It's something of a tradition in British politics to bury bad news on days when public attention is elsewhere. So it was that while the horrified eyes of the world were all turned Stateside, the government quietly slipped its Investigatory Powers Act through Parliament.
A bill the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who knows about these things, calls "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy".
In the words of Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group: “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”
There seems to be a prevailing attitude here that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. But this rather depends on what the definition of "wrong" is - and who exactly is defining it.
How much wrong have the vast majority of America's Muslims done? How much wrong had Germany's Jewish population done in the 1930s? Or the Communists? Or the homosexuals? Or the Gypsies? Or the disabled? Or the mentally ill? How much wrong were those who spoke out in the defence of those groups doing?
The surveillance powers now to be handed to the police and intelligence agencies have been a favourite policy of Theresa May's since she was Home Secretary. But they can't be written off as just a typical Tory policy because the basic plan was drawn up under Tony Blair's supposedly Labour government.
Which may be one reason opposition to the Bill was half-hearted at best. Another, perhaps, is that people have assumed for a long time that spying on the public was routine anyway.
Have you ever felt that Big Brother wasn't watching you? The suspicion is that the new law merely makes legal the sort of thing that's been going on in secret for decades.
And, of course, if you're in the habit of putting everything there is to know about you on social media you really have nothing and nowhere to hide.
You may even feel this doesn't matter too much. That you trust the British government to do the right thing with whatever information it can get its hands on.
But Lib-Dem Lord Strasburger, one of the few Parliamentary voices raised in protest, makes a good point about that. A rather chilling point.
“We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump," he says. "If we do end up with one - and that is not impossible - we have created the tools for repression."
And he adds: “The real Donald Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we should be worried about that.”
Indeed we should.
----
My neighbour stopped me in the street the other day and asked: "What do you think about that Donald Trump, then?" Don't think he reads this blog, my neighbour.
"Oh, please," I said. "I'd rather not think about him at all."
But here we go again. More thoughts about America's president-elect. And if you're sick of the subject, believe me, you cannot wish any more than I do that it would just go away. Sadly - tragically - it's unlikely to be going away any time soon.
I won't waste your time or my emotion reciting again here all the reasons why Trump's election is a major catastrophe. If you've been paying attention at all lately, you know that already.
But Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of humanity's descent into hell in a handcart. And if we really are heading for some very dark times indeed - as I fear we are - it shouldn't seem so hard to believe.
The recent decades of relative affluence and comfort here in what's called the West are the anomaly. Our generation, and the one above, are arguably the most fortunate people the world has seen - or we have been up to now.
History is full of periods and places when life has been nasty and brutish by the standards you and I think of as normal. The new normal, like the old normal - and the normal now in many parts of the world - is not as pleasant as our normal.
People may tell you we owe our relative comfort to democracy. But democracy brought us Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Putin... and Trump.
"I'm more worried about Brexit," my neighbour told me. "Brexit's the destruction of my country forever - Trump is only for four years."
But an awful lot of damage can be done in four years (see the list of names above).
As I explained last week, I don't expect Trump personally to preside even that long. But there's no guarantee at all that the sea change he represents isn't the start of something much longer-lasting. Something capable of seriously harming the whole world, not just the USA.
A bill the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who knows about these things, calls "the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy".
In the words of Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group: “The UK now has a surveillance law that is more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy. The state has unprecedented powers to monitor and analyse UK citizens’ communications regardless of whether we are suspected of any criminal activity.”
There seems to be a prevailing attitude here that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from surveillance. But this rather depends on what the definition of "wrong" is - and who exactly is defining it.
How much wrong have the vast majority of America's Muslims done? How much wrong had Germany's Jewish population done in the 1930s? Or the Communists? Or the homosexuals? Or the Gypsies? Or the disabled? Or the mentally ill? How much wrong were those who spoke out in the defence of those groups doing?
The surveillance powers now to be handed to the police and intelligence agencies have been a favourite policy of Theresa May's since she was Home Secretary. But they can't be written off as just a typical Tory policy because the basic plan was drawn up under Tony Blair's supposedly Labour government.
Which may be one reason opposition to the Bill was half-hearted at best. Another, perhaps, is that people have assumed for a long time that spying on the public was routine anyway.
Have you ever felt that Big Brother wasn't watching you? The suspicion is that the new law merely makes legal the sort of thing that's been going on in secret for decades.
And, of course, if you're in the habit of putting everything there is to know about you on social media you really have nothing and nowhere to hide.
You may even feel this doesn't matter too much. That you trust the British government to do the right thing with whatever information it can get its hands on.
But Lib-Dem Lord Strasburger, one of the few Parliamentary voices raised in protest, makes a good point about that. A rather chilling point.
“We do have to worry about a UK Donald Trump," he says. "If we do end up with one - and that is not impossible - we have created the tools for repression."
And he adds: “The real Donald Trump has access to all the data that the British spooks are gathering and we should be worried about that.”
Indeed we should.
----
My neighbour stopped me in the street the other day and asked: "What do you think about that Donald Trump, then?" Don't think he reads this blog, my neighbour.
"Oh, please," I said. "I'd rather not think about him at all."
But here we go again. More thoughts about America's president-elect. And if you're sick of the subject, believe me, you cannot wish any more than I do that it would just go away. Sadly - tragically - it's unlikely to be going away any time soon.
I won't waste your time or my emotion reciting again here all the reasons why Trump's election is a major catastrophe. If you've been paying attention at all lately, you know that already.
But Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of humanity's descent into hell in a handcart. And if we really are heading for some very dark times indeed - as I fear we are - it shouldn't seem so hard to believe.
The recent decades of relative affluence and comfort here in what's called the West are the anomaly. Our generation, and the one above, are arguably the most fortunate people the world has seen - or we have been up to now.
History is full of periods and places when life has been nasty and brutish by the standards you and I think of as normal. The new normal, like the old normal - and the normal now in many parts of the world - is not as pleasant as our normal.
People may tell you we owe our relative comfort to democracy. But democracy brought us Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Putin... and Trump.
"I'm more worried about Brexit," my neighbour told me. "Brexit's the destruction of my country forever - Trump is only for four years."
But an awful lot of damage can be done in four years (see the list of names above).
As I explained last week, I don't expect Trump personally to preside even that long. But there's no guarantee at all that the sea change he represents isn't the start of something much longer-lasting. Something capable of seriously harming the whole world, not just the USA.
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