I doubt there are any conspiracies of X-Files proportions to worry about. And if we're about to be sold off to our new
alien overlords, who knows, maybe they'll treat us better than our human overlords. What I do think is that power attracts the wrong kind of people. Not just the corruptible ones, but vain, arrogant, self-centered and more often than not incompetent people who lose perspective very easily.
This is why every single government institution in the world suffers from inefficiency, mission creep and lost perspective. We get what we deserve, of course. Or maybe we have it better than we deserve, but it can't last forever. Democracy must be nurtured and you'll lose your rights if you don't stand up for them.
Living in the UK I do have to think about Jean-Charles de Menezes, the innocent man who was shot seven times in the head with hollow-point bullets while being pinned to the ground by several police officers.
Of course, it was an "honest mistake" - they'd been tailing the wrong guy. Crap happens. But even if there existed conditions to warrant this sort of impromptu execution without as much as a warning, then the conditions weren't met in that case. And it's times like those that you learn just how unaccountable the police really are. Even after the disaster, none of the officers involved was found to be at fault, and no heads rolled over the decision to implement a shoot-to-kill policy in the first place. The mysteriously missing surveillance footage can be dismissed with "alright, maybe they did forget to reload the tapes, we'll never know."
No matter their intentions or how decent they are, no one should be beyond accountability or above the law. In reality though, the police are. If a regular citizen brutally killed an innocent man in cold blood, simply having mistaken him for a suspected terrorist would not get them off the hook. And trying to cover it up would make the whole thing even worse.
Or look at oh-so-liberal Finland with its secret, unaccountable internet censorship agency, which, it was eventually revealed, is more interested in censoring gay porn and free-speech advocates than in the issues they were meant to be tackling (kiddieporn and so on). This all happens at the police level.
Even well-intentioned cops are eager to play politicians when they have the chance, as are judges when they have to rule on issues like freedom-of-speech vs. oh-my-god-think-of-the-children. At the same time politicians are eager to use the police and the courts politically. All the branches of government gravitate towards each other this way. In many ways it's already impossible to distinguish between them.
Plus there's sort of a problem in disagreeing with the lawmakers but respecting the law enforcers. Just "doing ones job" has never been a very good excuse.
I'm not sure the UK is that much better, I'm afraid. Having been around Europe I would say go for Scandinavia, possibly Germany. Not perfect democracies, and you'll suffer an intolerable lack of appreciation for the fact that money represents time (blurring the line between taxation and slavery), but a huge improvement over the all-invasive tracking and surveillance in the UK.
But at least the UK haven't yet made any moves to ban e-cigs.
