Restoration 10:10

Poole Borough Council in Dorset England has come under criticism for spying on a family to find out if they were lying about living in a school catchment area. The family were put under surveillance in their home as well as having their daily movements monitored. The spying has been described as ‘ridiculously disproportionate’. But is it? Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but we’re living in a spy culture? One week previously BT were forced to admit that they had been spying on 36,000 broadband customers. Social networking sites like FaceBook and Myspace are being trawled by Canadian civil servants to look for any evidence of benefit fraud.

"Facebook or MySpace, yeah, depending on what kind of allegations are brought to our attention, we might use that to follow up on a complaint," said a Provincial Government spokesman. Let’s face it, covert surveillance is a normal part of everyday life. Local councils, commercial companies, customs and tax departments are all infiltrating our private lives and extracting information for their own purposes. But before we get paranoid about the Big Brother State, we should consider a recent Oxford report. It says that online spousal spying is wide spread. One in five married UK couples admits to electronic snooping on their spouses. Is everyone just nosey or doesn’t anyone trust anyone anymore?