worse, voting Reform.

Let’s leave it there.

You might think that the worst thing to ever happen to the modern ruling elites here in Britain was Brexit, and in America, Trump. But that’s not really the case.

The worst thing to happen to the lazy, complacent regime, was the internet.

Tik-Tok. But, you know, from the olden days.

No new technology has democratised the free flow of information so much since the printing press.

But the elites were slow to realise the implications. They took their eye off the ball. And now they are forced to play catch up. And like with the printing press, are desperate to concoct reasons to roll back this democratisation, to block access to facts, to discredit dissenting opinion, delegitimise counter narratives, and to suppress freedom, while at the same time pouring the full weight of the state’s resources into identifying, taxing, and punishing, those who refuse to comply.

Ultimately this whole process of internet suppression isn’t about protecting kids. Stopping terrorism. Stifling ‘hate speech’. Or promoting ‘trustworthy’ content.

It is a coordinated, international progressive crusade. Its aim is to talk up the invented dangers of ‘too much information’, online choice, and ‘unfettered’ free speech, and leverage the resulting moral panic as an excuse to remove our voice, eliminate our freedoms, reinstate the gatekeepers, and put us, the little people, firmly back in our box.

The assumption in the Wire was that everyone, even Baltimore‘s worst, most violent drug dealers, had a right to freedom of association, and private communication.

The assumption in the EU, and its piddling, fawning familiar, the YooKay, is that we proles cannot be trusted to send and receive private messages, curate our own news sources, or pick our own YouTube videos, lest we taint our weak, gullible minds, with the insidious, dangerous, virus, of free expression, and independent thought.

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See you in the comments

ATB

LSO