Wow! I don't know if they've gone this far yet in the USA -- I wouldn't be
surprised if they already have -- but if they have, we are in serious
trouble!

Between government electronic email surveillance with programs like
"Carnivore", ISP data packet sniffing, web browser cookies, surveillance
cameras on every street corner, in stores, in elevators, and everywhere
else, telephone wire taps, police and other law enforcement agencies and
authorities conducting physical surveillance, huge citizen databases run by
the government, and who knows what else, we must wonder exactly how much
real freedom we still have left.

The most chilling thing about the following article is a comment that was
made by the local authorities, when the family that was unjustifiably
targeted questioned the authorities' right to intrude so much into their
personal lives.

The response that the authorities gave?

Get this, and be shocked:

"You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have."

It is supposed to be that people are innocent until proven guilty; but
nowadays, it seems as if the situation has been totally reversed.

It is precisely because governments and local authorities now possess so
much power to peer into and control our lives, that when the New World Order
is ushered in under a One World Government, it will be so easy for the
demonic leader who takes over that government, to enslave us all. After all,
all of the necessary tools will have already been created, and will already
be in place.

Think about it!


Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases

By SARAH LYALL - NYT

October 24, 2009


POOLE, England -- It has become commonplace to call Britain a "surveillance
society," a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant
databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has
extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens' lives.

A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain
in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on
a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three,
were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address
to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began
a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing
records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole
education department secretly followed her, noting on a log the movements of
the "female and three children" and the "target
vehicle" (that would be Ms.
Paton, her daughters and their car).

It turned out that Ms. Paton had broken no rules. Her daughter was admitted
to the school. But she has not let the matter rest. Her case, now scheduled
to be heard by a regulatory tribunal, has become emblematic of the struggle
between personal privacy and the ever more powerful state here.

The Poole Borough Council, which governs the area of Dorset where Ms. Paton
lives with her partner and their children, says it has done nothing wrong.

In a way, that is true: under a law enacted in 2000 to regulate surveillance
powers, it is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local
governments regularly use these surveillance powers -- which they
"self-authorize," without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers
-- to investigate malfeasance like illegally dumping industrial waste,
loan-sharking and falsely claiming welfare benefits.

But they also use them to investigate reports of noise pollution and people
who do not clean up their dogs' waste. Local governments use them to catch
people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people
who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and
people who illegally operate taxicabs.

"Does our privacy mean anything?" Ms. Paton said in an interview.
"I haven't
had a drink for 20 years, but there is nothing that has brought me closer to
drinking than this case."

The law in question is known as the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act,
or RIPA, and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies --
including the Ambulance Service and the Charity Commission -- powers once
held by only a handful of law enforcement and security service
organizations.

Under the law, the localities and agencies can film people with hidden
cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web
site visits and enlist undercover "agents" to pose, for example, as
teenagers who want to buy alcohol.

In a report this summer, Sir Christopher Rose, the chief surveillance
commissioner, said that local governments conducted nearly 5,000 "directed
surveillance missions" in the year ending in March and that other public
authorities carried out roughly the same amount.

Local officials say that using covert surveillance is justified. The Poole
Borough Council, for example, used it to detect and prosecute illegal
fishing in Poole Harbor.

"RIPA is an essential tool for local authority enforcement which we make
limited use of in cases where it is proportionate and there are no other
means of gathering evidence," Tim Martin, who is in charge of legal and
democratic services for Poole, which is southwest of London, said in a
statement.

The fuss over the law comes against a backdrop of widespread public worry
about an increasingly intrusive state and the growing circulation of
personal details in vast databases compiled by the government and private
companies.

"Successive U.K. governments have gradually constructed one of the most
extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world,"
the House of Lords Constitution Committee said in a recent report. It
continued: "The development of electronic surveillance and the collection
and processing of personal information have become pervasive, routine and
almost taken for granted."

The Lords report pointed out that the government enacted the law in the
first place to provide a framework for a series of scattershot rules on
surveillance. The goal was also to make such regulations compatible with
privacy rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights.

RIPA is a complicated law that also regulates wiretapping and intrusive
surveillance carried out by the security services. But faced with rumbles of
public discontent about local governments' behavior, the Home Office
announced in the spring that it would review the legislation to make it
clearer what localities should be allowed to do.

"The government has absolutely no interest in spying on law-abiding people
going about their everyday lives," Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, said.

One of the biggest criticisms of the law is that the targets of surveillance
are usually unaware that they have been spied on.

Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials
summoned her to discuss her daughter's school application. To her shock,
they produced the covert surveillance report and the family's telephone
billing records.

"As far as I'm concerned, they're within their rights to scrutinize all
applications, but the way they went about it was totally unwarranted," Ms.
Paton said. "If they'd wanted any information, they could have come and
asked."

She would have explained that her case was complicated. The family was
moving from their old house within the school district to a new one just
outside it. But they met the residency requirements because they were still
living at the old address when school applications closed.

At the meeting, Ms. Paton and her partner, Tim Joyce, pointed out that the
surveillance evidence was irrelevant because the surveillance had been
carried out after the deadline had passed.

"They promptly ushered us out of the room," she said. "As I
stood outside
the door, they said, 'You go and tell your friends that these are the powers
we have.' "

Soon afterward, their daughter was admitted to the school. Ms. Paton began
pressing local officials on their surveillance tactics.

"I said, 'I want to come in and talk to you,' " she said. "
'How many people
were in the car? Were they men or women? Did they take any photos? Does this
mean I have a criminal record?' "

No one would answer her questions, Ms. Paton said.

Mr. Martin said he could not comment on her case because it was under
review. But Ms. Paton said the Office of the Surveillance Commissioners,
which monitors use of the law, found that the Poole council had acted
properly. "They said my privacy wasn't intruded on because the surveillance
was covert," she said.

The case is now before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which looks into
complaints about RIPA. It usually meets in secret but has agreed, Ms. Paton
said, to have an open hearing at the beginning of November.

The whole process is so shrouded in mystery that few people ever take it
this far. "Because no one knows you have a right to know you're under
surveillance," Ms. Paton said, "nobody ever makes a complaint."



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