Henry Porter believes that 2009 was a bad year for civil liberties.
It was not all bad news though as there was an increase in the levels of awareness about the erosion of civil liberties as more and more people became affected by the encroachment.
One particular example is the large number of innocent people in the DNA database and the great difficulties and apparent postcode lottery in getting oneself expunged from the database. Damian Green writes that DNA retention hampers policing.