A good friend told me that while traveling in England, he was horrified by the number of surveillance cameras (apparently 1 camera per 15 people), and he sent me a link to a piece titled "Orwellian U.K. Angers People With Tree Cameras, Snooping Kids":

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Hidden in foliage next to a path in the southeast England seaside town of Hastings are digital cameras. Their target: litterbugs and dog walkers.

The electronic eyes feed images to a monitoring unit, where they're scanned and stored as evidence to prosecute people who discard garbage or fail to clean up after pets, a spokeswoman for the town council said.

``It's becoming a bit Big Brother-like,'' said Sandra Roberts, 50, a Hastings kiosk manager, invoking George Orwell's 1949 book ``Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' about a Britain where authorities pry into all aspects of citizens' lives.

Local authorities are adopting phone-record logging, e-mail taps and camera surveillance to police such offenses as welfare fraud, unlawful dumping of waste and sick-day fakery. Telecommunications companies are about to join the list of crime monitors. Already, 4.5 million closed-circuit cameras watch public places across Britain, or about 1 camera for every 15 people, the highest ratio in the world.

``There's too much of it now, all this spying,'' said Ivor Quittention, 80, a retired owner of three hardware stores who lives in Hastings. The town's spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, said spying is the most effective way of dealing with something residents complain about most.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, dubbed ``the snoopers charter'' by London-based civil-rights group Liberty, was passed by the ruling Labour Party in 2000 to legislate methods of surveillance and information gathering. The purpose of the law, known also as Ripa, was to help prevent crime, including terrorism, according to the Home Office.

To begin with, there's always a broad catchall category called "emergencies." But because almost everything is an emergency or a crisis to one activist group or another, eventually "emergency" means anything and everything. After all, a child or an animal might die!

"What kind of cruel and heartless country are we, that we routinely use this technology to hand out speeding tickets, but not to save a child from a predator?"

No politician wants to be in a position of not saving the children, much less being on record as "against" saving children. So these things expand.

But I digress from enlightened England, where citizens are more "protected" than we who still lag behind: Back to the Bloomberg piece:

Initially, only security and intelligence services could invoke the Act's provisions. In 2003, Parliament extended powers to the 474 local councils in England, Scotland and Wales, as well as to 318 other state bodies, including 11 Royal Parks, the Post Office and Chief Inspector of Schools.

From cigarettes! And alcohol!

East Hampshire, in south England, applied the law to catch vandals defacing tombstones. Derby, in northern England, invoked it to send children with recording gear into shops to see if they'd unlawfully be sold cigarettes and alcohol.

"It's unreal,'' said Dean Price, 24, a graphic designer in London. ``We've been sleep-walking into this. Everyone talks about Orwell and 1984 but no one ever does anything about it.''

The Association of Local Government, which represents councils, said through a statement by outgoing Chairman Simon Milton that the "crime-busting powers'' are an essential tool in gathering evidence needed to stop criminal activity.

At the same time, Milton said he wrote to all councils in June asking them not to invoke the law for petty offenses.

But by "petty offenses," surely he didn't mean crimes against the bureaucracy itself! Nothing could be more serious!

In April, council workers spent two weeks tailing a couple in Poole, southeast England, they wrongly suspected were planning to send their daughter to a school outside their designated area. Tim Joyce and Jenny Paton called the intrusion into their lives "hugely disproportionate.''

(The law abiding classes are of course the ones who clamor for action against the recalcitrant scofflaws, and for reasons I explained here, they can be depended upon to be the chief enablers of totalitarian tendencies. It's simple human psychology, along the lines of "I obeyed the law, so who do you think you are to violate it?")

And while we haven't yet made all dogs illegal (first it's banning certain breeds and all sexually intact dogs, then banning dog breeding, then all pure bred-dogs, and eventually all dogs, plus horses), the point for now is that no decent law abiding person would allow his dog to foul the grass!

In August, Paul Griffiths was taken to court and fined 1,000 pounds for allowing his dog to foul grass outside his home in Bristol. Griffiths said he's innocent and his pet had only been urinating when she was spotted on camera.

Brian Clements, a 79-year-old retired teacher from Clacton- on-Sea, south England, said the measures are "like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.''

"Wouldn't the Gestapo have loved all those little cameras,'' he said.

The decent law-abiding citizens who want these cameras have nothing to fear!

As to everyone else, what are you hiding? Only an anti-social misfit would fear law-abiding citizens!

Those who don't like the cameras should simply stay inside their homes.

("Camera 655321 in Sector R has determined a suspicious lack of activity from a home with previously normal patterns. Recommend dispatching an officer for a standard health and welfare search.")

If you think things are bad here now, be patient.