It's interesting the the internet has been a tool that has allowed people in repressive states to rebel and at the same time has made states that were supposedly 'free' become more and more like that states those people were rebelling against. The difference is that those other states were open about their corruption - everybody knew it and understood it - and rebellion could take place. The internet allows the 'free' governments to break laws in relative secrecy and even when caught regular people find it difficult to understand the details anyway.

I find it so depressing that the once beacons of "democracy" in the world, are rapidly trying to catch-up to China when it comes to surveillance, and even censorship, most of them already being well past the level of surveillance the Stasi or the communist states had.

UK is probably the most aggressive from the ones trying to "win" this race right now with both its surveillance and its "porn & others filter". But Australia has been making some big moves lately as well trying to catch-up.

US, of course, already has a mature level of surveillance of everyone, and it has also tried to introduce some censorship with with SOPA. It also has some Kafkaesque measure in place such as the no-fly lists of tens of thousand of people, put there with no evidence, just some suspicions. Then there is the TSA, the border checks where border can mean up to 50 miles from the border or more, the cash seizing, the civil forfeiture laws, the militarization of police and the increasing use of SWAT teams and "no-knock" warrants for non-violent crimes and so on.

Canada has also tried a few times to introduce various surveillance laws, but it has been stopped by the population for the most part.

What's even more worrying is that it's now pretty obvious all of these countries are working together and planning together when to introduce such laws, which is why you see statements within days or weeks at most from US, UK, Canada about "Tor being a threat" and online anonymity in general, and so on.

They're also trying to introduce new surveillance laws more or less at the same time, because then they can make it look more like it's a "natural thing" to do - "hey, look, all democratic countries are doing it - how bad can it really be then?!". Except virtually none of them are doing it by consulting the population. The governments in power simply decide by themselves to introduce them, and that's it. At best, they try to push in the media some more extreme murder as a "danger to the nation" - and that we need these laws to protect against those kinds of murders".

They're almost starting to turn this into a science. After all, they're already researching how to manipulate the public through Twitter, Facebook and so on. They're starting to figure out what "works" and how to press the public's hot buttons in order to get them to support whatever they want to pass.

Articles like this are truly surreal.

It almost feels as if the debate about whether this data collection should be introduced is purely for the purpose of distracting from the fact that GCHQ has already been doing this for years.

I wonder what Andrews and Arnold's approach to this problem will be. They're the last bastion of common sense in the UK.

Technically not the same snoopers charter, but it does sound like they want to force ISPs to maintain DHCP and NAT logs. Despite a lot of the rhetoric about stopping terrorism, a lot of the public support for this, and pressure from this in the UK media comes, from complaints about abuse on Twitter (the mainstream media has recently discovered the definition of 'trolling' and love it). I have no doubt this will be one of the primary exercises for these new powers.

A good showcase : https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Abbc.co.uk+twitter+a...

Huh. Don't all ISPs already keep these logs? I would be very surprised to find one that doesn't.