We Live in a Country in which Academics, not Police and Government, protect our Civil Liberties
30th May 2009 10:01:10
Let's be perfectly clear. We don't want to live in a country in which our attendance of work and school is logged and monitored to check our whereabouts. We don't want the ridiculous system of laws having to be enforced by our teachers and lecturers working as border guards. We don't want to require all foreigners to carry biometric identification. These are not the marks of a happy society.
University Lecturers are planning on boycotting the rules regarding snooping on their own students, and good for them. Adults can take care of their own lives, thankyou. If I sleep in and don't fancy attending classes, then that's my decision, I don't need an MI5 agent knocking down my door at 11 o'clock when I fail to turn up to Linear Algebra and carting me off to Guantanamo Bay.
You might think the previous sentence is a little silly. Of course, MI5 aren't going to actually knock down the doors of a Muslim student just because he fails to turn up for a lecture. That's just a daft overexaggeration, and I would probably have toned it down if I hadn't read last week about MI5's secret underhand blackmails and threats towards what appears to be a group of entirely innocent Muslim men.
It's hard to write things like this without sounding like a tinfoil-hat wearing nutjob, and that's what scares me. The truth is far worse than anything you could make up. Our own secret service threatening innocent men. Of course, we all remember Binyam Mohammed, a man imprisoned without charge for seven years and then released. And inbetween that "imprisoned" and "released" phase, there was a "being tortured" one.
Even worse than the George-Orwell-style state snooping is the state incompetance. It turns out that the Government has approved non-existant colleges to universities trying to do actual checks (i.e. academic, relevant ones) on their prospective students. It's facism and stupidity all rolled into one. Good going, Labour, and thanks to our University academics and lecturers, we can keep our lives private and off a state-sponsored database for just a little bit longer.
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