The room smelt of not having been smoked in - Ronald Knox
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Quixotic conservative barks at databases
THE MAN WHO has led the Conservative campaign against the UK's identity cards, CCTV cameras and nosey databases has bet his career on beating the government on the "surveillance state" issue.
David Davis, until yesterday the Conservative shadow home secretary, will be fighting for re-election to his incumbent seat in Haltemprice and Howden. Haltemprice, roughly speaking, means quixotic.
Davis has crusaded against the clammy clutches of Britain's emerging surveillance state for five years. The straw that broke his donkey's back was the governments plan to lock people up in jail for 42 days if it suspected them of being terrorists but didn't have enough evidence to charge them with an offence.
In his resignation speech yesterday, Davis said: "We will have shortly the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it."
He lambasted the government for laying the foundations of a "database state" , "opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers".
In 2006, Davis vowed that the Tories would scrap identity cards if they came to power. But the party has been less specific about the inbred government databases that form the backbone of the government's ID system. The data sharing windmill is spinning fast and is guarded by men with big guns.
The No2ID campaign group was enthusiastic about Davis' campaign. Davis has outlasted three Home Secretaries while in the shadow cabinet, all of whom had a part to play in getting the identity scheme up and running and all of whom are now sitting on the back benches.
Phil Booth, No2ID's national co-ordinator, said the government should get one of its ex-Home Secretaries to stand down to face Davis in his by-election. But neither Labour nor the Liberal Democrats are thought to be fielding candidates. Former Sun editor kelvin MacKenzie could be facing him on a reactionary, right-wing tabloid ticket. ยต
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Funny, but I lived the past decade at least under the assumption that the database state exists live and well and there is no going back. Privacy? What privacy. Then, with my encounters with official Norway, doctors say, they always seem to ask me for some piece of paper, which is in a database, and I go to these other people, and they print it out of their database, and gives it to me, and then I go to the first person and he types the information into his databse.

Connecting these databases and then deepmining the data will provide a very powerful surveillance tool, and I have always assumed in secret this has already happened. And they're just pretending it hasn't. And they won't disclose the power of this to us mere mortal citizens, we get no benefit, we get to run around with pieces of paper -no doubt made from dead rainforests.

A conspiracy theory. Sure. I know. Silly isn't it?
Newcastle Brown can sure smack you down 
Take it easy Tory on a rollin' dance floor 
It's got your head spinnin' round 
If you live on the road, well there's a new highway code 
You take the urban noise with some Turban Poison
It's gonna lessen your load 

42 days in the hole 
That's what they give you now 
42 days in the hole 
Oh, yeah 
42 days in the hole 
All right, all right 
42 days in the hole 

You know it's so hard Labour to please