Modern Britain - Suspect Nation

Excellent documentary here. "The State now has powers that to probe & pry into our lives that the dictatorships of the past couldn't have dreamt of. A profound change is taking place...We should all be worried we are sleepwalking into a society where 24 hour surveillance of everyone is the norm." Since Tony Blair’s New Labour government came to power in 1997, the UK civil liberties landscape has changed dramatically. ASBOs were introduced by Section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and first used in 1999. The right to remain silent is no longer universal. The right to privacy, free from interception of communications has been severely curtailed. The ability to travel without surveillance (or those details of our journeys being retained) has disappeared. Indeed, as Henry Porter (the Observer journalist famous for his recent email clash with Tony Blair over the paring down of civil liberties) reveals in this unsettling film, British citizens' movements are being watched, and recorded, more than ever before. Here the fundamental State philosophy towards its citizens views being exactly that, ie ITS citizens, as opposed to the citizens' State. And with that in mind it is interesting to take a look at some thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human: Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit depostism whose heir it wants to be. It desires a wealth of executive power, as only despotism had it; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, & which it intends to improve unto an expedient organ of the community...It desires the Caesarean power state of this century...it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the likes of which has never existed. And since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work to eliminate piety, it can only hope to exist here & there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, & drives the word "justice" like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason(after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), & to give them a good conscience for the evil game they are supposed to play. Socialism can serve as a rather brutal & forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulations of state power, & to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its rough voice chimes in with the battle cry "As much state as possible," it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: "As little state as possible." Naively we may imagine that the US is a capitalist system where the above does necessarily not apply but the identical attitude of "the state" towards "its" citizens is clearly in operation, where the state, under the justification of a phoney war on terror, awards itself endless rights of observation over its citizens whose traditional rights such as habeus corpus are severely eroded. I use inverted commas over the state as it seems conveniently forgotten that the actions of the various states are on behalf of individuals or ruling elites rather than imaginary entities such as these states, even though highly complex bureaucratic edifices may convey the impression that such entities are indeed real.