Nothing To Hide? CCTV In Your Home Then!, page 1

I agree completely, I get tired of hearing that particular phrase too.

Of course, your argument does take the point to an extreme conclusion but responses to this - and I've used the same line of thought you have myself in arguments - only illustrate the basic point that people, generally, draw lines in the sand in different places.

What's acceptable to some isn't acceptable to others and when this disparity presents itself, then, for neither love nor money, can someone more willing to give up freedoms actually understand someone less willing. It just doesn't make sense to them in the same way that someone more protective of 'freedoms' just doesn't understand why some are so willing to give them up.

People just place different values on freedom. Throw a few bugbears into the ring - paedophiles, terrorists &c - and watch the stock price of freedom and privacy go into free fall.

However, eventually, everyone does draw a line in the sand, and usually it's at the suggestion of putting CCTV in their own homes. However, I honestly and genuinely think it will happen eventually. It's just a case of convincing enough people that it's for 'our protection' and wheeling out some real or imagined scenarios that could have been prevented with CCTV in our homes.

Whilst adults now baulk at the idea of CCTV springing up everywhere with databases for this and databases for that as well as mandatory checks to go with them, much of this is based on the idea that we've managed for so long without them and so we're naturally suspicious. However, right now, there's babies being born that will never know any different at all.

They in turn might grow-up under the belief that changes implemented during their own life times may seem restrictive compared to what they knew as young kids - never mind what adults know now in 2008. However, by the time their children are adults - and this isn't that far in the future - you'll have a couple of generations of people who've never, ever known any different and are more accepting to increasingly intrusive levels of monitoring.

When I was a young teen, I was signed-up for a library card and that's about it. Teenagers are now used to being part of a plugged-in network and allowing strangers to know what they've been doing, who they're doing it with and when. The idea of things like LiveJournal and FaceBook as well as signing up for this that and the other would have just been weird to a young Merriman Weir. Society has made this acceptable and the norm - for unknown strangers to be reading your thoughts, your jokes, your talking about the mundanity of you getting pissed-up the night before; all the while people are 'right click and save as' pictures of you.

I've been saying this for about 15 years; if anyone has expected a police state in Britain to happen over night and take the form of armed police dragging people away in the night, curfews and watch towers on street corners &c has been deluding themselves. It's always been about the 'drip-drip-drip'.

To be honest, I'm not wholly convinced it's all orchestrated. I'm sure some people will benefit and relish the eventual control but I'm as equally open to the idea that society is sleepwalking into a 'police state lite' thanks to well-meaning but horribly misguided groups of people.