A Week in Surveillance Britain

I thought it might be interesting to see what a week in the life of 'surveillance Britian' was like. This last seven days, the following occurred:

1. Google Street View was launched last week. Why do we need this? How come Google has the right to take pictures of my home and put them on the internet? (But of course not Number 10). Google has been forced to pull down some images before the week is even out...

2. Dodgy databases abound in Government, according to The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which reports that one in four major government databases is "almost certainly illegal" under human rights or data protection legislation, with 11 of 46 systems being utterly dodgy and a further 29 looking pretty shaky too. You can read the full report here.

3. Social networking sites are to be monitored by the Government. Why should the law abiding 99% have their privacy rights taken by the state in tackling the law breaking 1%?

4. On average, councils have used terror legislation 25,000 in the last five years to snoop on their local residents, but for minor issues like dog-fouling, parking offences etc...

And that's just the last week.

How did we get here? How easily has society slept whilst our fundamenatal rights have been unceasingly eroded? What was Liberty and its the attention seeking Shami Chakrabarti doing whilst all this occurred?

Update: Thanks to Lib Dem Voice, here is how to get yourself removed from Google Street View.