Tuesday 7 July 2015

Big Brother at Download

One of the difficulties of fatherhood is when your beloved youngster reaches an age when you can no longer tell them what to do. My daughter is aged twenty and a big rock music fan. Therefore when she went to the Download festival at Donington Park racetrack in Leicestershire a few weeks ago, see: http://downloadfestival.co.uk/ she made all the arrangements. My conspira-dar being what it is, I soon got wind of some suspicious goings on there. The use of a cashless system of purchase and sale for all transactions in the festival. This system only reached the mainstream news because it crashed. This should really be a lesson to anybody who thinks a cashless society at large is a good idea, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3119945/Chaos-Download-Festival-useless-new-cashless-payment-crashes-leaving-music-fans-unable-pay-food-drink.html. A security protocol that was tried out there involved facial recognition systems. In my view it's likely that all the festival attendees had their features stored on the database, see: http://rt.com/uk/267250-biometric-cameras-festivals-privacy/. This includes my daughter. If she were a few years younger I could of course complain to the organizers and hit them with a FOIA to get the information about her removed, but she's an adult now and only she can do that. She does not want to; she does not share my ideas unfortunately. She calls what I do "that David Icke stuff!" This is a generic name for everything I do on HPANWO; it doesn't matter if I really refer to David Icke or not. She objected at the age of ten when I stopped the school from fingerprinting her; see background links below. I warned her about what was going on at Download, but she didn't care. I suspect that the festival was used as a trial for methods to run a global permanent Big Brother state.

3 comments:

Laurence said...

As a matter of interest Ben, what do you do when you leave the UK by plane? When I fly out of England from Ireland my retina is scanned, which nowadays is used instead of a passport check? Not that I am happy about but this being Ireland, the 51st State of the United States, and as such we go along with everything are betters tell us, I don't have much choice except set sail in a currach.

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Laurence. I've not been outside the UK since 2001 when I went to Ireland actually. I have destroyed my passport in protest, along with all my other documents of citizenship. The fact that your eyes are scanned just goes to show how bad things have got since then. I never even had to show my passport going to Ireland and even when I went to Australia a few moths earlier I just needed the passport and visa alone.

Laurence said...

Good on you Ben, a very principled stance. In a way you are fortunate to lead a simpler type of life in regard to travel - you're not missing much. What is more, the eye scanning and alarmist security control is soul destroying, that is for anyone with a modicum of discernment, which is in short supply these days, unfortunately.