Privacy is not "hiding things"

If you listen to politicians and the media when they talk about national security, terrorism, and awful threats from parties unknown then you'll probably have considered where the balance lies between the security of our country to protect itself versus the privacy of individuals to keep the government from seeing things that the government has no need of seeing.

Should individuals, including those bad actors whose aims are to commit acts of terrorism, have the right to hide what they do from the authorities even if that means innocent civilians might die as a result? On the face of it the choice is obvious - the government should be able to look at anything at any time in order to save lives. Saving lives is their priority. The government can't just let innocent people die.

And besides, if you've not got anything to hide then it doesn't even matter if someone sees you. Why hide things that aren't even worth hiding.

Right?

No one knows how many laws the UK has.

There are too many to count. There's the legal statutes in the UK legislation, then there's the by-laws that are set by local government, and there's extra things added by the legal profession when things are decided in court. Add to that already substantial corpus the rules and regulations of government bodies, legal entities, and rules by private corporations that are governed by civil law and there's literally no way to count how many laws we have.

Now ask yourself if you've broken any of those laws today?

It might seem surprising, or not, that the probability that you have is quite high. Someone with a vested interest in what you do, who surveilled you and monitored what you were up to, could probably find something that would at least see you in court if not worse.