The Snowden Revelations showed that the UK had even more pervasive Civil Society Surveillance than the US, literally levels of surveillance of the public that would make the Stasi in East Germany green with envy.
Further, whilst in the US they walked it back a bit after those revelations, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make all of it legal, newspapers got a bunch of D-Notices (the UK’s censorship mechanism) to shut up and the editor of the newspaper who brought it all out was canned.
Even if you know nothing about all the other scandals that have come out over the years around that in the UK (such as Green Party MEPs being under surveillance or Environmentalist groups having been infiltrated by coppers), one’s perspective on why those controlling power in Britan would want to “validate” and gatekeep where people go and what people do online, should at least be informed by what Snowden revealed and how those holder power in Britain dealt with it.
The US has more than caught up though. The US regime is currently working on establishing a DNA databank of all political opponents it can artest under unlwaful conditions, during lawful protests for example, long enough to get the samples, feeding everything into one huge database with all the other legally and illegally aquired data. When the time comes they’ll have already a list of everyone who has to disappear, like the Gestapo in Austria during Anschluss.
The Snowden Revelations showed that the UK had even more pervasive Civil Society Surveillance than the US, literally levels of surveillance of the public that would make the Stasi in East Germany green with envy.
Further, whilst in the US they walked it back a bit after those revelations, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make all of it legal, newspapers got a bunch of D-Notices (the UK’s censorship mechanism) to shut up and the editor of the newspaper who brought it all out was canned.
Even if you know nothing about all the other scandals that have come out over the years around that in the UK (such as Green Party MEPs being under surveillance or Environmentalist groups having been infiltrated by coppers), one’s perspective on why those controlling power in Britan would want to “validate” and gatekeep where people go and what people do online, should at least be informed by what Snowden revealed and how those holder power in Britain dealt with it.
The US has more than caught up though. The US regime is currently working on establishing a DNA databank of all political opponents it can artest under unlwaful conditions, during lawful protests for example, long enough to get the samples, feeding everything into one huge database with all the other legally and illegally aquired data. When the time comes they’ll have already a list of everyone who has to disappear, like the Gestapo in Austria during Anschluss.