I find it so depressing that the once beacons of "democracy" in the world, are rapidly trying to catch-up to China when it comes to surveillance, and even censorship, most of them already being <i>well past</i> the level of surveillance the Stasi or the communist states had.<p>UK is probably the most aggressive from the ones trying to "win" this race right now with both its surveillance and its "porn & <i>others</i> filter". But Australia has been making some big moves lately as well trying to catch-up.<p>US, of course, already has a mature level of surveillance of everyone, and it has also tried to introduce some censorship with with SOPA. It also has some Kafkaesque measure in place such as the no-fly lists of tens of thousand of people, put there with <i>no evidence</i>, just some suspicions. Then there is the TSA, the border checks where border can mean up to 50 miles from the border or more, the cash seizing, the civil forfeiture laws, the militarization of police and the increasing use of SWAT teams and "no-knock" warrants for non-violent crimes and so on.<p>Canada has also tried a few times to introduce various surveillance laws, but it has been stopped by the population for the most part.<p>What's even more worrying is that it's now pretty obvious all of these countries are working together and <i>planning</i> together when to introduce such laws, which is why you see statements within days or weeks at most from US, UK, Canada about "Tor being a threat" and online anonymity in general, and so on.<p>They're also trying to introduce new surveillance laws more or less at the same time, because then they can make it look more like it's a "natural thing" to do - "hey, look, all democratic countries are doing it - how bad can it <i>really</i> be then?!". Except virtually none of them are doing it by <i>consulting the population</i>. The governments in power simply decide by themselves to introduce them, and that's it. At best, they try to push in the media some more extreme murder as a "danger to the nation" - and that <i>we need these laws to protect against those kinds of murders</i>".<p>They're almost starting to turn this into a science. After all, they're already researching how to manipulate the public through Twitter, Facebook and so on. They're starting to figure out what "works" and how to press the public's hot buttons in order to get them to support whatever they want to pass.