Surveillance

The farmer to whom we rent our field turned 34 young cattle into it today and whenever I went outside it seemed as if 68 eyes and ears were trained upon me, following my every move.

The nauseatingly complacent words of William Hague were still ringing in my ears, reassuring us that as law-abiding individuals going about our normal business we have nothing to fear from the US national security agency collecting data on all our electronic activities with the connivance of the British government.

So, we are reassured that Big Brother is totally benign and has our best interests at heart. We are not to recall that surveillance is a classic tool of oppression and control?    Not to worry that intelligence agencies are unaccountable?  Not to be concerned  that evidence can be deliberately manipulated to incriminate an innocent person,  or that humans and machines can simply get things wrong?

I was alerted to the latter fact just this morning  when I idly clicked on 'Statistics' on the blipfoto menu, then 'misc' - and found myself reading that I mention Doctor Who 152% more than the average journal. Wha-a-a-at?? To my certain knowledge I have never mentioned Doctor Who. There was a link to seven of my blips: each one included the word 'doctor' and maybe somewhere else the word 'who' but not even in consecutive order as in 'the doctor who...'

Obviously this is a million light years away in importance from the material Edward Snowden has so bravely made public but nevertheless it's  a slightly disturbing reminder  that information similarly garnered can easily become misinformation.
The assertion that I have mentioned Doctor Who 152% above average is totally false and presumably based upon some random collection of data that gives an erroneous conclusion. Come on blipfoto, even a cow could do better!