Steved - if living under mass state surveillance makes you feel safer that's cool. This being a travel site there are many states to which you can travel where you feel very safe. I'm thinking China, Burma, Syria..actually none of these states have the kind of mass surveillance we in the UK do so perhaps I'm wrong. You might care to ask the Russian or East German readers of HU what difference, prior to 1989 it really make to them if the government knows what flights / trips they had done and also who with?

Anyway, my point is there are many who think this is a very sinister thing indeed and even if you there are those of us who do not wish to live in such a state. If we do not want a political party to eviserate every part of our privacy that is OUR right. Your privalege is to question that right but like the government, not to take that right away.

I feel like saying "unless by gun point" but Orwell was spot on about Ingsoc. As long as the proles have their DVD, internet, , gambling, etc. then they're happy.

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It isn't a case of living under mass state surveillance making me feel safe, it's more a case of the mass state surveillance not having any impact on me or the way I live my life. I appreciate that this may sound incredibly naive but I just don't have an issue with it or view it as anything sinister.

Steved - I'm afraid you are not the arbitar of whether this affects you, the government and their software is.

Another database the Labour Party wish to introduce is one which compels ISP's to monitor every site you visit and every e-mail you make, every phone call you make and to whom, hold that data for ten years and submit it to the state.

Let us play a thought game; You visit the Sahara forum here to plan a trip to Morocco. On a thread you see the word polisario. Is this what they call the cops over there? You google Polisario and find it's an acronym "Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro " an armed terrorist organistion with rumored links to Al Qaeda, at war with Marocco for some years. Oh well, none of your business. Except that your visit to that site has been logged on a database. On another database it is noted that you are travelling to Morocco and the two items of data are combined on a third database which in a reciprocal arrangment with the Moroccan government flags you up as a visitor with known links to the Polisario. You enter Marocco happy in the knowledge that you'll soon be Waddi Bashing. Except that pretty quickly you find yourself in a dark cell bent over a bench with a cattle prod where the sun don't shine trying to explain that you have no links to the Polisario even though your government has furnished docmentary proof you do.

Far fetched? Watch out for a UK resident returning this week from Gitmo after seven years under very similar circumstances. The High Court was prevented last week from revealing what exactly happend to ths person after threats from the US and UK government, thought to be motivated by implicating those governments and their ministers in conspiracy to torture.

Still - if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear right? And it's not like computers make mistakes

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Very!

While I can understand what you are saying the fact is that the example you give is way over simplified. Data mining of this type could and no doubt is used in such a way, but it would take a lot more than a single visit to a website and a trip to a foreign country to get you flagged as an international terrorist, as for Binyam Mohamed how does his case relate to this? As I understand it he is in Gitmo having been accused of training at an Al-Qaeda camp and trying to fly using a false passport.

Don't get me wrong, I don't support the thinking behind Gitmo at all, but I also don't see how it relates to government gathering information about it's citizens travel arrangements either.

China is developing (or perhaps more accurately getting other people to develop) a system called Golden Shield. In a nutshell, it incorporates internet monitoring and face-recognition CCTV, so that at any minute of the day the government can know who is where and what they're doing. It's being trialled in Shanghai. And the British government is interested.

Now I'm not a huge paranoia-type person. I also (and many will shout at me about this) believe that quite frankly there isn't very much we can do about it. After all, given Britain went to war in Iraq with that much public and international opinion against them, protests aren't really going to stop anything. And we already have a prime minister that no ordinary voter got a say about (and an unelected royal family, and a war to teach the Iraqis about democracy. But that's another story).

The thing is, in Britain at the moment we can get away with saying it doesn't concern us. And Britain's CCTV-fest began with the IRA and preventing attacks, which in principle is a good thing. But what matters is what happens if those at the top aren't as scrupulous as they should be. The Chinese government cheerfully imprisons people for looking at websites they don't think people should - things like BBC news for example. Because to their mind that's evidence of dissent. What matters isn't whether you've done anything wrong or not, it's the fact that the goverment gets the power to prove you did something it thinks was wrong. And that infrastructure, once there, stays there. Hitler was elected. France nearly brought in LePen through sheer voter apathy (which scared them into going to the polls for the 2nd round). George Bush is a war criminal - and isn't ever going to go to trial for it. In France you already have to carry a form of ID on you at all times. As a young white woman I've never had mine checked. For black or Arab male friends it's almost routine.

