Certainly the police in the UK and the US seems to have lost a lot of trust, to the point that recorded evidence (like the CCTV tape at the shooting of Jean Charles de Menenez?) goes missing and it seems that criminal cases such as the one against PC Simon Harwood who assaulted and most likely killed Ian Tomlinson at the London G20 get intentionally buried and stonewalled – justice is not being done.

But the main evidence in the Ian Tomlinson case was video; the police know this and are trying to get people to not record them, even using privacy laws in a totally incorrect manner (police operating in a public space cannot have an expectation of privacy!), as in the Graber case in the US above …but without say the Rodney King footage, or the BART killing of Oscar Grant by Johannes Mehserle, or the Ian Tomlinson footage – who watches the watchers?

My thoughts are this – if we had video or photographs in the case of Blair Peach, some justice or at least identification of who killed him from the SPG (who became TSG eventually) might have been proven (although it is admitted they killed him, but as the other police officers are lying to protect their comrades 31 years later Blair will probably never going to have justice). Its pretty well known it’s most likely Officer E who is Alan Murray, apparently you can kill someone as a police officer (or lie about who actually did) and get a comfy gig as a lecturer in Corporate Responsibility at Sheffield University. I wonder why the students there don’t care? Certainly in my days at Sheffield Hallam they’d be protests and meetings).

The Graber footage is less than ideal; the person was acting in an infantile and dangerous manner pulling wheelies at high speed, and the muted audio…but the 16 years threatened jail time for recording a police officer (accidentally it seems, unless he was planning a confrontation with the law which I doubt) is extreme and brings up problems with expectation of privacy laws being used to protect police and state from monitoring. Also worrying is the trend of not indentifying yourself; that cop was lucky Graber didn’t also pull a gun faced with a unmarked car and unidentified policeman with a gun (it has happened in the past policemen have been shot and killed when plain clothed and unidentified even by their own force) – which follows through to the UK hiding of badges, or the plain clothed SO12 officers who lied about indentifying themselves to Jean Charles de Menenez before they shot him.

And with the battle over FITWATCH (I note that the police are failing to prove that Forward Intelligence Team surveillance of protesters – peaceful or otherwise, thus putting them all into the ‘suspected’ category and inhibiting protest – is lawful) there is a ‘them vs us’ attitude that the police and the state are allowed to film and monitor us – but to do same means you get kept without charge for days, brutally hog tied, abused or insulted, or told that ‘you can’t film here’ which is wrong unless it’s private property. But if the watchers have nothing to hide why are they so scared of being filmed? Is it like with the removal of shoulder badges, or indeed jumping out of an unmarked car, you start to wonder what are they hiding – and why should they hide it if they are indeed the bastions of law they pertain to be?

And for those who say ‘one bad apple’, in the Met and especially Territorial Support Group there seems to be an orchard full…a gang mentality produces a gang response, and in the violent G20 and Climate Camp footage, harassing photographers, journalists, protesters, hiding evidence and not grassing their ‘bruvs’ seems to be nothing more than the SW1 New Scotland Blue Bovver Boys to me.

I’ve posted about them before (their excellent and funny Canary Wharf video I think as part of their ‘Everything is OK’ series) but I love how Charlie and co. deal with the Fake Bacon (aka Hobby Bobbies, aka PCSOs). They really do seem to be a menace, as they pop up a lot in Section 44 mistakes. Love the comment about the Louis 14th beard, and it seems that even at the end the PCSO is smiling…

And here as posted on Boing Boing and other places how they deal with a Section 44 stop and search – politely, firmly, funnily and also with love…but also with all their rights intact. Shame the police haven’t been so respectful in recent shocking cases of art-school students being arrested,  forcefully detained and fined for taking pictures of buildings for their work, journalists being stopped for taking pictures of the Gherkin, filmmakers getting detained for filming their partner’s questioning on a mobile and a man getting arrested for filming Christmas.

More about The Love Police, and the disturbing State of the Nation in Britain which is getting more and more like V for Vendetta and 1984 for my liking. Sadly the ending cuts out but you get the drift.

Chasing Shadows from Charles Veitch on Vimeo.

And remember: don’t be afraid, humour is the best Weapon of Mass Destruction And resist. Nicely.

Well those in the UK are – and should be concerned because Orwell’s predictions (and even Alan Moore’s in V for Vendetta) are seemingly comng true. With The Fear this time being terrorism – despite a terrorist attack happening last nearly 4 years ago – they are clamping down on a variety of things. They might seem small, even trivial – but the right to photograph protests, or anything you like in a street – have already been eroded, and if they think you might be a terrorist however spurious they can lock you up for a long time – stop me if you can see the way this can be politically used to oppress people?

