..good.
The sanctimonious bitteratti re-emerges in tonight's Standard with the now tired quote from Martin Niemoller. Powerful in its time, Niemoller's vision of the individual standing aside while minority groups are abused had been diluted by the casual repetition by the patronising liberal elite. And Gilligan.
Tonight he is after the collection and collation of information from electronic sources that will allow data mining. Gilligan makes so many errors of judgement in his article - nothing new there - in his desire to unleash another assault on Labour that they are hardly worth commenting upon.
Two points, however, seem worth a second look. Firstly that the collation of electronic information is OK to fight terrorism, but not organized crime. Presumably unless it is your child who is abused by an international paedophile gang. This seems to me to be just wrong headed. If the information is availble then it is resource allocation which drives the priorities not some middle class intellectualisation of personal freedom. If they've caught the terrorists, get after the litter louts say I.
The second point is how to handle the data. Gilligan claims that would just make a bigger haystack in which to find the needle. No wonder people ask themselves what is the point after talking to Mr G.
What Gilligan utterly fails to appreciate or acknowledge is that these haystacks already exist and may be the repository of the missing needle.
I should probably give a brief mention to the third of these two points. Giligan says terrorism is on the wane, not many people are killed anyhow, and in any event most of it happens outside of the civilized west, and you are more likely to die in hospital. There is clearly a rational debate that could be held here but frankly I can't be arsed.
Gilligan, you are a mind-numbing twat.
Oh, but I did enjoy the one comment that "a million leylandii hedges testify how strongly we feel about privacy." That would be only when you don't have a chainsaw to hand.
