How to defeat the Met's Paranoia Campaign
As previously discussed, the Metropolitan Police has launched a campaign, ostensibly under the guise of counter-terrorism, but with chilling implications for personal liberty. The negative effects on perfectly innocent photographers have already begun to be felt.
So, I thought to myself, what can we do to help stop this? Well, there are two main routes I can think of. First of all, raising awareness. This is a difficult one to sow in the minds of the general public, as they have been programmed to believe the rhetoric that if you’re innocent you have nothing to worry about; generally speaking, people won’t take any stand against these things unless it affects them directly.
The second route would be to make this campaign become an inefficient mechanism for its intended objective (which I don’t believe has anything to with terrorism, and has everything to do with giving the government yet more control over the populace, in line with the steady creep towards a police state masquerading as a free country).
And so it hit me; a way of accomplishing both of these goals at once. Simply encourage individuals to report people photographing in public whenever they can. Any instance of a person taking photographs in public should be reported, no matter how obviously benign (in fact, it would probably be best to deliberately report only those that are obviously benign, so as to spare the accused of harrassment). If the freephone number the Met advertises for this purpose is inundated with calls (which they then have to decide how to deal with) then their resources are tied up and the system will become effectively useless. Simultaneously, as the public begin to feel more (and rightly) intimidated for having the reasons they’re taking photographs cast under suspicion, the awareness of the draconian nature of this campaign will spread.
So, I encourage you to tell your friends about this: get them to report any public photography (a few people reporting members of the public taking photos at Alton Towers, say, would be a great start) by calling 0800 789 321 (an easy way of remembering the number on a keypad would be that it’s the bottom three, left to right, then the top three from right to left).