"I am going to tell you something, and if you put it in your blog, the powers that be will bump you off". I've reached the point where I am past caring. If I get hit by a number nine bus, or fall out of the 13th floor of a hospital window in the next few weeks, then you'll know that I was foolish. About 2-3 years after I started writing the blog, I was given some 'friendly' advice by an acquaintance. It wasn't a threat. It wasn't a challenge. It was delivered with the bored indifference of someone who has told a lot of people something they don't want to know and who is sensible enough to know that direct threats are not very productive when dealing with people who by nature are risk takers.
Over a friendly beer, I was asked, out of the blue "What exactly do you hope to achieve by writing your blog". At the time, it was at the forefront of a campaign against several companies, who specialise in outsourcing and supply a lot systems, etc for a lot of rather shady parts of the government. I was well aware of this work, but my assumption was that such large companies have chinese walls between different departments. My answer to the question was quite simple "I think people have a right to know what is going on with their hard earned taxes". He replied "Do you really think if the British people were interested in knowing anything, The Sun would be the best selling paper". That was a reasonable point, but I pointed out that with zero advertising and purely by word of mouth, the blog had built a massive hyper local readership. It had also inspired a bunch of other locals to try and do the same.
He said something that to this day, I am not entirely sure of the meaning of. He said "Yes and there are some very powerful this people who are rather disturbed by it". I was quite taken aback. I could understand that people in Barnet Council and the local Tories may be a bit fed up with the attention, but nothing any of us was writing was dangerous, dishonest or fomenting insurrection. So I said "Why would any powerful people be in the least bit bothered about what is happening in the London Borough of Barnet?". His answer was rather difficult "You and your friends are starting to lift up rather too many stones to see what is under them, it could all get out of hand. We'll leave it there".
Rather oddly, my acquaintance met a strange, difficult and unusual end a few weeks later. At his funeral, someone I didn't know asked me what he had been discussing with me. I was shocked that someone I had never met should even be aware that we had been having a conversation. I played dumb and said "To be honest he was talking about lifting up stones, but I didn't have a clue what he was getting at". I made a guess that he had some idea. His response was chilling "This whole business is rather unfortunate, things like this shouldn't have to happen". And walked off.
To this day, I've never been quite sure what it was all about. Had he been giving me a friendly warning and upset someone? Was I just being paranoid? Of course what happened was unfortunate and things like that shouldn't happen. He had a very strange accident that I was not entirely sure of whether it was an accident at all. I genuienly don't believe it was anything to do with our conversation, but it was all rather odd. A few years later, I was talking to a friend who had a friend who had been investigating deaths of MOD workers for Computer Weekly. He asked if I was aware of the scandal. I wasn't. It seems that a rather large number of MOD IT workers had met strange and bizarre deaths. He asked if I'd be interested in meeting up with said individual and comparing notes. As I had no information of any use to such an individual and doubted they knew much about Barnet politics, I didn't see the point. My friend was unaware of the strange encounter and subsequent events. I link them, so I declined. I had enough on my plate.
A couple of years after that, I was at a function and I got chatting with a data journalist. I told her that I wrote this blog. She was rather surprised. She was well aware of the Barnet bloggers and our activities. I asked why she seemed so surprised. She said "Oh, I read a lot of your blogs, I thought you'd be a real geeky nerd". I replied "Sorry to disappoint you". She then said "You realise that a few people in high places were rather disturbed by yiour activities?". I said "I was aware that Eric Pickles liked us". She said, yes but when you have a lot of rather obsessive, highly motivated people digging up everything they can about companies that supply systems at the heart of government, there is a lot of scope for things to go wrong". It is very easy to put two and two together and to make five, but I immediately thought about the conversation with my acquantance, then the conversation with the mate of the Computer Weekly journalist. We were digging around Capita and BT who were big suppliers of systems for government. Now we weren't interested in their activities for central government, but when you start to join the dots and see the bigger picture, sometimes find an image that might scare you to death. Now none of us had anything other than information that was widely available online. I personally didn't see anything that was particularly sinister beyond a rather awful company taking taxpayers to the cleaners, but there were all sorts of information chains, leading away from Barnet, which had we followed them, heaven only knows where they lead.
I had been given some 'inside information' in regards to the Barnet contracts and processes, as I am sure my fellow bloggers had, but we were looking for things in Barnet, not in Capita's other government contracts, so if I had something 'dangerous' I may well have not recognised it. Could it really be that the most dangerous secret in the world is out there in clear sight, just waiting for people to join the dots? So I asked her and explained about my acquaintance. She laughed and said "In actual fact, I think the powers that be would have been far more worried about the fact that you were bothering to dig and that people were paying attention than anything you might have found. People don't read newspapers to get informed or learn. They buy them to have their opinions and prejuduces vindicated. The concept that ordinary people might find real news from their peers interesting is a very dangerous concept".
By chance, over the weekend I bumped into her again. We were chatting about how the world has changed. When I started writing the blog, the concept of ordinary people sharing opinions and setting the news agenda was a novel one. That was why this blog garnered such a large readership. She explained that Twitter/X has destroyed the concept, not by suppressing information but by swamping us all in the opinions of every one. What is worse is we create our own little information bubbles. You can find out anything you want on X but the way it works is that you are pretty much sure to be wearing your own favourite tint of rose tinted spectacles. Even worse, Elon Musk has persuaded us that his AI bot Grok is the ultimate in trusted source fact checkers. If some dodgy part of government wants to bury a difficult fact, what better way than to release it and persuasde Grok that it is facke news.
The most dangerous secret in the world is there, right before your eyes. People don't need to get thrown under buses to suppress it. We just need Grok (other AI platforms are available) to tell us that what we are seeing isn't true and we'll believe it. If I was paranoid, I'd believe that Grok took a dislike to my cynicism of Musk/Twitter/X and that was why my account got closed, even though they tell me its open. But I am not paranoid and to be honest, I am quite enjoying not having to wade throuugh all the mindnumbing drivel X was dishing up. I just wish a few more people would write blogs these days!
Going back to how I began the blog "I am going to tell you something, and if you put it in your blog, the powers that be will bump you off" - No one says that anymore, they don't have to!
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