Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance?

nytimes.com

78 pointslelf80 comments

What a trite article. To claim that the British are complacent about state surveillance because we all perceive ourselves as "royal subjects" smacks of fire-starting by a Guardian columnist desperately trying to draw attention to his newspaper's position to gather more readers.

There are a number of factors why this is less of an issue in the UK than it is here in North America, including:

1. Brits fundamentally trust their government more - not politics, but the concept that a state government exists first and foremost for the good of the people is more prevalent in the UK.

2. The influence of special interest groups and corporate electioneering is much more muted in the UK.

3. As someone else mentioned, CCTV cameras in themselves are not bad - most are privately operated and NOT linked to a central government data store.

4. As someone mentions in the article comments, the UK has been a target of terrorism for much longer than the US.

5. Increased education levels in the British armed forces, garner more confidence in the military to do the morally correct thing given a tough decision.

6. Britain is institutionally far more liberal than the US with less interference in policy from religious extremists and a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention tantamount to constitution (given the choice I'd rather have a country that is self-restraining and no constitution than a constitution that restrains, but a government that looks for ways to usurp it).

This is not to say that there is not a worry about civil liberties in the UK - you only have to look at the furore about the proposed introduction ID cards a couple of years back to see that the Brits care a lot about civil liberties, they just see the threats in different terms.

I agree with most of your points, except for these two:

> Britain [has] less interference in policy from religious extremists [than the US]

This seems a slightly rose-tinted view of British history. I would argue Britain actually has more interference in policy from religious extremists than the US. What would you call the Lords Spiritual (the 26 seats in the House of Lords reserved for Anglican Bishops) if not religious interference in policy?

Or how about Section 28, which was proposed and pushed through primarily by religious groups? US government policy is frequently influenced by religion, but the separation of Church and State tempers this, and the Supreme Court has frequently overturned legislation that has been drawn up with religious influence (and indeed, directly overturned legislation that actively promotes religion in state institutions). In the UK the church is the state.

You only have to look at the recent issues surrounding gay marriage (versus civil partnerships) in the UK to see there is religious interference in governmental policy.

> a history of judges making activist decisions in order to preserve civil liberties where legislation threatens to undermine established convention

I would argue the US has an equally strong history of this, and the current Supreme Court system in the UK owes a lot to the US. Indeed, I think the etymology of the phrase 'activist judge' stems from the US, not the UK.

I'm not arguing for or against the Lords Spiritual, but the Church of England is probably the most liberal wishy-washy organised religion there is.

I don't think any Lords Spiritual (whom one would be hard-pressed to qualify as extremists in any case), or other Lords for that matter, could be construed as having significant influence on Parliament.

We don't have the massive (and perfectly legal!) campaign contributions from religious groups that the US does. While less direct than the lords spiritual, I think those are much more influential on the whole.

And while the Church of England and Lords Spiritual may be many things, extremist they certainly are not.

In much of the US atheists are forbidden from holding many electe offices. This is not true in the UK. Fretting over the Lords Spiritual and their lately ceremonial role is to misunderstand the nature of political power and the lack thereof vested in the House of Lords, and in particular the non-party-political members.

Nowhere in the US are atheists explicitly forbidden from holding a government position as that would be a flagrant and obvious violation of the First Amendment. In many places they certainly won't be voted for if they admit their religious position in public.

> In much of the US atheists are forbidden from holding many electe offices.

This is ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if there were laws on the books dating back to the 1800s as Wikipedia states, but no way are they being enforced, the first time they try would spell the end of any such law.

Now, atheists may well be unelectable for many offices, but that's neither here nor there.

Definitely, distinctions without differences are neither here nor there.

Are you just trying to sound smart?

Forbidden? That's completely untrue. Unelectable, certainly. Atheist are the most mistrusted group in American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=in-atheists...

Interesting. For myself, as a Brit, I agree with the points above except this one:

2. The influence of special interest groups and corporate electioneering is much more muted in the UK.

... I suspect we are actually beholden to special interests, but due to the nature of secrecy in government, we don't hear as much about it.

Many of us don't willingly accept the level of surveillance that we now know is happening. Unfortunately, our electoral system is very much an all-or-nothing proposition, and therefore who holds power tends to be dominated by how the major parties deal with a very small number of issues that can each have a big effect on a lot of people.

