Expansion of Powers

A few indicators of--well, you decide. News out of Britain:

A law passed in 2008 under Gordon Brown’s Labour government allows the government to use money from dormant bank and building-society accounts “for social or environmental purposes.” An account is dormant if the holder has made no transactions over a period of 15 years.

The British Bankers’ Association, a lobby group, estimates that about 400 million pounds ($610 million) is unclaimed in bank accounts. The government will set up a fund to be administered by Co-operative Financial Services that will hand over money to Cameron’s Big Society Bank by the end of this year, the Treasury said. The Co-op expects as much as 100 million pounds to be disbursed.

A senior Labour lawmaker, Tessa Jowell, said in an e-mailed statement that Cameron’s proposals are “simply a brass-necked rebranding of programs already put in place."

News out of Russia:

The upper house of Russia's parliament on Monday passed a bill granting expanded powers to the country's main security agency, a move that critics say echoes the era of the Soviet KGB.

The bill, which now goes to President Dmitry Medvedev to be signed into law, would allow the Federal Security Service to issue warnings to people suspected of preparing to commit crimes against Russia's security.

Human rights and democracy activists say this power could be used to intimidate government opponents and stifle protests.

Might? And news from the US:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Cause this is healthy for a democracy--massive, secret facilities suddenly sprouting up without anyone at the top even really knowing what's going on.