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No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance
UpnAtom writes "People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they've claimed, and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to — will be denied passports from March 26th. The Blair government has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons. Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe — more so even than Sweden. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British government to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea."
This is one of the ripples forward through time of the affinity for monarchy, I think. While most European governments in present day have leaders that are elected, there are still the remnants of monarchy, which are held on to quite firmly and even fondly. This unconscious collective desire for protection by a good and powerful parent has to manifest itself in other ways now, one of which is wide-scale state surveillance. In an era where "God Save The Queen" doesn't in and of itself mean much when the Queen's just a nice old lady on telly, there needs to be some other symbol for the collective unconscious to latch onto.
Of course, that doesn't mean the parent is in fact either good or powerful, just that the desire for it on the part of the population has them see it that way.
In America a similar thing seems to be true (because the culture descended from European culture), but the anti-monarchy element that lead to the Revolution means that it seems to require a larger perceived threat before people are willing to accept it. Hence the need for 9/11 and the saturation advertising for the war on terra.
Nuclear/Chemical/Biological attacks are much more critical to stop, as they can be society ending. From what we've been told today's terrorists are aiming for those types of attacks. We have to prevent a much higher percentage of those types of attacks for society to survive.
And the best way to prevent those types of attacks is to keep our nose out of other countries' affairs and withdraw our troops from foreign soil. We swat at a hornets' nest and then complain when we get stung. Big surprise.
"I mean, what else could they do, declare you a stateless person?"
Yes. The U.S., for instance, has prisons with hundreds, thousands of stateless people that will never be released. Not a well known fact that we've had gulags under the radar for quite a while.
Yep, those damn despotic Brits are WAY worse than the freedom-loving people of Turkey.
Simple...they may have liked what he did, but they wanted to be the ones in charge, not him.
Why does anyone think the USA got involved? "World domination? Thats our fucking game! Killing brown people? Thats our fucking job!"
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.