Other than right after an event like the 7/7 bombings, neither national security nor civil liberties get anywhere near the top of most people's lists. Those people are too busy hoping they have a job next week, or trying to get the best possible education for their kids, or worrying about the quality of care that sick or elderly family members are receiving, or wondering if they'll ever be able to buy a home somewhere they really want to live.

All the main political parties in the UK obviously understand this, and that means policy on other issues is dominated by concerns other than the immediate will of the electorate. In some cases, it's special interest groups. In this particular case, there's probably some of that going on, but there's also the politics of fear, where no-one wants to be the guy who didn't vote for something security-related if the next horror happens on their watch.

This is a horrible situation if you are a citizen who believes the threats are overstated or the privacy concerns are dangerous, but it's a rational response -- indeed, it's probably the only rational response -- under our current political system, and that's why basically every major party here is reluctant to oppose these kinds of infringements too strongly.

I think a major reason for the indifference is ignorance. Many people here in the UK are not well informed on this issue. I'm shocked at how many people I've spoken to about this and they're only hearing it for the first time. Apart from the Guardian no major news outlet that I have seen has given this scandal any prominence. They have mostly acquiesced with the recommendation from our security services that they don't report on this issue. In my opinion another scandal in itself.

Another factor may be that people in this country don't think the risk of tyranny returning as credible. They don't believe that the danger posed by mass surveillance will ever be anything but hypothetical, that somehow a free society is our national destiny. This shocking complacency manages to both totally ignore human nature and the lesson from almost every history book ever written.

As a country I really hope we get real about these issues and that we stop taking our hard won civil liberties for granted. Ultimately they're the only things that can be trusted to truly protect our democracy.

I think to the contrary that Brits, an Europeans in general are vastly more sensitive to the threat of nazi-style or communist-like government - and corporate - oppression than Americans who are, by and large, complacent on this topic despite all the anti-government rhetoric you hear. As a result governments can't get away with as much because people watch closely. Combine this with the greater sense that the government runs the provision of critical services like healthcare and people have a better relationship with their government so fight over what matters, and there tends to be a good sense of what that is. Also the British political system is far more responsive to the electorate than is the US system which famously has less churn among elected officials than the old soviet politburo. This means that the electorate has more confidence in its ability to effect change.

Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. When humans lived in clans and tribes, everybody knew everyone else's business, including the leaders. Today, that social surveillance network still exists (tips given to police, etc.) but in a degraded form now that people live more individually.

People instinctively dislike spying because they want to be in control of their own PR (social status), and secrecy gives them advantage even while it hurts society as a whole due to information asymmetries. Gossip networks tend to distort the true picture as well. This, humans evolved to protect their own secrets while simultaneously snooping and gossiping on their neighbors.

However, living in an organized society involves compromise for the greater good, and community surveillance is one of those compromises. One might as well ask why the Brits accept paying taxes. Instinctively, you hate to part with your money, but you must do it.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Mass surveillance is a terrible idea not because of the potential for personal embarrassment but rather for the countless ways it can go very wrong.

Other ideas have the potential of going very wrong, it's in the implementation, which sounds like a challenge worth attempting to take

What for? A tiny bump in crime fighting efficacy? I assure you, there are many other more cost effective ways to do that.

Mass surveillance is the natural state of man.

So is beating up your weak neighbour to take his food for your dinner. We're supposed to be more civilised than that by now.

No, that's what law is for.

Look at any of the half dozen recent "whoops, you weren't a founder after all" legal kurfuffles removing millions of dollars from people ("ex-friends, now enemies").

and laws are created by a civilised society.

How is everybody being spied on by a very small minority information symmetry?

However, permanent record is in no way the natural state of man. The problem of constant surveillance now is problematic, but only to a limited extent because of how surprisingly not evil the people watching are; black bags and public executions are reserved for people with funny skin and strange religions in far away places. However, there is an even bigger problem in that the surveillance record stays. It follows us around forever. Any mistake or error you make will haunt you til the rest of your days.

People are forgetful, but less forgiving. If you "fix" forgetfulness, and make memory of your actions eternal and immortal, you destroy second chances.

It follows us around forever. Any mistake or error you make will haunt you til the rest of your days.

I can't help but think that we've crossed that bridge, and that in the near future everything about anyone will forever be obtainable. Avoiding this situation will require collaboration around safeguarding individual privacy on a scale we haven't accomplished up to now.

> However, there is an even bigger problem in that the surveillance record stays. It follows us around forever. Any mistake or error you make will haunt you til the rest of your days.

