Re: dan1980
@Matt
"Way of life" means the way you live your life. It is not just confined to, say, living in a modern, technologically-advanced society with stocked supermarkets, clean water and good living conditions. That's important, but it's much, much more than that.
It's the freedoms you have and the mental and emotional state that you have as well as the worries and concerns that afflict you.
While you may be different, it cause me real and genuine mental anguish when I think of how much of my life is laid bare to our governments and their spy agencies and, for that matter, many government organisations that ask for (and receive) access to that data.
While it may cause no specific, physical issues or problems, knowing that my privacy is not valued by the people with the power to deprive me of it makes me, for want of a better term, unhappy. It causes me stress and anxiety and prompts me to conduct my life differently, with one eye always on how much data I am revealing about myself.
Even if nothing tangible comes from it, most people want to know that what they do and say and think* is reasonably private and not searchable in a big database by some government official a thousand miles away who has never met them and has no reason to suspect them of any wrong-doing or even suspicious activity.
In a way, it's the presumption of innocence - we expect to be left to live our lives in peace and privacy without being a constant and continual person of interest to our governments and police agencies.
Again, maybe none of this matters to you, and that is fine, but it would nearly unimaginably ignorant for you to assume that because you don't mind, no one else does or should either.
It's also somewhat narrow to say that there won't be any future encroachments building on these intrusions that even you would have to agree constituted a change in you 'way of life'.
AND, it's rather naive to think that the only people being affected by these regimes are 'criminals'. You definition may be so wide as to make even the smallest infraction 'criminal' but, legally, not every illegal/unlawful act is a CRIMINAL offence. My point is that if you think only CRIMINAL offences are targeted then you are poorly informed.
Even then, many things that are criminal are hardly a national security/think-of-the-children issue, which has been - almost without exception - the justification for these intrusions, including by people like you, as evidenced by your list of people who should be worried.
Take social security/benefit fraud, where someone dishonestly claims and receives benefits. In some countries this is actually a criminal offence, depending on the exact nature of the fraud. Now, it's certainly wrong and certainly a drain on the economy and no one wants their tax dollars going to lazy cheats. BUT, it is hardly the sort of thing that could possibly justify the mass collection, storage and analysis of any and all data by our governments.
Likewise copyright violations. In some areas that can be a criminal offence but not in others (again. depending on exact circumstances) but these data retention and collection and access laws are most certainly used to police this.
The point to this all is not so much that the data is collected by the government - that is a separate issue - but that this data, which was explained as necessary to 'combat terrorism' and 'keep our nation safe', is now being used for much, much less serious issues and is done so with far, far less restrictions and scrutiny that the sensitivity of that data warrants.
* - Yes, 'think'. It has been shown through the 'big data' collections and analytics that have become almost mandatory these days that if you have enough information about people you can, within an acceptable margin of error, predict what they will do. Certainly, with simply a full Internet browsing history, you can make high-probability guesses about a number of things that many people rightly consider no one else's business - political affiliation, sexual orientation and preference, hobbies, favourite foods, where they like to go on the weekend, what type of shoes they wear, what medical conditions they have - and much, much more, both mundane and important. You can profile someone with scary accuracy with enough information, and this is, in fact, what is done.