[handelaar]

"Far from authoritarian" ?

She put hundreds of thousands of UK citizens under secret service surveillance for the crime of disagreeing with her government's decisions.

I was one of them. Aged sixteen I walked out of our house on the way to school every morning and passed the fake BT engineer changing the tape in the green switch box outside the house next door, reattaching something to our house phone with crocodile clips.

Mail took weeks to arrive because it was intercepted and read en route. I was stopped for questioning at every border point I passed in Europe until I was in my late 20s.

All this because not being a Thatcherite in Britain in the 1980s made us "enemies of the state".

[hp50g]

Yep. I saw this with my own eyes once. I had a disreputable youth in the 1980s which involved trying to steal linesman sets (for phreaking) from those old yellow BT Bedford vans (anyone remember Busby?)

One of them turned out to be a spook wagon. This was in Islington in north London. Really nearly got in deep shit on that one.

People might think you are nuts but its spot on and its worse now than ever.

[herdrick]

Really? I'd take as given that this is happening now, as it's cheap. But back then? Can you link to some evidence of this?

[DanBC]

ECHELON was revealed by Duncan Campbell in 1988.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(journalist)#E...)

He also wrote a book about the amount of police surveillance going on in the UK.

I hated Thatcher. I wouldn't put the surveillance down to just her. There were plenty of other people involved in making lists and monitoring people. (The building industry would use blacklists of agitators. This was so severe it was one of the drivers for the data protection act, and it was this list that caused the act to be extended to cover non-computerised information too.)

Certainly, it would be odd for people to blame Thatcher for the number of CCTV in the UK now. The UK has about 20% of all the world's CCTV! (I haven't checked this, it was a comment on a Radio 4 news programme so maybe it's nonsense).

[cs02rm0]

Cute story.