A post by Pat

If you throw out your leftover fish in the U.K., the chips will know it. The latest from the land of CCT, surveillance drones, ID cards and the world’s largest DNA database — microchips in your trash can to keep track of how much you throw away.

Waste watchers? U.K. group deploys trash bin ‘spies’

It’s the new front in the nanny state: Microchips placed in garbage bins to monitor how much people throw away.

A pro-privacy group [Big Brother Watch] warns in a new report that more than 2.6 million of the chips have been surreptitiously installed in what is seen as a first step toward charging those who toss too much. Proponents say it’s a bid to push recycling. Opponents say it stinks.

A government official says the chips will be useful to reward people who reduce household trash. The program, according to the government, is intended to encourage recycling. Many people expect they will be fined for throwing away more than some bureaucratic allotment of trash.

The chips haven’t been activated yet. There’s a concern the program won’t be popular. Maybe because not everyone has gone balmy in the crumpet over there. When this kind of monitoring was tried in Ireland, people started to burn their garbage instead of throw it away. Only their garbage?

“It’s voluntary, not compulsory,” he said. “A compulsory plan would not work. We’ve managed to persuade the people of Bristol to participate in the recycling program. We want to encourage the people who aren’t using it to join in as well.”

The government’s ambitious information-gathering plans go still further. Security officials working on counterterrorism plans have lobbied for greater powers to track every e-mail, text, and phone call made in the U.K. The country already maintains an extensive DNA database that is, per capita, the largest in the world.

Come on Brits, how about getting a chip on your shoulder?

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7 Comments | Leave a comment
  1. Chris says:

    I used to want to visit the UK. No longer. This story fits right up there with those such as this: UK Actress warned by police that using a knife to protect herself in her own home is illegal

  2. LeJaeger says:

    Fortunately for the statists in charge over there, Brits are a flock of disarmed defenseless sheep. No way a country brimming with soccer hooligans and guns would take this crap. Your freedom may last a while, but ban the guns and inevitably you will have a freaking spy chip in the “bin”…I mean, what the hell are you going to do about it…mace them?

  3. larrygeary says:

    Two words: Duct tape.

  4. americanegoist says:

    If the people of Britain can allow their State to oversee their bodies through Nationalized Socialist Medicine, then personal trash monitoring is just one in a million “NEXT” steps. Its a -“why not ?”.

    This shows why criminalizing private health care in the US is such an important goal to the Left. It opens doors, windows, roadways, freeways, & whole giant chasms in the earth, for the Left to puruit other Statist goals. The Left also knows that “the right” has never shown the strength necessary to “reverse” course, but only to “delay”, or “temporarily stop” this regression back to the cave., and away from the enlightenment age our founders produced. Not that the fight against tyranny is not noble, its just we have been losing 90 % of battles against the Left for over a century now, in America. And this appears to be our last battlefield.

    In many ways, this is the way the world ends, in light of socialized medicines complete failures world wide, America, the greatest nation on Earth, and historically, the greatest enemy of tyranny and promoter of the Individual, ever to grace this Earth…is about to capitulate to that enemy, and if so, ends the founders enlightened age, not with a “bang”, but a “wimper”.

  5. thierry says:

    it’s like the part in “serial mom” where she wants to kill the woman who refuses to recycle her trash. oh how we laughed. now it’s near public policy.

    in england they already have cameras EVERYWHERE, invented a chef knife you can’t stab someone with and are very well on their way to sharia law. they’ll spend money on microchip technology to monitor trash and gather ‘ information’ but not on expensive surgeries for their citizens who get to give birth in hallways and rot in nursing homes rather than get their hips replaced.

    well, they are ruled by germans …. uncle willy and hitler would be right proud. sadly, during the whole eugenics craze of the late victorian era through actualization in the strictest sense of the term in nazi germany, it was the english, where the term eugenics was created, that refused to allow the legalization of forced sterilization of ‘ undesirables’ while the americans gleefully enacted laws to do it. even though such luminaries as churchill, hg wells and gb shaw were for eugenics laws, the politicians viewed such laws as the grossest violation of god given human rights and as ‘unlawful wounding’, refusing to pass legislation. now look at them- the neo-stalinists on a trash war against their people.

    years of socialization and the hopelessness it generates has created an england where political correctness and the global warming cults are the new eugenicists- tracking down the’ useless eaters’ and wasters and depriving them of all their political and human rights, sometimes their right to life under a rationing ,socialized health care system, because they are acting in a manner that does not advance the objectives of the collective, the borg.it’s been done in all the same ways the original sham science of eugenics was promoted-very rich people fund ‘ scientific studies’ and political agitators ( the rockerfeller inst. and the carnagie foundation in america among others for eugenics) to first collect information on those to be eliminated and co-relate them to their ‘ science’, then to wave this mass of paper filled with graphs written by doctors in front of politicians to force them to enact legislation- in the case of eugenics to sterilize and sometimes outright murder genetic’ ‘defectives’ , now it’s cap and trade, monitoring people’s trash and food intake, and death panels encoded and non-repealable in laws passed by congress.

    where is boudicea when you need her?

  6. RuBegonia says:

    Another NitWitBrit initiative – shatter-proof beer mugs to prevent drunken bar-goers from smashing them and using shards as weapons. See last line of follow-up article on this subject.

    • Chris says:

      In January, the government banned some drinking games and bar promotions in an attempt to cut back on binge drinking.

      Holy crap, Police State! I wonder if they will ban parents from telling their children the story of Humpty Dumpty soon, too, as it is sorta scary…

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