Well, Google certainly retains things for longer than NSA or GCHQ does, and in any event you're describing a problem that is not new or peculiar to the Internet.

Anon is already quite fond of reminding us that "The Internet Does Not Forget". They mean this in regard to the actions of states or corporations, but the shoe does apply to the other foot.

Likewise the government already maintains permanent private and public records on many people as a matter of course.

The Germans have a very insightful legal structure on data privacy which basically forbids both collection of needless data and retention past relatively short timeframes, but I suspect that it will eventually become yet another way of trying to wash away reality via the law, as we see so often in the U.S. The Internet has popped the data genie well and truly out of its bottle, and it's high time we came to grips with that.

> If you "fix" forgetfulness, and make memory of your actions eternal and immortal, you destroy second chances.

Not at all. The correct action is in any event to allow for second chances fully appreciating that the person has previous faults. For starters it's only fair; none of us are perfect. But also, we already live in a world where people end up with scarlet letters and so it is already necessary (not simply a good idea, but required) the the law and society both are able to give people second chances.

If we can't already give second chances then we have much bigger problems to solve as a society. If we can give second chances already then the idea of our mistakes being captured can simply become a new normal, just like cell phones replaced landlines and automobiles replaced the horse and buggy.

What you describe - with everyone knowing everyone else's business - is not mass surveillance. Surveillance is "watching from above", that is the observation of individuals by those higher up the hierarchy of power. By extension, mass surveillance is this but applied to a significantly large segment of the population.

That's hand waving. Mass surveillance is not the natural state of "man." You have an cartoonish or idealized view of history and oversimplifying to make some point that doesn't quite make it.

Some of the commentators on the original article also pointed this out.

We've been facing domestic and foreign terrorism for a very long time. We found our societal balance for freedom and security some time ago.

If anything the Internet and commercial surveillance for marketing purposes are the things that have disturbed the balance rather than the previously accepted concept that we are surveilled by the state in every public and private forum.

Written down it sounds terrible but it works in practice.

Yep there are places in the uk (NI) even today civil servants and others considered "crown" agents have personal protection weapon licenses.

I think the fundamental difference UK versus USA, is that it is very hard to inflame passions in the UK about abstractions. Concrete examples of abuse are needed to arouse our ire, and we only get angry at the actual abuse, not the potential for it. So for example, we get more annoyed about police undercover spies having sex under false pretences, than about the fact that there were police undercover spies in peaceful protest groups (despite the fact that is clearly egregious overkill and bad for democracy).

It depends on the surveillance.

GCHQ slurping all my data doesn't have much negative effect. But some of the surveillance the Americans go through isn't okay here - drug testing in the workplace is limited for example.

And GCHQ's slurped data is tricky for law enforcement to use, which is why there's been a debate about changes to the law to allow (or not) collection of metadata by domestic law enforcement agencies.

Drug tests and credit checks in the workplace always struck me as being screwed up.

Yes its only really jobs requiring DV clearance that do the drug test thing - though Amazon is requiring it for warehouse workers which is taking the piss they really need to lose a court case over that.

Really? Not in my experience. I lived in Texas a few years and every job seemed to require drug testing and often credit checks. I always wondered why folks just didn't say fuck you but once I'd lived there a while I learned that in those parts of the country where people like to talk about freedom and independence they sure like to accept their obedient roles when it comes to companies telling them to jump.

The article completely glosses over the fact that the reason for the media silence is the D-Notice (officially DA-Notice but no-one calls them that) in effect. This is a 'voluntary scheme' in which the government asks the media not to cover a story on the grounds of national security, but really it's only voluntary if you don't mind having your access to government more or less killed off, which for most news outlets is a no-no. Only the Guardian has the balls to stand up on this one, and you've seen what's happened with shadowy goons destroying laptops, people detained at airports and the attempts at intimidating the editor.

And the fact that the media have been grossly hacking and spying on the public - the media in the uk dont have the rosy view of "journalists" that the USA has.

People are more concerned about shady media moguls and the importation of invasive hr practices that for example amazon are doing in the uk.

And we dont have the paranoid style that infects the USA political discourse.

I think it's because it rarely directly affects the majority of people in a negative way, so it's hard to notice what the problems with over-surveillance might be. Also, we hear about the good that comes from surveillance - such as preventing and punishing crimes - more than we hear about the bad that comes from it.

That will always play a role in situations like these. However, you can see things are turning around in US, at least with the population.

