What is Drip ?

Drip stands for Data Retention and Investigatory Powers and critics are calling it yet another erosion of civil liberties.   A close, careful examination of the Drip bill's various clauses and sub-clauses reveals alarming consequences for the average Joe, namely these:
 ▶ You'll have to shout all your Google searches aloud while you type them. Under the bill, any citizen conducting a Google search will be required to simultaneously bellow every word they type at the top of their voice, loud enough for the neighbours to hear. Any neighbour who supplies the authorities with information leading to a conviction automatically wins an iPad Air. It's the cheapest, most comprehensive mass surveillance system ever designed.
 ▶ Every child born after August 2014 will, at birth, have one of its parents replaced by an undercover police officer. They won't know whether the rozzer is mummy or daddy. They will know that anything they say may be used in evidence against them.
 ▶ The only way to delete your own history will be to jump off a bridge. Which will have the side effect of deleting your own future, too.
 ▶ You'll have to email Theresa May asking permission each time you want to go to the toilet. Obviously, given the number of responses she'll be dealing with, there'll be a terrible backlog. But you'll just have to shit that out regardless three weeks later when your handwritten permit eventually arrives in the post.
 ▶ David Cameron can walk into your house and watch you sleeping whenever he wants.
 Seriously, thanks to the Drip bill he can do that now. So he does, nightly. He stands at the foot of your bed, shrouded in gloom, his glassy eyes glinting coldly in the midnight blue, twin machined pupils mercilessly trained on your slumbering form; his sentinel's glare drilling into your back, your shoulders, directly into the vulnerable side of your face as your head pivots uneasily on your pillow, your sleep disturbed by troublesome sensations, your dreams gradually infused with the bitter scent of a faraway fire, a smouldering pit of skull and bone. Slowly, you become aware of the mounting weight of a scream that has lasted for ever; here, now, enveloping you and the building entire. You jerk upright and snap on the light and, to your horror, he's there – he's really there. And, to your greater horror, he doesn't leave. Cameron merely stands there, unblinking, looking at you. Looking through you, past you, into the never. In a hundred years you may come to realise that time itself has frozen and this moment is all that's left, for eternity. But right now there's only howling. Your own demented, desperate howling. That's clause nine.