I'm starting to worry, quite a lot, about the UK government and its plans for removal of privacy. I mean, first came RIP. Now, I did my bit to oppose that; I faxed my MP via stand.org.uk, and then again when I got the letter back from him, explaining my reservations and laying out the details of the Bill so that he'd hopefully see what the problem with it was. Did it work? Did it fuck. I got a response back saying that my words had been passed on to another MP (Oliver someone?), and the Oliver bloke wrote to me basically saying "Yeah, we in the Tory party, despite being in Opposition, agree with RIP." Hmph. Anyway, now there's this thing about the government getting access to medical records, in defiance of the Hippocratic Oath. It's worrying. Alan Moore wrote an essay called Behind The Painted Smile to go with collected editions of V For Vendetta (a dystopian view of a future fascist England), in which he describes exactly the sort of feelings I'm having now. "It's cold and it's dark and I don't like it here any more," it closed. I can see this sort of thing happening; bit by bit by bit, this government seems determined to remove the right to privacy. I don't see what I can do, either; I tried explaining things like RIP to people, when it was an extant issue rather than law. I've tried explaining the whole DVD/DeCSS thing (that's American, but the same principle). And people don't seem to care, and I feel like an arse who is obsessed with minority "geek" issues which are irrelevant to the populace. Sometimes I just feel like shouting "hello! Wake up! Do you want to live in the novel 1984?"
There's an NTK writeup on the MS/Apple collaboration here, written with 1984 imagery, which made me laugh at the time. Not sure I'd laugh as hard now, if I read it. The whole subject becomes less like a dystopia every day, and more like something I might wake up to one morning, and then it'll be too late.
This sort of thing is keeping me awake at night, and I don't like it. What can be done, anyway? I don't want to live anywhere else, but I'm starting to not like the feel of here.
England prevails.
© Aquarius, March 2001