Kudos to Chris Huhne, the Lib Dem Shadow Home Secretary, for garnering excellent coverage for the awful statistics about state sponsored snooping.
The Daily Mail’s ire is justified:
The number of Big Brother snooping missions by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in two years.
Last year there were 504,073 new cases – an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance.
One adult in 78? I wonder who it is on my street. Which member of the Lib Dem Group in the House of Lords is it?
Obligatory Chris quote:
It cannot be a justified response to the problems we face in this country that the state is spying on half a million people a year.
The Government forgets that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. We are still a long way from living under the Stasi – but it beggars belief that it is necessary to spy on one in every 78 adults.
LDV has been blogging about issues like this for some time – you can find a list here.
See also:
Niles's Blog 