Jon Bright (London, OK): Simon Davies of Privacy International has a good article on the Sadiq Khan bugging affair in yesterday's Telegraph. In it he points out that the catch all defence of the "public interest" is always going to override any weak mechanism for checking surveillance in the current frenzied atmosphere of the war on terror. Privacy International provide an interesting comparative take on the state of surveillance societies worldwide, summed up in this eye-watering map:
I have cropped the colour coded chart to get the thing on the page - you can see the map in full here. But you can probably hazard a guess at what most of the colours mean (a small hint: gray ones have yet to be included in the results). It will come as no surprise that we are doing badly - what might be more worrying is the rest of the world is doing poorly as well. Greece, it seems, is now the only country providing decent safeguards against surveillance and interception of data. I feel, unfortunately, that the countries in black above are at the forefront of a trend, rather than struggling to catch up with the rest of the world. What colours will the PI map be next year?
