Quick - what country is in the top three in the world in terms of surveillance of their citizens?
Within 100 yards of a man's home, he found 200 cameras.
Before going on the run, he made 80 formal requests to government and commercial organisations for the information they held on him. He piled the replies on his floor, appalled by the level of detail. The owners of the databases knew who his friends were, which websites he’d been looking at, and where he had driven his car. One commercial organisation was even able to inform him that, on a particular day in November 2006, he had “sounded angry”. It was more than he knew himself.
In the days that followed his disappearance, Katie heard from him occasionally, using pay-as-you-go phones he’d bought specially. But he didn’t tell her where he was, because he was being followed by detectives.
What he didn’t know was that Katie was being watched, too. Hoping to use her to find him, the detectives had leapt over the garden wall one night to fit a tracking device to her car.
They also worked out where she was due to give birth and phoned the hospital, pretending to be Bond, to get details of her appointments.


"Quick - what country is in the top three in the world in terms of surveillance of their citizens?"
I got it! I got it! It's America! It's all Bush's fault! He dreamed up that infernal Patriot Act because he personally wanted to listen in on all my phone calls! That's an invasion of my privacy, I tell you! Civil liberties are at stake! All that evil and dastardly Bush does is trample the Constitution!
What's that you say? Bush is no longer president?
I got it! I got it! It's Israel! It's the evil Zionists!...
Posted by: fallingpianos | April 30, 2010 at 01:08 PM
Oh, and you were so close, too. Alas, no cigar. Not that you could smoke one anywhere in the country, these days....
Posted by: Max | April 30, 2010 at 02:01 PM