Considering what went on under Bush and the GOP Congress including whatever extreme action that Bush wanted Ashcroft to accept, but was refused, don't think for a minute they wouldn't have taken the US down this path as well. Maybe the likes of Blair, Bush and the GOP are fine with scraping a free society, but it strikes me as undemocratic.
British police to launch spy drones above UK cities:
Britain is now the most intensely monitored country in the world, according to surveillance experts, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed, equivalent to one for every 14 people.
So blanketing is the surveillance that the average resident of London runs the possibility of being photographed up to 300 times a day just moving around the capital, civil liberties campaigners Liberty say.
The pervasiveness of the cameras, combined with the government's plans to introduce digital identity cards for all citizens in the coming years and expand its DNA database, has led to calls for a halt until the impact can be better studied.
In a report issued earlier this year, the Royal Academy of Engineering warned that increased monitoring of society actually risked provoking a breakdown in trust between individuals and the state, eventually causing more harm than good.
