Welcome to the Age of Surveillance

This is face of the devil today

"They hate us because we are free, we are told. The fact that we've responded by giving up ever more freedom doesn't seem to matter" from 'After Paris, there will be no stopping the surveillance state now' by Neil Macdonald, Senior Correspondent CBC News. Macdonald makes the point that Europe, especially Britain and soon France, are essentially surveillance societies where, if you are in an urban area, your mug shot is captured dozens of times a day by your 'protectors'. 

Having spent my career working in complex and highly regulated advanced scientific businesses where I interacted with a plethora of well-educated bureaucrats and regulators, I can say without a blink that I don't trust governments with anything but the simplest and most obvious data on me and mine. 

To my younger brother, who once worked as chief scientist for the UK military and therefore was part of the hydra which we can think of for convenience as the 'Man', I am an innocent at best, and more probably a deludedly dangerous libertarian. He has told me more than once that I just have no concept about how many bad people there are out there who want to do us all harm. 

Before he got the job as Q's boss, I, as his closest living relative, was 'checked out' by our RCMP. Thus they have a file on me somewhere that I'll never see. Frankly I'd rather they hadn't, especially since compiling it would have involved checks with people with whom I have interacted. It isn't that unreasonable to assume that people in the surveillance business are not that different from the police in that, from experience, they generally assume the worst about the rest of us.

Jihadist psychopaths like the newly-killed Paris mass-murderer Abdelhamid Abaaoud (picture above), a man whose satanic world view is encapsulated in this comment he made about his practice of dragging murdered victims behind a vehicle - "Before we towed jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, big trailers filled with gifts for vacation in Morocco. Now, thank God, following God's path, we're towing apostates", want us to lose our freedoms. They want enemies like a Mongol warrior needed them under the great khans. Just like the khans, the more fear they can induce, the more pleasure and profit for them in manufacturing further terrors. Turning free societies into police states through terror is an old, old trick.

Why are we falling for it?