The modern democratic police state

Columnist Richard Reeves writes about the radical reform taking place in America and Britain in the wake of the so-called "war on terror":

The great English-speaking democracies are almost inevitably remaking themselves as police states. Changing or ignoring the laws of liberty and instituting more and more invasive technological monitoring of citizens are the new passions of the interventionary state -- all in the name of spreading freedom.

While the U.S. government, supported by majorities in national polls, is ignoring laws on oversight of homeland spying, the British are developing systems to literally follow, photographically, every citizen on his or her daily rounds. Big Brother, the fictional invention of a British writer, George Orwell, will be real and functional within a year. The first step, scheduled to be operational next March, will use thousands of cameras linked to government databases to photograph every vehicle entering or leaving London, driving on major highways or stopping for gasoline -- and checking those movements against driver's licenses and other government information over two- and five-year periods.

So if the terrorists frighten us into adopting high-tech versions of the KGB's and Gestapo's tactics for surveiling the citizenry, does that mean that the "evildoers" have won? If the "haters of freedom" scare us into giving our very freedom away to secretive government agencies, can we really claim to have won the "war on terror"?

Which is more to be feared - a few outlaw extremists who might manage to kill some people once in a great while, or an all-powerful government that knows where we go, what we buy, with whom we associate, what's in our medical records, what causes we support and oppose, and which gives us nothing but its own word (and maybe not even that) that it would never, ever even think about abusing all that information... not that such a government has any real reason to bother with telling the truth, since secrecy is so much more expedient, anyway.

So many people say, "Stop being so alarmist. You're just blowing hot air, anyhow - that could never happen in America!" Take a look - it's happening (and without any apology) in Britain, and
if the Blair administration is doing such things publicly, is there any doubt that the secretive Bush administration is already hatching similar plans behind closed doors? I promise you that Tony Blair is not now, nor has he ever been, the innovator in the "war on terror" - he takes his cues from George Bush.

The revelations about Bush's illegal spying on Americans through the NSA are only the tip of the iceberg - and if this much is already being done, one can only imagine what three more years of Bush's terrifying "war on terror" will do to everything that's worth protecting about America.