"Alex from Ipswich emails: I really don't understand this furore over industrial surveillance. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, simple."

I don't want to live on this planet any more.

There's no such thing as a trustworthy government, and the "if you don't like it then maybe you should just leave" attitude doesn't help anyone.

It's backwards, the citizenry doesn't have to tolerate their government, the government must serve its citizenry.

I don't know what you are smoking but given your comment history, I am sure you would be fine if the police came knocking at your door at night and randomly wanted to search your place, without a warrant. Right? Since you did nothing wrong, it should be OK for the police to randomly search people's places and arrest them. We should trust the police also and let's remove the judicial oversight they have. Correct?

You should ask yourself why the police should not be allowed to do this. And then if you do understand, you may perhaps realize why the GCHQ should not be allowed to carry out mass surveillance.

Unfortunately the country you're in isn't a choice. I can't just move to another country because they have laws preventing people from doing that.

Elsewhere in the thread you say "If you disagree with those laws, apply pressure to change the law."

So which is it. Do you expect people to stay and fight perceived injustices, or leave? You can't have it both ways.

If you think that having a wide open window into the industrialized world, such that GCHQ and NSA have, and don't use that for capitalist, industrialist purposes, then you are a fool.

Its not about having anything to hide. Its about whether or not others can use your work against you. This happens far more often than real terrorism, and it ruins lives, industry, and culture when it happens.

Exactly, and on top of that most people actually do have something to hide, whether they realize it or not.[1]

Even setting aside crimes, there's plenty of things that happen in peoples' day-to-day lives that the government has absolutely no business even being aware of. It's not hard to imagine that they could collect vast troves of information on a person and then that information can get misused in any number of ways by rogue employees or by the government itself.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...

Internet commenting is a cesspool of idiocy.

If your government is daily committing crimes against humanity, you shouldn't be trusting it. You should be replacing it.

That's naive, we've already seen them abuse their powers in the name of terrorism.

OK, I'm no fan of invasive government snooping on this scale. Read my HN comment history. But invoking 'crimes against humanity' in that way shows a distinct lack of perspective.

It's their job to spy on people. It's what they are for. If the legal regime they operate under is faulty, it needs to be fixed. If they have overstepped, they need to be reined in. Lumping them in the same category as race militias butchering women and children with machetes is not helpful.

One mans machete is another mans remote controlled drone. If you think the UK is innocent of war crimes, you haven't been paying attention.

We're not talking about drone strikes, we're talking about rummaging in google accounts. Which incidentally we know for a fact have been used in the past by terrorists to plan atrocities.

Now, it just so happens that I agree with Benjamin Frankin's assertion that those who trade freedom for security deserve neither. Nevertheless, going all "stick it to the man, they're all out to get us" puts no votes in the ballot box. These people can be fought and the laws they operate under can be changed. So lets work towards changing them.

Its not just rummaging through google accounts. Its recording 5 days of all Internet traffic.

But I agree with you: change the politicians in power, change the laws.

I wouldn't call surveilling internet connections and phone calls a 'crime against humanity', those are reserved for mass murders and genocides. It's bad, but not ethnic cleansing bad.