In case anyone in the UK is feeling complacent following this week’s US torture legalization, it’s worth noting that the US agreed to return nearly all the UK residents currently being tortured in Guantanamo—and the UK government said it didn’t want them back. Four of them are still being actively torturedinterrogated.
When Britain started deploying surveillance cameras everywhere, civil libertarians got worried. No need to panic, they were reassured—the cameras were just to watch criminals, they weren’t going to be spying on law-abiding citizens. Well, starting next year the government will be using the networked cameras to feed computers running license plate recognition software. They will record the time, date and location of every car they see, and store the information in a big database.