Is the EU becoming nationalist/fascist/undemocratic?

[auroraglacialis]

But I think it is a problem if everyone but some who are aware of the issues just lets things go as they do. Sometimes, awareness is high enoug - like in Germany when 100.000 people went on the streets to protest data retention laws and a subsequent lawsuit in the supreme constitutional court resulted in a retraction of that law. But at the same time 2 or 3 other major issues went ahead (electronic RFID passports, centralized medical data collection,...). I really fear that we are loosing here, not winning. 20 years ago, the percentage of privacy-aware people in so many areas was higher than it is now. People protested the census back then - nowadays there are just a few concerned voices. Yes, the "pirate party" has won 7% of votes and thus has entered the parliament in one of germanies states last week, that is a good sign in terms of the reflection of the awareness of voters of the privacy issues which was one of their main political themes, but I feel somehow that Germany is not really the norm here. If there is something I like about the German society, it is that the people are overall more aware of the problematic issues that threaten the world and the ideas of a free society. Maybe because Germany has experienced two totalitarian states and it has experienced the effects of pollution and overburdening industrialization early on. We had the NAZIs, the STASI, completely toxified rivers, forests dying of acid rain and fallout from Chernobyl. Maybe it is no wonder that antifascism and environmentalism are not as weak as elsewhere here...
But still - I observed the trends over the past 20 years and looking bad I see that the trend is not encouraging, that things seem to rather decay than to progress towards something positive. Not all is bad and not all is gloom and doom, there are many good people out there trying to keep civil liberties, freedom and democracy alive and the environment safe. But if I go around the street and ask people if they heard about TOR, they probably would in >>90% of the cases direct me to the nearest city gate (Stadt-tor) and not to a computer program and for GNUs, they probably tell me to go to Africa. If I send someone random a PGP encrypted email, I will not get a reply (heck sor some even opening a HTML email is a challenge). We spread flyers and stickers making fun of pseudosafety measures like CCTV or try to make people aware of horrible internet laws, but I still feel this is not enough and we are still loosing. You in the UK have already lost, I think. If I'd have to travel to the UK, I'd probably have a strange feeling in my stomach. I would not take my laptop with me (as they can force me to give away my password for the encryption), I would feel watched by CCTV wherever I go and try to spot the cameras and I would try to always use a proxy or TOR when available to go on the internet. But what do people complain about who live there? That THEIR neighborhood has not yet enough CCTV cameras. W T F...