They Track Luggage, Don't They?

The war on privacy continues with a scheme to implant electronic tags under the skins of convicted paedophiles and sex offenders so that they can be released into the community and "create more space in British jails". Since our new Titanic jails will probably be run by private companies, the Government presumably does not wish to give its corporate friends the trouble of looking after anyone dangerous. "If we are prepared to track cars, why don't we track people?" demanded Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. The tags "are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage", and paedophiles and sex offenders are obviously much the same sort of thing. The idea is to use Global Positioning System technology to monitor offenders and thus prevent them going near places such as primary schools. Self-evidently, if a sex offender is prevented from going near primary schools but nevertheless feels inclined to indulge his illegal proclivities, he will find it utterly impossible to get a victim elsewhere; particularly as the Global Positioning System will only inform the defenders of our lifestyle about the position of the offenders (cars, dogs, cats, cattle, airport luggage), not about what they are doing. Still, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Ministry of Snoopery, Incarceration and Profits both seem to believe that this system of monitoring will work in the shadow of tall buildings, which a previous satellite tagging scheme did not.