Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV. As a result, surveillance has become an inescapable part of life. Britain has a larger DNA base and more police powers and email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy.

This is the very solid base for home secretary Teresa May’s new bill which will allow GCHQ to conduct real-time surveillance of a person’s communications and their web usage. The intelligence services and police will have powers to insist that internet and phone companies hand over our data without our knowledge. Read the full story

The Identity Documents Bill abolished identity cards and the national identity register in December 2010. It was the first instalment of the government’s promise to introduce legislation to “restore freedoms and civil liberties through the abolition of identity cards and unnecessary laws.” The Protection of Freedoms Bill, presented to Parliament last week, is the next step. Read the full story

Last Thursday Christopher Graham, the UK Information Commissioner, sent his report on the state of surveillance, and recommendations for action, to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. While welcoming strengthening of the data protection regime, he said that technological and societal developments mean that the risks to individual privacy remain real. Read the full story

Party manifestos are really little more than wish lists. But the unprecedented Tory and Liberal coalition agreement, produced at breakneck speed, and to be followed in due course by a final and fully comprehensive agreement, is something else. It is little short of a Queen’s speech for a whole parliament. Section 10 of the agreement is about civil liberties. The preamble states: Read the full story

Over the past decade there has been a wholesale removal of rights that were apparently protected by the Human Rights Act and set down nearly 800 years ago in Magna Carta. The liberties that were assumed to be guaranteed by British culture have been compromised, as have constitutional safeguards that were once considered beyond the reach of a democratically elected legislature. Read the full story

In August 2004 the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warned against the possibility of the UK sleepwalking into what he referred to as a “surveillance society” in which the tools of mass surveillance have become ubiquitous and individual privacy a thing of the past. Read the full story

“We regard privacy and the application of executive and legislative restraint to the use of surveillance and data collection powers as necessary conditions for the exercise of individual freedom and liberty.” Not the words of a committed civil liberties’ campaigner Read the full story