Daily Archive

Fear not.  You’re safe here. This blog continues to avoid mentioning Senator Side-Splitting. 

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At just before noon, ITN reports:

Greenpeace activists are staging sit-in protests at one of Britain’s largest power stations.

A group of 30 anti-pollution campaigners invaded Didcot coal-fired power plant in Oxfordshire at 5.30am.

Protesters hit emergency stop buttons on conveyor belts carrying coal into the plant and attached themselves to machinery. A second group climbed a 200 metre high chimney to set up a “climate camp” at the top…

Obviously, they are quite fit. So presumably they walked and/or jogged to the plant in the first place? (Sorry, but if we are truly to make a dent in “climate change” we all know that even cycling is not really acceptable: bikes require oil on the chain, remember.) And we certainly hope there was no stooping to the use of an internal combustion engine?

That reaction is light years’ more amusing than the original “joke”.  However, if you’ve stopped by here because you just can’t take any more about a defeated boob’s hilarious sense of humor and want “news” from elsewhere, continue to let me oblige.  The BBC reports:

Britain is “waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us,” the government’s Information Commissioner has said.

The irony of this criticism coming from a government official naturally doesn’t dawn on the BBC.

Richard Thomas spoke after research found people’s actions were increasingly being monitored.

The Surveillance Studies Network report says there are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras - about one for every 14 people…

…The report’s co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was “the most surveilled country”…

Of course, you’ll never guess which government entity the BBC names first as specifically doing a great deal of “watching” of people in the UK?:

…The research says surveillance ranges from the US national security agency monitoring all telecommunications traffic passing through Britain to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and global positioning satellite information tracking company vehicles…

So the Bush administration is monitoring UK key stroke information and tracking company vehicles, too? Oh, sorry, I misunderstood.  Interestingly, the BBC doesn’t there tell us exactly which government entity is monitoring those.  (That omission must be because they’re fearful that entity is watching.)

Also, what the BBC doesn’t choose to clarify in that messy paragraph is if the U.S. NSA is “monitoring traffic” that commences and terminates exclusively within the U.K. — starting, for instance, perhaps in Derby and concluding in Exeter — or that which eventually ends up in the U.S.  If the latter, that such involves the U.S. and as a result therefore might be considered perfectly reasonable for the NSA to monitor (especially in the current climate) is apparently not an issue the BBC thought worth addressing.  (There’s a surprise.)

…The report will be presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners’ Conference in London on Thursday, hosted by the Information Commissioner’s Office…

Hey, and whaddya know?, on the NSA issue of course we’ll have to wait until later today to find out for ourselves. . .

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Oh, and speaking of surveillance and monitoring at its most personal, the BBC also reports . . . and chooses a, shall we say, interesting photograph as an illustration (no intrusiveness here, of course):

Hmmmm. It even gets the bottles on the ground next to her. Isn’t technology remarkable? I mean that image doesn’t even look like it was shot by an NSA satellite?

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UPDATE. Come on, you didn’t really expect Reuters to be any brighter, did you?:

The government is becoming a surveillance society where individuals are filmed hundreds of times a day by security cameras and where firms “data mine” to build customer profiles, the information commissioner said on Thursday…

Yes, thus sayeth the government information commissioner.

…”We are now waking up to a surveillance society. It is not just cameras on the street and things like that — it is technology monitoring our movements, our activities,” Thomas told BBC radio…

Interesting choice of words. Although presumably, that girl later awoke on that bench probably never knowing some photographer had snapped an image of her for publication after she had perhaps had had a few too many. (I write perhaps because, as we know, still photos can lie . . . or simply convey a false impression. Is she passed out drunk? Maybe. But maybe it was made to look even worse that it really is. For it also seems funny how both bottles are standing upright, but she’s not. Perhaps those bottles aren’t even hers, and were simply placed there by someone else, maybe even by the photographer, to “stage” the photo that was desired? Who knows? Not that any photographer would ever do such a thing, of course.)

…Companies also increasingly monitor their own employees, whether by tracking their movements in company vehicles via the use of GPS satellites or by counting the number of key strokes they make on their computers…

As bad, and irritiating, as that is (as is also our increasing inability even so much as to “have a moment” on a bench, or post a letter without some “photojournalist” capturing us doing so), I’m sorry but that’s not in the same league as government engaging in it. One can always quit a job one doesn’t like. On the other hand, just try to quit being governed.

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On what the U.S. NSA is up to, here’s the excerpt from the paper (in .pdf, page 22):

9.4.6. Transnational state surveillance of telecommunications, signals intelligence (SIGINT) remains an area shrouded in secrecy, with the
technological capabilities the subject of a combination of educated guesswork, extrapolation and rumour. States also routinely filter vast amounts of telephone, telex, e-mail and fax traffic for reasons of ‘national interests’ (both security and economic interests). The so-called ‘ECHELON’ system, the global surveillance network operated by the American National Security Agency (NSA) maintains a huge base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, which routinely automatically filters all telecommunications traffic passing thorough the UK for key words and phrases and increasingly employs more sophisticated algorithms for advanced speech and even meaning recognition.

So, it is probably about what we already thought it was . . . hardly what the BBC implied.

Oh, and by the way, that info wasn’t likely obtained at the cost of the lives of several British agents. Footnote 41 tells us the report’s authors got it from a 1999 research paper for the European Parliament and — hold your breath, for this is dramatic — a 2001 PhD thesis at the University of Newcastle.

Thus it is “new” information . . . that is at least 7 years old. And that then begs another question: what sort of researchers are they? After all, they clearly didn’t even know they could easily have gotten far more up to date US national security info . . . from any recent copy of the NYT.

This blog intends to be ”A defeated US presidential candidate’s hilarious sense of humor“-free zone.  Welcome!

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A little while ago, feeling a need for some fresh intellectual insights, I thought it best to give any other Times’ combination sports writers/Weimar Republic experts a miss for a moment and decided instead to have a read of this month’s recently delivered Sky TV magazine. . .

Inside, British actor and TV host Denise Van Outen, who now lives in L.A., offered up this profound observation on Anglo-American difference (alas, there is no web link available): 

…My male British friends have told me that American women are really forward. Some of them are quite aggressive when it comes to getting their man, whereas American guys think I’m posh, which makes me laugh. They’re like: ‘God, you’re so British — say tomato.’ They’re easily pleased. It’s great. I just keep ordering tomatoes on dates, and they fall at my feet. That’s my tip for getting an American fella: order tomatoes…

Similarly, her manner of doing so, I grant you, can be truly spellbinding; indeed, her intonation and delivery is even more captivating when she suggests extras like “Besides the tomottos, on T-yous-day, we have to buy some tune-ah“.  But what actually got this “fella” about the then future wife was not so much her “way” with ordering tomatoes as much as her red hair, gorgeous blue eyes and nearly 5 ft 9 height.  Actually, come to think of it, considering all that, what the heck is the wife doing with me?