We'll be watching you...

For whatever reason, the future proposed in the movie V for Vendetta seems to be approaching every day in the UK.

From the Guardian:

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The UK is constantly in the news for gathering data on its citizens into databases so this comes as no surprise, but it's like watching your beloved sibling descending into drug addiction and homelessness. We can offer the people of the UK a safer place to live (for now anyway), but as far as the government's over-reaching dictatorship tendencies, all we can do is advise and hope for the best.

Summary

In the near future, the UK has come under oppressive rule by its own government.

During the course of the movie, we learn that this sad state of affairs began with a "terrorist attack" that the leader used as an excuse to be granted absolute power that he never released. Later we learn the the attack was actually planned by a small number of politicians as an excuse.

Now the people are ruled with an iron fist. Many people who were dissidents or otherwise undesirable (homosexuals, anyone that insulted the prime minister) was taken away in the night and never seen again.

A strange masked hero takes on the entire regime by blowing up a public building and threatening to destroy the house of parliament in one year's time.

Lessons

• A society that gives up its privacy and rights can become dark and broken and may never regain them.
• With enough technology and complete media control, a very small number of people can subvert and control an entire nation.

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This comes from a long string of stories about how bad privacy is getting in the UK. As bad as it's become in the US, apparently our friends out there have it much worse.

They had it, they shouldn't have, now they lost it. Same story all over.

The funniest part of this is that they're trying to convince their public that it's a good idea to have a national ID card containing even more data and that they'll be responsible with that data.

Said someone from an anti-ID card group:

"It's inevitably good news for our campaign because it proves to people that this government, and indeed any government, cannot be trusted with this amount of information. For 25 million people this is a catastrophe but it is just a small herald of the national ID scheme which would mean a potential catastrophe for 60 million of us."