SSSSHHH! Don’t tell anyone, but I am sure I’m being bugged and I wouldn’t like the security services to know I know that they know what I know.
There is a clicking noise on the telephone and an unmarked white van parked down the road where no doubt my conversations are being recorded. I am aware of a faint whirring in my front room, which will be a miniature TV camera and microphone so carefully hidden I can’t find it.
Damn clever, these people.
Knowing my every move outside is covered by CCTV on street corners, roads, shops, public buildings and car parks – with the pictures being instantly relayed to a central control point – I put on my sunglasses and turn up the collar of my mac. Two can play at this game.
I set off to do some research and it transpires the telephones of more than 1,000 people are tapped each day by any of 654 state bodies that have the power to do so.
Recently, it was revealed even an MP has been bugged by the secret squirrels.
So I go over and over in my mind what they have learned from my private conversations.
I realise I have been getting a lot of calls around tea time from mysterious Asian sounding people who pretend to have English names. That could make me a suspect.
One only yesterday said: “My name is Beryl. Are you interested in a mortgage.”
And I replied: “No, I do not wish to have that product, thank you.”
Did MI5 believe that to be one of those exchanges by which spies identify each other?
My mother rang. She’s not so good and I may have made some flippant – careless? – remark about doctors, their hours and pay. But surely I am still allowed, aren’t I?
She mentioned her neighbour, Irene, was upset because the council hadn’t cut her hedge, what her with her legs and all it was a disgrace and I said, tch, councils they’re all a waste of time.
I shouldn’t have been so outspoken as it would all be logged at GCHQ by now.
Do the council know I have located and removed the bug they planted in my wheelie bin? Am I a dangerous rebel in their eyes?
In our surveillance society we are the spied-upon, they are the spies; we are the bug-ees and they are the bug-ers. But don’t tell anyone I said that. And if someone asks, you haven’t seen me.
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