There are times ...

when I am heartily glad that I'm not driving.


As in when I read the story by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing on 21 April.


He says:

Personal info from UK traffic cams open to the US government
You know all those traffic-cams throughout the UK that capture your license-plate and correlate it with your identity? The British coppers have found a spirit of
sharing and will hand over their data to pretty much anyone:
.... .....
Home Secretary Smith failed to mention the exception in a statement she made to Parliament less than two weeks later on July 17, 2007 outlining Metropolitan Police exemptions to the 1998 Data Protection Act.
Link (Thanks, Brady!)

Read in full and be frightened! There is absolutely no way I'm going to be the only one worried by this.

"All it needs for evil to flourish is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke

But one does feel helpless, and hopeless when faced with this sort of thing. So is "do nothing" the best option? Is what is happening "evil"? Those are philosophical questions that can be debated until the end of time but it seems that the function creep of some of our laws is getting worse. The Freedom of Information Act has helped uncover some unsavoury practices but you need to know the questions to ask, and that only provides you with information not remedy.