I think the issue in UK is the old "boiling the frog" theory. They've gotten used to it, they've embraced it, so now they aren't particularly in a rush to throw stones at it.

But that's the population. The article already mentions why nobody in the Parliament says anything bad against it - the opposition started all of this, and the others are in power.

I do think the lack of a proper Constitution is also a major problem for UK. For example, in US, whenever someone tries to stop you from speaking, you can easily point to the 1st Amendment and say it's your damn right to say anything you want, even if it's scary law enforcement people. In UK, you don't really have anything like that, so people may "feel" something is wrong - but in comparison to what?! They haven't really put the principles on paper. It's all pretty vague and it's hard to get angry at a vague target.

This is a a classic tyranny of the majority situation. One way to think of it is the difference between a mere democracy and a principled, civilised society. The former is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. To get to the latter, you need three animals to decide on the dinner arrangements before they know which of them is the sheep.

There is exactly something like that in the UK. Freedom of speech has long been a Common Law, with centuries of precedence.

Not only that, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarentees freedom of expression, which was incorporated in the UK as part of the Human Rights Act 1998.

Learning more on the subject will help you greatly.

I'm not convinced by the idea that surveillance in Britain is worse than in America or other first world countries.

Yes there are a lot of CCTV cameras, there are a lot in most American cities too, in both cases most of them are operated privately.

What is different is that Britain has a much higher population density, so the surveillance appears more obvious, and makes for some skewed stats.

As for GCHQ, I would be surprised if they were notably worse than the NSA when it comes to snooping.

This is disappointingly poor for Jonathan Freedland. The most remarkable thing about the session he cites was how unremarkable it was; no one expected any great revelations and no one got any, as even Freedland himself said in a radio interview on the BBC after the session. It was just a bit of theatre.

The argument about CCTV cameras as evidence of complacency about surveillance seems silly and tired to me, as silly as an article would be in a British newspaper that concluded that Americans are obsessed with killing each other on the basis of gun ownership rates vs the UK. They're not, of course, the overwhelming majority of gun owners do not buy them with the intention of killing another person.

Likewise, the one camera per 11 people crops up a lot and (as far as I know, having a small interest in the actual figure) no groups trying to find evidence for it since have managed to do so, in fact the most high profile study that investigated the number concluded that there were 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M were fixed and publicly owned, and 0.12 were on public transport. [1]

That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial premises, just as you might be put off from robbing a convenience store in the US in the knowledge that the store-owner might be armed, here it's completely normal to see signs outside a shop saying "These premises are protected by CCTV" - note the use of the word protected - and indeed most hardware shops will have this sign in stock right next to the 'no smoking' signs. They're there so you can give something to the insurance company and if lucky there will be something to help the police get an ID. I find their presence as much a threat to civil liberty as dash-cams are to the civil liberty of the average russian.

Likewise stuff is called 'Her Majesty's $FOO' for entirely vestigial, historical reasons. When Obama says 'God Bless America' at the end of every speech we don't honestly think that he's designed a policy whose success is contingent upon divine intervention, jokes about healthcare.gov aside.

There are differences in the relationship between people and their state in the UK vs other places just because of different evolutionary paths (socially rather than biologically!). For instance, an American economist friend expressed surprise that we didn't have a legal separation of church and state, and how dangerous it was, and how we should get one like in America. Well, people here are just not that religious in comparison to the US, and my experience of the US is that the church has enormously more influence over US politics than it does in the UK anyway, despite the law. It's just not really a thing here. I'm sure if a modern British Prime Minister were to say 'God Bless the UK' at the end of a speech he'd be sectioned under the mental health act, and the PR people would go into overdrive to explain that he didn't really mean it. Similarly, If UK employers were to switch to a policy of only allowing two weeks holiday per year, and why not add random drugs tests while we're at it, there would be riots at the outrageous and dangerous attempt at enslavement of the population, and the government would likely be overthrown if it failed to act. I use these just as an example to illustrate the differences in what's considered important, and of what people are vigilant, between the two nations.

"Many Brits accept the old securocrat formulation: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. " Do they? I don't think I've met that many people who think that - maybe I just move in the wrong circles - but my most prominent encounter with that sentiment was as an argument whose flaws we had to point out in a Critical Thinking class homework at secondary (ages 13-18) school, as part of one of the national school syllabuses.

