Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter
Strong guarantees of privacy are essential to enable political dissent. Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.<p>Without privacy individuals are unable to explore, consider and evaluate diverging ideals, and eventually reach new personal convictions which may in time turn the tide against the status quo. Instead, the fermentation of ideas is cut short, as most people are unable to stand the push-back inflicted on them by society at an early stage in their thought-process, leading to self-censorship and group-think.<p>Society incurs much more damage from so many angles, ranging from murders to car accidents to diseases, that it does not need to jump in such abject terror at the thought of political violence - still a comparatively rare occurence in most places on this earth - so as to trample on the very foundation of every democracy:<p>Which is the freedom of the individual in his own thoughts, to form his own personal opinions unimpeded by institutionalised social pressure.<p>The mass-scale erosion of privacy must be stopped before it is too late to reverse the trend.