UK police goes DDR

Speaking of eerie remnants of the DDR, the UK police seem hellbent on creating an informer society based on the same principles: If you believe your neighbours are behaving in a non-comforming way, report it to the police. Combined with the CCTV insanity going in there we've got pretty much a modern day DDR. A country where surveillance and informants make everyone a suspect:

The ad was part of a campaign for a police anti-terrorist hotline. It described a man who "likes to keep himself to himself", doesn't have a bank card and keeps his curtains closed, before advising that "this may mean nothing, but together it could all add up to you having suspicions".

You'd better not be a loner who doesn't like his neighbours peeking through the windows. If, in addition, you usually rely on cash rather than credit card, you're a potential terrorist.

This is the United Kingdom. This is 2010. For fucks sake.

Life behind the iron curtain

I woke up today and realized I'm living in DDR. Who would have thought, on that fateful day in 1989, that the fall of the Berlin wall, and the fall of the iron curtain, would in fact not export democracy and freedom to the east, but rather oppression and surveillance to the west? Who could have imagined that in Sweden in 2009 one would have to meet in secret places, talk quietly and constantly look over one's shoulder in order to stay out of the prying eyes and ears of the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit"?

I sure as hell didn't.

How to introduce a DDR regime

This is how the FRA act (or the Stasi act, as it would have been called in the good old DDR) was passed in Sweden. I highly doubt this exercise in terror and threats will have a positive impact for the Moderate Party, Moderaterna, in the 2010 elections, as Fredrik Reinfeldt seems to believe.

This is why

If anyone is still wondering why Piratpartiet, The Pirate Party, got 7,1 percent of the votes in this weekend's EU elections, and why they are so desperately needed in the EU, here's your answer. And here.

The well established political parties are simply too stupid, ignorant and/or well paid by the entertainment industry (who spend 900 million SEK a year "lobbying" and suing dead grandmothers and bullying minors instead of developing new and sustainable business models) to care about the fact that the bills they're passing are colliding heads on with basic rights that we're used to in this part of the world, at least after the fall of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, and that many, thank God, refuse to give up without a fight.

My guess is that England and France will have their own pirate parties, or civil liberty parties if you will, taking several seats in the EU parliament after the next election, and working for the basic rights and liberties that the old parties are dismantling in an absolutely unbelievable attempt to increase the profit of an industry unwilling to adapt to the modern times.