Ian M Banks, 1954-2013 RIP

Ian M Banks passes from cancer. Banks a prolific British author who is celebrated for his fiction but I know him best for his science fiction, specifically "The Culture", an evilly benign utopian world :

"The Culture is characterised by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others." Wiki

"Law abiding citizens have nothing to fear".

--Foreign Secretary William Hague responds to the NSA's clandestine recording and analysing of global communications