Our privacy rights are violated every day, but Kate and willyboy could care fuck all about it. But somehow the royal groupies here are all protective...this impacts all of us, they wail.
No, we are under surveillance every day, and you can do something about it by getting involved not in Katie's booby non-story, but with Big Brother watch and similar organisations that work to actually protect us.
The Chief Surveillance Commissioner's annual report shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking. These operations are now part of our nation's everyday life.
This surveillance isn't just being run by MI5 or the police, and it's not just mounted to detect serious crime or terrorism. Very real concerns about covert surveillance by local councils are dismissed by the commissioner with two cursory paragraphs, with the suggestion that the problem lies with the way that the media reports such surveillance. This really is a grave abrogation of his responsibilities. Big Brother Watch research shows that local councils approved and conducted over 8,500 separate covert surveillance operations in the last two years.
Surveillance has been used for everything from allegations of benefit fraud and fly-tipping to dog fouling and allegations of lying about which school catchment area you live in. For this, councils up and down the country empower their employees to watch and record us for days or sometimes weeks.
Not only has the media been reporting on a genuine concern, it is far more common and far more serious than the commissioner can bring himself to admit. He should be a champion of accountability in surveillance, not an apologist for it. After all, this is the body we depend on to bring responsibility to this area ? if he won't take such abuses seriously, who will?
Worst of all, the commissioner has revealed that after four years of his expensive endeavours the number of operations conducted in the past year that were unauthorised has gone up: there has been an increase in operations that broke the important and serious rules on covert surveillance and should never have happened. In last year's report he stated that he was happy that the appropriate disciplinary measures had been meted out in each such case. He gives no such assurance this year
These unauthorised operations were not only intrusive, but also often extensive - the longest lasted for 24 days. That's over three weeks of illegal surveillance by the state, of people against whom nothing at all has been proven, and have not even been charged, without any apparent repercussions for those who did it. Because the commissioner refuses to release any details of these unlawful operations, the victims of this outrageous intrusion will never know that they and their families were watched. In such circumstances it is not scaremongering but simply stating the obvious to say that it could have happened to you.