Because even when your personal liberties are continually brutalised in the real world Orwellian dystopia that exists outside your front door, hollow platitudes still count for something and will somehow make it all right:

[Yfrog]

The neighbour’s cat is squatting amongst your prize begonias. The wife is enjoying a little extra-curricular yankee-doodle with a co-worker. Your boss is illegally dumping radioactive chemicals of some sort and knowingly poisoning school children. One of these situations is true, but which one? Without some hard proof, all you’ve got is a hunch and a wife with a headache she’s had since September.

No longer. What you need is a little covert surveillance, and that’s where the Swann PenCam comes into play:

It’s a real ballpoint pen, that also happens to house a 2GB hard drive and a re-chargable battery which lasts up to three hours. Simply leave it lying around the scene of the suspected crime, and you can record several hours worth of video to satisfy your curiosity. If nothing else, you can pretend to be a spy and sleep with pert 20-something year old sex-kittens before they’re drowned in oil by a maniacal crime syndicate. All for just £99.99. Bargain.

[Maplin]

The pissed-off members of Open Rights Group and No2ID put together an Orwellian collage of Gordon Brown in Parliament Square this morning. The collage was made from pictures of CCTV cameras and other surveillance ephemera taken by the group members.
(more…)