The question is, why is anybody surprised by this supposed revelation? Did anyone think the US government wasn’t spying on its own citizens? Or that the UK government isn’t highly likely to be doing the same?

These are the days of state-sanctioned terrorism. These are the days of big brother surveillance methods being used in everything from car satellite navigation systems to the electronic tagging of paedophiles to observing every citizen of these countries going about their own private and entirely legitimate business. These are the days of phoney wars, evangelical and other religiously extremist attempts to censor and reshape our societies. These are the days when almost all legislative change affecting education, law, political and social structuring is controlled by large, technologically-sophisticated businesses buying votes in the US Senate and European parliaments.

We either accept the argument that these uses of technology and the activities of big businesses are entirely acceptable, in every context, or we become political activists to fight the intrusions into our private lives and defend our civil liberties which our fathers, mothers, grandparents and earlier ancestors fought and died to see introduced. What will it take to wake up the lemmings? What will it take to make the majority grow some balls? When will the day come when we take our politicians to task for whoring our democracies to line their own pockets, when we face the issue of Microsoft’s dominance of technology head-on, when we say we aren’t willing to sacrifice our freedoms for what amount to minor conveniences?

Democracy may well be dead. I think it is dead. That doesn’t mean the peoples of the world can’t bring it back to life. It takes organisation, willpower, conviction and sacrifice. And, depressingly, all those admirable abilities and tendencies – the stuff of the ordinary heroes – are being weeded out of our young people by their schooling, the influence of the media and the legislative changes brought in by politicians who increasingly speak for smaller and smaller, highly vocal and monied minorities. When will this stop? And will it ever stop? What are we becoming? How many of us dare ask the question, and what might the answer be?

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