Hands up all Brits on here.
*hands*
Is it just me, or are we sleepwalking into a level of state intrusiveness in the UK that not even the Stasi could have countenanced?
You see, aside from the National Identity Register, 42 day detention, control orders, and so forth, there's an ongoing fetish - and has been since 1997 - to build gigantic databases with loads of information - usually of a personally sensitive variety - on it about everyone. Recently our Home Secretary Jacqui Smith proposed that we need a huge database of every e-mail, phone call, and web visit made by everyone, ever, in an attempt to fight terrorism. Or that we need a permanent record of every school leaver that tracks everything they did at school and all the time they appeared on Social Services' radar for whatever reason so they can be targetted for state intrusion.
I remember in 2007 a woman who had been suicidally depressed as a teenager had a child with her husband of several years and Social Services immediately swooped on her like Cowled Wizards on a marilith that appeared in the Bridge District and said that they were going to have the kid off her, since as a former depressive she posed a threat to it. The fact that it was all 20 years ago didn't cross their mind. Oh, and when she recorded the social worker in question and posted it on YouTube, the local council went into a massive dummy-spitting and threatened to sue them for invasion of privacy.
I also worry about the upcoming ban (from January 2009) on so-called "extreme pornography." Regardless of your moral viewpoint about such ongoings, is it really the business of the State to pontificate, ban, and incarcerate for three years for having the "wrong" filth on your laptop? Is it any of their business what people get up to and film, consensually, for theirs and others edification?
To be frank, the constant mantras that we all have to give up a little bit of freedom or personal information for our own good and so as not to be exploded by wild-eyed, bearded men with large rucksacks and 72 virgins on their mind, just don't wash. Unlike a lot of other countries in Europe and Northern America, we had been under siege in Britain constantly from the 1960s to 1998 by terrorists who were I. competent, II. properly funded, III. that the Americans were willing to sell guns to, and IV. that in 1984 came within six inches of wiping out the entire Cabinet. And we didn't need control orders or giant databases or detention without charge or constant surveillance to beat them, now, did we?
And the same applies to the protection of children. No, there are not paedophiles handing out in every corner of the Internet and in every park. Though I do think one laughable attempt by the Murdoch press to claim that terrorists were using kiddie porn to transmit secret messages (I wish I were making this up) was a bit of an overplayment of hand by the banstibators.
Unfortunately things are no better elsewhere. The French seem to be moving more towards mass surveillance and increased powers of intrusion for ticky-box bureaucrats, even though Nicolas Sarkozy promised in the 2007 election campaign that he'd move towards shrinking the sprawlingly inefficient French state. In Spain they've aggressively resurrected lése majesté. In Sweden they're moving to further impose a form of state-sanctioned morality on their people and aggressively surveilling them to check for breaches of this. In the US, the Republicans are demanding wire-tapping and Internet use logging for everyone, and the Democrats are crowing about how it's an invasion of privacy and unconstitutional but still voting for it because they don't want to be painted as "soft on terror."
In thirty years' time we'll probably be living in some sort of godawful cross between "1984" and "Neuromancer."
Now for your thoughts!