I'm very worried about state surveillance, it's a constant fight, and while I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards and 90 days detention without trial - were rightly defeated, I'm under no illusions about winning a battle vs winning a war. But you have to pick your battles, and the reason I think this article is guff is because it misidentifies what to fight, and plays up to superficial and lazy observations of the UK from outside, as if to appeal to its intended audience. All that's missing is a reference to bad teeth.

Like I said, surprisingly bad from Mr Freedland, who otherwise has been quite eloquent on the subject, I think.

[1] http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv

Edit: typo.

> I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards

Maybe I'm not thinking very creatively but I don't see the problem with national ID cards, could you elaborate?

National ID cards are generally associated with either:

a) Enabling every company or organisation to learn everything about you. e.g. a bank can know about your health care or education because the one ID you gave them for your financial services actually unlocks access to all others. This is why discrete identifiers for each service is preferred, despite the hassle or redundancy.

b) If carrying the ID on you becomes mandatory, it becomes a reason to needlessly arrest young people who have committed no real crime (because no one carries a passport sized ID with them everywhere they go)

A lot of it is cultural and propaganda related.

Remember how we (well Americans) used to joke during the Cold War how in repressive regimes people had to carry papers and then at each checkpoint a guard would stop and ask "papers please".

Americans have been proud to be the opposite of that. We are "free" people, we have "privacy" at work here, nothing or nobody restricts our freedom of actions. Government is all elected by the power of the people and they fear us, not us fearing them. Anyway that explains why that is a sore point, it tingles the cognitive dissonance nerve quite a bit.

So now if you move from state to state, you have to get a new license and that becomes your ID. Coupled with your social security card. Coupled with all the crap Facebook, Google, and Choicepoint has on you. Coupled of course with NSA registering every number you call. All those things have raised eyebrows at various times, but well at we can say "we don't have government mandated papers to carry" and that is why when government mandated papers appear in conversation people get all upset. Nevermind that effectively all the privacy is lost and it doesn't really matter and it would probably make many things a lot simpler if we just one national "driver's license equivalent".

Being resident in China, I learned by some means that I was legally expected to have my passport on me at all times. Do I actually carry it around with me? Of course not; that would be a good way to lose it (which, unlike just not having it with you, will severely aggravate the government).

Just the fact that you're officially supposed to carry papers with you doesn't indicate much.

Right. We Israelis have National ID cards and National ID Numbers, the number being printed on your driver's license if you choose to carry that instead.

Both cards are small, fit inside any adult's wallet (and children aren't required to carry), and just overall tend to make dealing with any kind of officialdom massively easier than it was in the USA. Why? Because my National ID links to an Interior Ministry database about things like, for instance, my residential address.

So rather than having to provide several different pieces of official documentation to prove local residency and some others to prove citizenship, I provide one card which then proves both residency and citizenship and entitles me to the services of my municipal government and the local branch of the Interior Ministry, while also unifying all official identity records under one number.

Strangely enough, there have not been mass purges of Israeli Communists or anything. I should know, having been to a few party meetings.

because it leads to restricting movement, ie interstate checkpoints

> Likewise stuff is called 'Her Majesty's $FOO' for entirely vestigial, historical reasons.

Although the notion of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' is indeed vestigial, it still has modern day implications. For instance, the majority of the public sector in the UK (Police, NHS, HRMC, etc) are Civil Servants, except for the British Intelligence Services (BSS, SIS, GCHQ, (what was) SOCA) which are technically Crown Servants. This makes them reportable to the Crown rather than the current government. This may sound like hair-splitting but it allows the intelligence services to avoid the brutal austerity that is being inflicted on most of the civil service; indeed we have had guaranteed pay rises for the last few years.

Assuming you actually do work for GCHQ, would you mind elaborating (briefly, and without violating official secrets) why you've chosen to work for GCHQ, and how you feel about the Snowden leaks?

Does the level of spying targeted at the population bother you, or do you feel it's justified? If you're not able to answer this question -- e.g. it may implicitly confirm official secrets -- then would you mind briefly summing up how happy you are working for GCHQ post-Snowden?

The majority of GCHQs recruitment is done at a graduate level and I expect most graduates don't give too much thought to the moral implications of GCHQ's mission. If you ignore the moral questions of GCHQ's role, most of news.yc can see why GCHQ is an interesting place to work. Everything is available there: 'big data', processing data at line speed, security work in CESG, building custom hardware, crypto work, liaison with industry, involvement in operations etc. Hell, there's even lots of J2EE development to keep you occupied.

