Britain Is Slithering Down the Road Towards a Police State
February 8th, 2008Via: Guardian:
The 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.
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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.
George Orwell was English. His “1984” is set in England. But deep down, I think the real motivation among the English is the opportunity to peep. It’s the country that gave the world the word “kinky.”