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“More than 90,000 people have signed an online petition calling for anyone convicted of taking part in the riots to lose benefits they get”
Thomas Hardy wrote a book of poems entitled “life’s little ironies”. He’d have seen the humour in an online petition that mobilised masses to take retributive actions.
After all aren’t Facebook, Blackberry Messenger and Twitter in the dock this morning as the means of organising the rioters in question!
Gilbert and Sullivan would have had a laugh to at the events in Clapham and Croydon on Monday night – The Pirates of Penzance”with catlike tread” stealing through the General’s Garden! In truth the Met were made to look every bit as inept by the looters as their Cornish cousins.
While the authorities may imply that the looters used underhand tactics by deploying their skills with mobile keyboards – isn’t it time to recognise that mobile communications have advanced from the walky-talky. Whether the police have the capacity to do anything with the information that Blackberry claim they will supply them with on”criminal activity” within their groups – I doubt.
If anything sums up the divisions between those in and those against authority on Monday night it was organisation.
The police static, the looters fluidly moving like a swarm of bees from shop to shop – guided by Sat Nav.
The police passive, looters, victims , journalists and everyday Jo’s actively engaged through every form of mobile device known to man.
The most looted and least protected shop in the high street – the mobile phone store.
I tell you what would really hurt the looters – mittens.
Related articles
- Riots: Meet the accused (thesun.co.uk)
- London Police to Arrest Tweeting Looters (readwriteweb.com)
- RIM’s BlackBerry: From the C-suite to the mean streets of U.K. riots (business.financialpost.com)
- FT: Plasma TVs top looters’ shopping list (anisekirkpatrick.wordpress.com)
- London riots: Close-knit neighbourhoods rally for their own defence (telegraph.co.uk)
- After Riots, London Crowdsources Cleanup, Identifying Looters (techland.time.com)
- Riots: Eyewitnesses Capture Violence On Film (news.sky.com)
- “I just want to show the rich I can do what I want” (henrytapper.com)
- UK Riots: Is Social Media a Key Facilitator, or Easy to Blame? (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
- Media Decoder: Riots Spread on Social Media, as Does the Cleanup (mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com)
- ‘It’s unbelievable BlackBerry Messenger hasn’t been shut down’ (textually.org)
- Petition to strip rioters of benefits (politics.ie)
- Rioters ‘should lose benefits’ (mirror.co.uk)
- Government Launches e-Petitions Website Guido Submits “Restoration of Capital Punishment” Petition (order-order.com)
- London Riots: 16,000 Police Take To Streets (news.sky.com)
