"If the people of Eastern Europe had been subject to the same level of surveillance and control that is now being proposed in the UK, the Berlin Wall would still be standing today. With everyone's fingerprints and DNA on a government database, all protesters would have faced immediate arrest and imprisonment. Here, it's already against the law to protest within a mile of Parliament. That's not the kind of world I want for my children." Pippa King, privacy campaigner.  
 
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? So how would you feel if your neighbours opened all your letters and read them? Yet the state scans everyone's emails on a daily basis, under powers granted by the Regulation Of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). Since 2003, the Act has been extended so that tens of thousands of government officials (even jobcentres and local councils) now have the power to snoop at will, without your knowledge or consent, and they can also see full details of all the websites you've ever visited.  
 

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? A warning from history. In 1939, the German government conducted a census of all persons living in Germany. Census takers recorded each person's age, sex, residence, profession, religion, and marital status, and for the first time, they also listed the person's race as traced through his or her grandparents. This information was later punched into coded cards by thousands of clerks.

The cards were sorted and counted by the Hollerith machine, an early version of the modern computer. The Hollerith was invented in 1884 by a German-American engineer, Herman Hollerith. The machine was used in the United States and by most European governments for processing census data in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Holleriths used by the Germans were developed by a German branch of the American company later known as International Business Machines (IBM). The information from the 1939 census helped Nazi official Adolf Eichmann to create the Jewish Registry, containing detailed information on all Jews living in Germany. The Registry also recorded the names of Jews in Austria and the Sudetenland of western Czechoslovakia, which were occupied by German troops in 1938 and 1939 and made part of the Reich (German empire). Nazi racial ideology and policies did not stop at Germany's borders.

source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum http://www.ushmm.org

After he was captured in 1960 and put on trial, Adolf Eichmann confessed to his executioner that "the fate of those killed in the Holocaust was sealed by their answers to the 1939 census on religious background recorded on paper for a Hollerith machine, an early mechanical computer. Quite literally, their cards were marked." In fact, all that citizens had to do to defeat the final solution was to avoid registration on the Hollerith cards. Just not be there when the census taker called. Once the holes were punched, Eichmann said, their fates were sealed.

source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2144204,00.html The Times, April 21, 2006

"When Bob received questionnaires at his office asking him to report if he, or anyone in his family was Jewish, we read them together, and I can still see his expression of disgust as he picked them up by the corner, opened the cover of our potbellied stove, and let them slowly fall into the fire. “ What are you going to do now?”, I asked. And he said “ I'm not going to fill out anything, and neither are you. I don't want to have anything to do with this, and whatever happens to us, we'll see.” ... I believed it was a cardinal error for people to report themselves for fear that otherwise someone else might."

" Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper, Holocaust survivor, whose husband's actions probably saved her life.

source: The last seven months of Anne Frank, Willy Lindwer, page 44 (Macmillan 1988 & 1991 ISBN 0 333 77965 7)

A dozen more reasons why "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" is a blueprint for dictatorship