Paying the price

摘要

Five years ago, Britain's newly appointed information commissioner, Richard Thomas, gave warning that the public was in danger of "sleepwalking into a surveillance society". Last week, as he prepared to leave office, he claimed that although he had not been able to halt the tidal wave of official intrusion into the private lives of citizens, he did believe that people's eyes were now open and that, consequently, the nation's rulers had become more aware of the need to balance security with liberty. A.C. Grayling is far less sanguine.rnIn his latest book, the professor of philosophy at London's Birkbeck College deploys all his polemical powers to show that there has been no let-up in the erosion of hard-won civil liberties.