Democracy???

Taipei Times - archives: "There’s nothing new about British governments spying on their own citizens. From the time of Elizabeth I’s spy chief Francis Walsingham to the legendary agent provocateurs of the years after Waterloo to the bugging and blacklisting of the postwar decades, espionage against domestic dissenters has long been a staple of British statecraft.

For most of the last century, the secret state targeted the left, trade unionists and peace campaigners, along with Irish republicans and anyone else regarded as a “subversive” threat.

That was all supposed to have been consigned to history after the end of the Cold War, when MI5 declared it had abandoned counter-subversion and switched its focus to the threat of jihadist terror attacks. But, if anything, the apparatus of official snooping and spooking has grown even more inflated than in the days when the state faced a real political challenge from both within and without."