Spy cameras to ring 'muslim' area

Meant to write a quick something on this over the weekend. Quite aside the sheer affrontry of the idea - essentially placing a whole community under surveillance - it hasn't taken opponents long to see the fundamental flaw in this as in almost all such plans:

John Hemming, Birmingham Yardley's Liberal Democrat MP, said he could "only see negatives" in the scheme, which would collate data about thousands of law-abiding constituents, leaving criminals to evade police surveillance by "cloning their car or taking the bus". 

You really have to wonder about who comes up with ideas such as this. Not only is it likely to be ineffective in its intended purpose - because, like, terrorists hide and play tricksy and all that - it seems so certain to alienate exactly the communities you need on-side in order to properly deal with domestic terror threats that it's almost as if this was the intended purpose. How do organisations such as the Safer Birmingham Partnership think people are going to react to having their every road movement tracked 'for their own safety'. A better example of how not to improve relations between local communities and the security services I think you'd be hard put to find.

One more worrying point - the councillors involve claim they were tricked into believing that the cameras were mainly there to deal with vehicle crime and ASB. So it's OK to track every vehicle movement into and out of an area if the aim is to deal with graffiti, kids drinking on the streets and the odd fight? Jesus wept.