GCHQ: Open Government Licence v1.0
There was once a scandal so big that every abuse of political power since has been named after it. It led to the indictments of 69 people and the only ever resignation of an American president. At the heart of it was a simple criminal act: a political leader using the power of the state to spy on their opponents. It was, in other words, all about surveillance.
What's interesting about Watergate is how attitudes to it have changed. As recently as the early Seventies, the idea that the government would listen-in on the conversations of its political opponents was seen as fundamentally undermining democracy; to such an extent that the most powerful man in the world was forced out of office when it transpired he'd been involved in it. Polls show that most younger Americans today, who weren't around at the time, can't understand what all of the fuss was about.
