Blair Calls for Chinese Style Net Controls

[Wokeman]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2007/120607Blair_media.htm

[Sherlock Holmes]

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/74061/Blair_Calls_For_Chinese_Style _Net_Controls_in_The_uk

by Steve Watson.

Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair has savaged online media today in a speech in which he declared war on the free press by hinting at new restrictions on internet journalism and suggested that the media should be brought more into line with the government.

Blair complained that the media was too "feral" (i.e. not tamed by the government) and referring to online journalism stated:

"In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five."

This is an outright call for a crackdown on the free press. Blair is out in the open here saying the media is too independent of the government, he is admitting that the freedom with which the media, especially online, is now operating is hurting his government and its agenda.

Despite the fact that it is the government itself that has consistently lied to and refused to listen to the British people, Blair blamed the media for an undermining of trust in the government amongst the people and further accused the media of being responsible for a moral downturn in Britain.

"The damage saps the country's confidence and self-belief; it undermines its assessment of itself, its institutions; and above all, it reduces our capacity to take the right decisions, in the right spirit for our future.'' Blair stated.

This is rich given the fact that when New Labour came into power in 1997 Blair's government quickly became masters of spin, using the media as a tool of hype to whip up a frenzy of positive attention towards itself.

Blair even admitted that his government readily did this and is to blame for what he now sees as a brutal backlash:

''We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media ....such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question.'' Blair stated.

So there you have it, the government used and spat out the media and now it doesn't like the fact that it is no longer trusted and is scrutinized as if under a microscope, especially by the independent and online media which does not pander to corporate masters.

Therefore Blair's solution is to bring in an online journalism regulator to decide what is "balanced" reporting and what is not. Such a move is exactly the kind of thing that has been witnessed in Communist China in an effort to crackdown on criticism of the government there.

Blair has recently been under the media microscope concerning the BAE cover up over Saudi arms dealing. Before that he was subject to scrutiny and twice questioned by police over the cash for honours scandal where peerages were handed out by the government in exchange for financial favours. No doubt these are the kind of "conspiracy theories" Mr Blair wishes the media to be unable to cover, along with the scores of lies he told in the lead up to the Iraq war.

Blair can whine and whine all day long but the fact is it is the openness with which his government has conducted its criminal actions and its own attempts to use the free press as a propaganda arm that has led to a surge in media scrutiny.

There is nothing he nor his elite masters can do to win this battle save shutting down the internet and free speech completely and risking revolution.

[karlos]

Tony Blair has turned Britain into a land where we are all prisoners

CHRIS ATKINS
UK Daily Mail
Wednesday June 13, 2007

Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

Although he famously coined the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you', even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.

Today, in Tony Blair's Britain - which I naively voted into power ten years ago - we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.

The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.

Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences - taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.

Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras - a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people's hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent

How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.

I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.

First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.

And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.

In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people - none of whom was a terrorist.

But this is only the thin end of the wedge - our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.

There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state - but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.

We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.

The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.

Ministers are even creating a children's database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.

And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 - to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data - your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.

And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras - 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world's population.

New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.

All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.

There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored - as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.

Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there's no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won't use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes - but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

We are told that this is all for the good - these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.

The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV - of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.

Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.

In any case, liberty and security aren't balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people's basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.

After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?

Stop and search laws applied to Britain's Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.

It's not all doom and gloom, of course - as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.

But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.

Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.

[redkop]

first class article,i think it is about time that the country has to refuse to vote until the provision for "i dont wish to vote for any of the above" is placed on the ballot paper. I also think a social refusal to co-operate with this platform of spying that Bliar and co have drip fed the people of this nation.

[jason67]

I have just moved to Italy from London to get away from this kind of s**t.
But, having just gone into an internet cafe to check my emails and this site i was told that i need to produce my passport!
When I asked why they said that its now the law so that they can track terrorists.

[rodin]

[rodin]

deleted double post

[rodin]

[uselesseater]

This is absolutely outrageous!

I can't believe the casual nature in which he announces this openly fascist move.

It seems to have been ignored a bit though.