Michael Snyder, Contributor

Activist Post

Why would anyone want to live in the UK at this point? Well, if you enjoy having every little detail of your life dictated to you by elitist control freaks then you might like living there. But most of the rest of the world is absolutely horrified that the UK is being transformed into a hellish Big Brother surveillance society.

The UK truly is on the “cutting edge” when it comes to implementing liberty-killing rules and regulations. Many have pointed out that the United States is becoming a Big Brother police state, but the truth is that the UK is even worse.

The madness going on in the UK is where the rest of the world is headed. Right now, there are more surveillance cameras per capita in the UK than anywhere else in the world. If you accidentally drop a couple of potato chips in public, or if you whisper a phrase that is not politically correct in a restaurant there is a good chance that you will be hauled into court. In the UK, the public has been sold the lie that society will be better off if everything and everyone is constantly monitored. But instead of improving society, what all of this surveillance is really doing is turning the entire nation into a very frightening version of George Orwell’s 1984.

Sadly, most of the rest of the globe is going down the exact same path that the UK has gone. The UK is several years ahead of most of the rest of us, but eventually almost every nation on earth will be just like them.

The following are 21 signs that the UK is being transformed into a hellish Big Brother surveillance society….

#1 A new UK law will allow the government “listening agency” to openly monitor all phone calls, all emails, all website visits, all Facebook status updates and all text messages.

The following is from a recent article in the Telegraph….

Under legislation expected in next month’s Queen’s Speech, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed in “real time”, The Sunday Times reported.

#2 Police in the UK use advanced software that enables them to track the “digital footprints” of virtually anyone that they want to investigate. The following is how one news report in the UK described this software….

The Metropolitan Police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the U.S. military which tracks suspects’ movements and communications and displays them on a three-dimensional graphic.

The software aggregates information gathered from social networking sites, GPS devices like the iPhone, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs to build a detailed picture of an individual’s movements.

#3 In the UK there is a “three strikes” rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the Internet if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement three times.

#4 In the UK, free speech on the Internet is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A recent UK government report calls for Internet service providers to remove as much “extremist material” from the Internet as possible. The following is an excerpt from that report….

The Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit does limited but valuable work in challenging internet service providers to remove violent extremist material where it contravenes the law. We suggest that the Government work with internet service providers in the UK to develop a Code of Conduct committing them to removing violent extremist material, as defined for the purposes of section 3 of the Terrorism Act 2006. Many relevant websites are hosted abroad: the Government should also therefore strive towards greater international cooperation to tackle this issue.

#5 In the UK, citizens are instructed that those that hold “anti-government beliefs” are potential terrorists and that they should be reported to the authorities immediately.

#6 In the UK there are more surveillance cameras per capita than anywhere else on the entire planet. It has been estimated that there are at least 4.8 million surveillance cameras constantly watching every move that citizens make.

#7 Under new government plans, cameras at UK gas stations will automatically stop any vehicles that do not have insurance or that are not up to date on taxes from being filled with fuel.

#8 In the UK, it is legal for local governments to assign agents to follow citizens secretly without any judicial oversight whatsoever.

#9 There are thousands upon thousands of “dysfunctional families” in the UK that are being subjected to intensive 24-hour video surveillance to make sure that their children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

#10 In the UK, police can demand to see your identification at any time for any reason that they want.

#11 Did you think that “future crime” was just something Tom Cruise had to worry about in the movies? Well, police in the UK are reportedly very interested in implementing “predictive policing” techniques in an attempt to get a better handle on crime.

#12 Tens of thousands of parents who homeschool their own children in the UK have been forced to undergo criminal background checks before being allowed to do so.

#13 Parents at one school in the UK were forced to undergo criminal background checks to prove that they were not pedophiles before they were allowed to accompany their own children to school Christmas events.

#14 In the UK, if you preach against sin in public there is a good chance that you will be convicted of a hate crime.

#15 Christian ministers in the UK have been told that trying to preach Christianity in an area that is primarily Muslim is essentially a “hate crime“.

#16 Simply playing the Bible in public is enough to get you into trouble with the law in the UK. For example, police once threatened a cafe owner with arrest for silently playing a Bible DVD on a small television on the back wall of his cafe. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article about this incident….

Mr Murray, 31, was left shocked after he was questioned for nearly an hour by the officers, who arrived unannounced at the premises. He said he had turned off the Bible DVD after an ‘aggressive inquisition’ during which he thought he was going to be arrested and ‘frog-marched out of the cafe like a criminal’.

#17 In the UK, it is now illegal to photograph the police for any reason whatsoever.

#18 In the UK, if you do not dispose of your trash correctly, or if you do not recycle properly, you can be hit with huge fines. In fact, right now millions of UK citizens actually have microchips in their garbage bins which track their disposal activities.

#19 One 79-year-old retiree in the UK was told that she would be required to have “three warning signs, a ‘lookout’ and a fluorescent safety jacket” if she wanted to continue to work on her garden.

#20 Government officials in the UK seem absolutely obsessed with gathering information on young children. The following example is from an article in the Register….

The government obsession with collecting data has now extended to five-year-olds, as local Community Health Services get ready to arm-twist parents into revealing the most intimate details of their own and their child’s personal, behavioural and eating habits.

The questionnaire – or ‘School Entry Wellbeing Review’ – is a four-page tick-box opus, at present being piloted in Lincolnshire, requiring parents to supply over 100 different data points about their own and their offspring’s health. Previously, parents received a ‘Health Record’ on the birth of a child, which contained around eight questions which needed to be answered when that child started school.

#21 Tens of thousands of kids in the UK are being branded as “racist” or “homophobic” and are being put into permanent databases just for using common playground insults. The following comes from an article by Paul Joseph Watson….

Over 30,000 British schoolchildren, some as young as three, have had their names registered on a government database and branded ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’ for using playground insults, infractions that could impact their future careers.

In the old days, we were all taught that totalitarian police states such as North Korea, Nazi Germany and the USSR were bad. But now we are being taught that totalitarian police states are good.

These days we are told that society works better when control freaks are watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do.

Sadly, advances in technology now make it possible for governments to track and control all of us to a far greater degree than dictators in the past ever dreamed was possible. With each passing year, the control grids get tighter and we lose even more liberty and freedom.

If we do not stand up for liberty and freedom while we still can, eventually it will be too late.

Please speak out and let your voice be heard. We simply cannot afford to let the control freaks win.

This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.