A pinko conspiracy theory? Maybe. Here's an excellent article on the topic from a communist propaganda rag owned by an infamous Bolshevik:
Bloomberg: George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move
Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.
``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''
During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.
And it doesn't stop there. Just this week, two people in Britain were convicted for refusing to unencrypt data they own.
The Register: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data
Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.
That's right. Five years in prison if you encrypt files on your hard drive and refuse to hand over the keys to the police.
Speaking of the police, it must be said that they're certainly doing their part. As part of their preparation for next month's Labour Party conference in Brighton, the British police are going to do door-to-door searches of the entire city to find Muslims.
The Daily Express: POLICE ‘GESTAPO TACTICS’ OVER TERRORIST FEAR AT LABOUR CONFERENCE
POLICE plans to quiz thousands of people in a seaside resort to check they are not terrorists were branded “Gestapo-style” tactics last night.
Squads of officers will carry out door-to-door interviews to weed out potential threats to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton next month.
Home owners and workers will have to produce passports, birth certificates, driving licences, proof of employment, and even provide the names of referees to show they are of good character.
They will also be quizzed on their religion to see if they have connections with Muslim fanatics. Critics said the “Gestapo” tactics were another sign that Britain is lurching towards an autocratic state.
An autocratic state? Nonsense! Autocracy, dear critics, means a system of rule by a single individual. It is patently absurd to suggest that Great Britain is becoming an autocracy. Try something like this instead:
After all, door-to-door searches to find people suspected of a heinous offense like an ethnicity or a religion were a specialty not of autocracies but of certain other forms of government that tended to have "soc" somewhere in their name.
I suggest anyone even slightly interested in this topic read the brief article from Bloomberg.com that I linked to above. Great Britain is turning into a truly terrifying place. I'll close with a last quote from that article:
In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.
Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.
By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.
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