Ministers 'using fear of terror' Stella Rimington has often been critical of the government A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Dame Stella Rimington, 73, said people in Britain felt as if they were living "under a police state". Having got snotty about being misrepresented on another thread, that's a pretty disingenuous bit of selective quoting right there. The original quote: For what it's worth, I disagree with the government's restriction of civil liberties, hence the phrase "overly zealous". The point I was making was that this did not make them the worst example of totalitarianism ever. Examples of regimes who gave themselves powers even more drastic than compiling a database would include Stalin's Russia, Cold War East Germany, 1970s Cambodia, 1980s South Africa or today's Zimbabwe. Don't let that get in the way of ever more tiresome rants against the government of the day, though.