What follows is a speech given by Henry Porter at the Lib Dem Conference Rally in Bournemouth, 13 Sept 2008.
On my return from holiday, at the beginning of this month, I was greeted by about 70 emails sent by my researcher. They were press clippings, excerpts from government papers and links to websites, all of them
about some aspect of the attack on liberty. I sat down and went through them and truly I felt I was reading the obituary for our free society.
Absorbing so much at once has a distorting effect - we are not quite there, but we have only a very little time: very little time to save ourselves from the database state. I estimate that in two or three years it
will be too late.
