Big Brother is watching your cat

A CCTV manufacturer wants to atone for the damage its Orwellian snooping solutions have done to our civil liberties….. by bringing us pictures of kittens.

Vemotion, which empowered Britain's couch potatoes with a frame by frame account of the fascinating events in the Big Brother household, has also provided traffic and people monitoring systems to the nation's desktop policemen.

Britain is the most spied upon nation in the world. Around 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras are installed on Britain's streets, though it has less than one per cent of the world's population. British author George Orwell predicted how the erosion of civil liberties could be achieved by stealth, in his novels Animal Farm and 1984.

But it's not all ruthless oppression. There was one aspect of totalitarianism he didn't see coming. Real time kitten monitoring, on mobile phones.

Yes, that's right, while you sit on the train, or in the queue to pay your latest parking fine, you can view cute little pussy cats, frolicking in a cat sanctuary, in real time.

It's a service provided by audio visual mob Vemotion, whose Qeeps service pipes any CCTV footage onto your mobile phone.

The kitten footage, beamed from an anonymous west yorkshire cat sanctuary, is a charity fundraiser. By sending a text, you can ensure your cat gets stroked. The money you pay for issuing this texted command goes to charity.

Meanwhile, Vemotion has another socially useful application planned. It's going to constantly film a recycling bin. At the end of the week, the footage of the bin will be played on a continuous loop, for a random amount of time, then stopped. The recycling citizen that's in the frame, when the film stops, gets to win a large cash prize.

That's the plan anyway. They haven't found a council yet that would want to reward people. Who needs a carrot, when you've got a big stick? µ