An official report by Britain’s interception of communications commissioner has revealed that nearly 800 (!) public bodies are making between them nearly 1000 requests per day for "communications data", including phone taps, mobile phone records, email and web search histories.  Britain has the  largest  DNA database in the world. It is proposed to centralize medical records and introduce biometric ID cards that include huge amounts of personal information.

The advance of technology gives the state opportunities to spy on its citizens that Stalin and the Stasi in East Germany never dreamt of.   One’s life is now mapped minute by minute through phone calls, emails, credit card purchases, CCTV.  At the same time many more people are involved in  the spying, and as a result the information gleaned is being lost, mislaid, and maybe misused for credit card fraud and other mischief.  This is progress?

This spying is in the name of the so-called "War on Terror", an anti-democratic scam devised to enlarge the powers of central government.  Britain was the birthplace of laisser-faire liberalism, and championed the right of  the individual long before the United States was ever invented.  It has now descended  into authoritarian busybody mode that has to be resisted.  All you can say on its behalf is that Britain has considerably more exposure to Islamic terrorism than the Unites States does.

Epicurus, faced with this massive intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens would consider it immoral, and would tell us that individual support for it was unethical.