Mistakes happen, but rarely. But what happens if the political situation changes and you become the "target" population?

On a lighter note, I used to do gigs at Windsor Castle. As you can imagine, every company has to submit the names of its employees for the day in advance, so they can be security checked. We turned up one day to find a lot of cops hanging around. Asked them what was happening, and they said one of the catering guys had been flagged up - he was on the run from the cops for a stabbing. So rather than chase him, they came to wait for him. How stupid do you have to be to take on a job in a royal palace when you're wanted by the police?!

Laura, still looking for that patch of hillside where the world and its machinations can be ignored.

It is rumored that the case against Binyam Mohamed eminated from a visit he made to a spoof website about how to make a nuclear bomb in your kitchen. After 18 months of systematic torture the US government built a case in their own minds that he was planning a "dirty bomb". There are no charges against this person and he is awaiting release from Gitmo..

My thought game whilst illustrative does not constitute my argument against all this. If data is collected on everyone then everyone is a suspect, the state and the security forces will always find what they are predisposed to find. In the 1950's that well know liberal pinko President Eisenhower in his valedictory address warned against the powerful military industrial complex creating a momentum which he feared might be unstoppable and result in nuclear war with Russia. The same is happening now with mass surveilance mechanisms under the pretext of security.

The state, whether by design or not is arranging a state of affairs that makes us accountable to them, contrary to the status quo. It is using fear and the "precautionary principle" to accrue more power to the state and is diligently assembling the instruments and mechanisms of a totalitarian state. It will not be like any totalitarian state seen before but will nevertheless, be one. In my opinion it will be a state of "total government".

The British people will one day wake up and realise they are living in a new form of a police state with little or no power to do anything about it. They will deserve this state of affairs because they did nothing to stop it. They may even enjoy their new state. I will observe you from afar.

Good night and good luck.

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not meaning to sound racist, but his name was mohamed, guilty or not, and he was looking at how to build a nuke in ones own kitchen. im not the type to racially stereoptype, i see a person as a person and not a spectrum of light or colour, or religion or creed. but in the big book of "know your terrorist" this would make the reader very suspiscious.

i hope i do not sound like an arse and feel sick at the though of him being torture.

as for police controlled state; i laugh so hard my sides are splitting at that idea chum. we have it ****ing good compared to those poor bastards in less fortunate parts of the world.

Hopefully this Government won't be in power long enough for their crazy ideas to come into effect, why don't they go the whole way and propose micro chipping us all?

Why check on us when our borders welcome every scumbag that wants to jump on the uk benefits and health system.

We know Clarkson is a twat but he was correct about Gordon(un-elected)Brown, the bit that amused me was the person who 'jumped' to Browns defence.........David Blunkett,

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'He who laughs last, was too slow to get the joke'
Never confuse the map with the journey.

...i'm not a racist - but hmmm how many callers to phone in shows begin with that line then continue with "but his name was mohamed"...

a police state is not a state controlled by police, they are as much controlled as anyone else is in such a state. We do have it quite good (not ****ing good) so let's keep it that way.

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I don't really see how the secret police of the GDR fit into this argument in any way, the UK isn't East Germany and storing detailed records of people leaving and entering the country for ten years isn't going to turn us into it either!

Some 15 years ago I found out that a flight by me to a South American country had been recorded because a trip to an EU country triggered a passport check on me out of 100 passengers. Even back then flight info was recorded, cheap. Software scanned it, cheap. Then an immigration officer speaks to you, cheap. After that I don't know what, more expensive. They wasted their time with me but I now know that much is already recorded. Big Brother is not a house! My intended port of exit on a bike has outward facing cameras to record licence numbers. I am working on it but it looks like going very illegal is needed to move around minding your own business now. Heil Hitler, Linzi.