Botnets are convenient enemies, providing justification for the introduction of spyware and restrictions on computers.
Walter and Amelia have good posts on the subject, particularly in South Korea.
South Korea, it seems, is further along a path that can be expected also in Europe and elsewhere. The country’s infrastructure has repeatedly been attacked by botnet-fuelled DDoS. These attacks strengthened demand for official regulation:
Popular support is rising for a helpful Zombie PC Act giving a government-controlled authority the mandate to access and scrutinize commercial, official and private datasystems. The authortity will help the government determine if the system is infected by any potential virus. Lacking appropriate anti-virus software shall, according to the bill, lead to repercussions.
That is, there would be a requirement for official intervention in every computer. With intervention comes inspection. And thus, the threat to alarm the paranoid — a sideways approach by which governments could seize computers. Walter:
Your computer may become a target for a serach (and seizure) just because it is a computer. The cherry on the cake is of course that we also should expect governmental bodies to take enough care that backdoors installed for this very purpose will not be abused by those very nefarious people, the Zombie-operators, it aims to fight. To quote Top Gear: what could possibly go wrong?
ETA
: Amelia has another post, laying all this out much more clearly.