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.

In 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. Governments say that they are only trying to protect people from the criminal and the wicked in an age when global terrorism poses a serious threat to “our way of life”. Mr Grayling argues that the malign coincidence of the so-called “war on terror” with a raft of invasive new technologies (from ubiquitous 24-hour CCTV cameras to the massive extension of electronic eavesdropping and all-encompassing databases) has provided both the excuse and the means for an assault on individual freedoms by democratically elected governments.

This is by no means a new argument. For much of the past decade, in both Britain and America, liberal lawyers, civil- liberties lobbies and campaigning journalists have been sounding the alarm. But a certain shrillness of tone and an unwillingness to take sufficiently seriously the ever-present danger of terrorist atrocities of appalling brutality has lessened their impact. And besides, even now many supposedly sensible people lazily believe that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. If a few Koran- toting chaps with beards and funny names get banged up in Guantánamo or have to put up with a “control order” to stay in Britain, so what?

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