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seafan (1000+ posts) Wed Feb-06-08 05:06 PMOriginal message Britain is slithering down the road towards a police state Advertisements [?]Britain is slithering down the road towards a police stateUK GuardianSimon JenkinsFebruary 6, 2008The machine is out of control. Personal surveillance in Britain is so extensive that no democratic oversight is remotely plausible. Some 800 organisations, including the police, the revenue, local and central government, demanded (and almost always got) 253,000 intrusions on citizen privacy in the last recorded year, 2006. This is way beyond that of any other country in the free world.The Sadiq Khan affair has killed stone dead the thesis, beloved of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, that any accretion of power to the state is sustainable because ministers are in control. Whether this applies to phone tapping, bugging devices, ID cards, NHS records, childcare computer systems, video surveillance or detention without trial, it is simply a lie. Nobody can control this torrent of intrusion. Nobody can oversee a burst dam.Khan, an MP and government whip, was allegedly targeted by the police for having been a "civil rights lawyer" and thus a nuisance, though the recording of his meetings with a constituent in prison was supposedly directed at the inmate. Either way, the bugging destroyed the "Wilson doctrine", that MPs cannot be bugged. It appears that they can if ministers, or the police, so decide.Security machismo claims that in the "age of terrorism", real men bug everyone and everything......The grim reality of the past week alone is that it has seen a substantial section of the British establishment allowing itself to believe that private dealings between lawyer and client, and between MP and constituent, should no longer be considered immune from state surveillance. A cardinal principle of a free democracy is thus coolly abandoned. It is not a victory for national security. It is a victory for terrorism.The monitoring organisation Privacy International now gives Britain the worst record in Europe for such intrusion, indeed the worst among the so-called democratic world and on a par with "endemic surveillance societies", such as Russia and Singapore. .....A quarter of a million surveillances in Britain are beyond all power of politicians or overseers to check. It is state paranoia, justified only by that catch-all, the "war on terror". In truth it is not countering terror, but promoting it. Mass surveillances one of the poisons that the terrorist seeks to inject into the veins of civil society. ..... Of course there are people who want to explode bombs in Britain. Taxpayers spend a fortune trying to stop them. But how often must we remind ourselves that the bomber need not kill to achieve his end when we appease his yearning for the martyrdom of repression? The amount of surveillance in Britain is grotesque. It is a sign of the corruption of power, and nothing else.The far-reaching, malignant legacy of George W. Bush's War On Terror is, so far, unchecked.When will it be enough?
gateley (1000+ posts) Wed Feb-06-08 05:09 PMResponse to Original message 1. As are we.
katty (1000+ posts) Wed Feb-06-08 05:27 PMResponse to Original message 2. this has been growing in UK and here...my UK friends left London recently, (I haven't been there in a few yrs)they said it is big bro there - and u.s. is doing this as well - there is more country to cover in the u.s., so it may 'appear' to be slower.
You got off your ass, now get your wife off her back.