And if they take any DNA off you, they can store it in their beloved police database against EU law:

And now with the new Coroners and Justice Bill the State want the right to use that information, or any other information they collect however spuriously for anything they like and use it for something else – as Boing Boing put it:

Clause 152 allows any Minister to take any information gathered for any purpose and use it for any other purpose

So now councils can spy on you to see if you’re emptying the bins correctly (ooh you terrorist) you can guarantee this clause WILL be misused, whatever they say – they said that about the anti-terrorism laws and there is a mounting pile of abuses that go FAR against the intention of that law and with all this CCTV, DNA databases and soon to be ID cards, we have become the most snooped country in Europe, if not the whole world.

What can you do? Well those in the UK can write to your MP – no don’t yawn and switch off it’s REALLY PISS EASY, I mean a muppet like me could do it, so can you – I did it and got results and a shiny letter from Glenda Jackson AND a big warm feeling that I had actually DONE SOMETHING – so can you. You can do it by email via WriteToThem and takes a few minutes. And you can join this Facebook group. – publicise, Twitter about this, bother friends, talk, phone – get the word out.

That’s not hard is it? Or are you going to be the kind of stupid person that Pastor Niemoeller wrote about? These are YOUR laws, if you just sit there eating your grub and shrugging then don’t moan at me when they come through your door.

Also word to my pirate radio bruvs (and gals out there – they’ve just raided about 30 of them in the UK and shut them down, heard via John. Keep going, keep the faith, don’t let em win. And that bullshit about emergency frequencies – they still using that as an excuse? As a former frequency scanner and radio geek, I can tell you the ambulance and other systems moved to higher frequencies from publically accessible radio waves (ie. on your dial) back in the 80′s – they use special frequencies with digital encoded systems for the ambulances, and obviously the police realised being listenable on a normal radio wasn’t really a good idea, so they did too. So I don’t see how the pirates could affect this unless some faulty transmitter is sidebanding. I call bullshit on that until I hear otherwise.

You see what I mean? It’s easy to shout fire in a crowded theatre, but since before Gordon Brown and that Weapon of Mass Distraction called a war where they ignored us, politically things have been shifted to make a whole bunch of people seem they are a potential threat, rather than the necessary watchguard (and yes the watchers?) to try and keep an increasingly distant and corrupt set of politicians accountable…ignorance and apathy just gives them the power to eventually really fuck up your day (or life).

This current state of affairs is really bugging me, there is a real danger we are going down the path of 1984 – you may scoff but do some research about what laws have been passed recently – and it will chill your blood.

If you’ve not tuned into Rise and Shine, so far you’ve missed ladies made of Magma saving Christmas, missing cats, Paris goes to Belgium in a currently very fashionable Italian Euro Disco vocoder stylee and a punk Santa breakin’ the law, well internet tubes – with yours truly on sleighbells!

Quite interesting seeing/hearing the songs develop by the guest songwriters and video & chat contributors, they are moulded (or maybe forged in the heat of battle over 3 hours from 7pm to 10pm until Christmas Eve.

New songs will appear here:

And don’t forget to chip in for charity here:

A lot has been written about Radiohead’s ‘radical’ policy with ‘In Rainbows’ last year, letting the fans pay what they like. It seemed like a bold move at the time , if not original. Trent Reznor and others had done it first – but it was interesting because Radiohead were at the time such a big former major label industry mainstream band, as much as they like to pretend otherwise.

In fact, it turns out according to their record label’s Head of Business Affairs if the fans had paid too little they’d have pulled the plug well before that:

Instead Dyball points to the fact that the band and their management never announced a timeline for the pay-what-you-like experiment and were watching the average price daily with a view to potentially withdrawing it any moment should it drop too low. Dyball points out that the average price went down after the download moved from uberfans to less committed fans, as expected.

Maybe not so radical then? Really if you’re going to make bold artistic statements intending to be a radical shakeup of the music industry and put good faith of your fans to the fore, you don’t keep a hand on the ‘off’ switch. That suggests an insecure strategy, and could have backfired for Radiohead, instead they made more money than before…then signed back to another major label to release the album physically. And then pulled the free copies just before that was released.

One positive thing, like the examples of online books given away bumping sales of present and future hard copies, that the industry will take note and this will happen more often – embracing the ‘free’ and thinking long term about how people are exposed to music and trusting them more, rather than the siege mentality that has gone before.

Yet all this supports an arcane and overblown system that has resisted change by criminalising a victimless crime of downloading and going after 12 year old kids and people who didn’t even have a computer to download with! And with this new ISP law, I can see this getting quite ugly…

So remember: revolution this is not.

(xkcd)