I think the question of targeting populations is perhaps missing the point. Only a tiny minority of GCHQ is actually aware of what we are capable of (and I include myself in the unwashed majority). For example, only a tiny number of people are briefed onto BULLRUN, most analysts are (were) unaware of where that data actually comes from. And an even smaller number are privy to how that data is actually acquired. I perhaps sound like I'm dodging the question but I don't think most employees of GCHQ feel like they are "spying [on] the population". They are simply getting on with their job (something something Godwin). Although Lobban's performance at the ISC public hearing was pretty woeful, his point about needles and haystacks is still valid; we simply haven't got the man hours to find the needles, nevermind go trawling through the haystack.

"post-Snowden" is certainly interesting :)

Thanks a lot for the in-depth reply!

It's interesting, because I think most people seem to assume that the power dynamics of working at GCHQ is somehow fundamentally different to those of a private company: because GCHQ spies on the public and is above us in power, everyone at GCHQ must also be on some sort of equal 'spy-level' footing and equally aware of what's going on. Of course this obviously isn't true, and I expect it's much as you describe i.e. it's like a regular company where no-one really knows anything above their pay grade.

Also -- assuming you've not already thrown the account away -- could I ask how many of the technical people at GCHQ appear to be working there for moral reasons vs working there for the challenge of it? Are there many techies who consider it a moral prerogative to work there?

Actually, beyond "something something Godwin", yours was quite an interesting remark on how the State is now maintaining the coherence of its little conspiracy: the people analyzing the data don't know what sort of spying apparatus it comes from, and I'd bet many of the people doing the spying aren't allowed to know where the data goes. The organization is trying to keep people from putting together enough of the pieces so that, lacking a leaker/whistleblower, nobody working there quite thinks they're doing anything wrong enough to refuse orders.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a movie. OHMS (On Her Majesty's Service) meaning government business is a thing. And indeed a formality of language based on tradition. The former was a joke on the latter. It is most certainly not a real thing beyond the movie.

Hear, hear.

As a Brit, my reaction was one of complete lack of surprise. I wonder if that is widespread, and accounts for the muted reaction.

The US operates big, obvious surveillance facilities from inside Britain. For instance, I like to hike, and two places very close to me are the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors national parks. So every time I drive out there I will pass either of these two installations;

  Menwith Hill: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=menwith+hill&tbm=isch
  RAF Fylingdales: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=raf+fylingdales&tbm=isch

These are two big, public surveillance facilities -- the first is run by the NSA, the second run partly for NORAD. They are really large, obvious physical structures built for surveillance. It is then no surprise to find out that the NSA and GCHQ have been working together to do actual spying, is it?

Imagine as a US citizen that you were living in San Francisco, and knew that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service had a 500-acre intelligence-gathering base in Mountain View, CA. Would you be in any way surprised to find out the Russians and your own government were spying on you?

I think it's more that Brits have been subject to massive (CCTV) surveillance for so long that these new revelations doesn't seem as shocking.

Additionally, all of us from Europe have assumed the US have been spying on us ever since the first Carnivore/Echelon rumours -- I mean what did we think all those NSA listening stations in the UK and Germany were for, if not monitoring communications?

We don't have any protection from spying by the US constitution (or against being killed by drones, for that matter) -- the favourite trite semantic straw man of US "libertarians"[1] (We the people, but not, you know foreign people - they we can assassinate and spy on even if they're our allies -- and that's certainly not a legal or moral issue -- it's only an issue when the private-government military-industrial terrorcomplex are actually turned on US citizens it's a problem...)).

After the intelligence agencies got away with incompetence/malfeasance regarding Iraq, contributing to hundred thousands of civilian deaths in an illegal war (arguably for the benefit of Big Oil and military contractors), without anyone being prosecuted or even fired -- why would we assume they didn't play fast and loose with moral grey areas that fall within their legal charter (spying on foreign nationals, ie: us) ?

Anyway, the title of the story brought to mind this story from 2008:

The Get Out Clause, Manchester stars of CCTV" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1938...

[1] Note the quotes, there are of course many individuals and groups in the US that do good and important work for privacy and other rights-issues.

I had heard that during the peak of the conflict with the IRA, more brits came to view surveillance as necessary to safety, and then it remained that way. Don't know how true this is.

It's eerily similar to the 9/11 situation and the Patriot Act though.

Its because of many things.

One thing for our american cousins to note is that up until recently we were regularly being bombed because of our (in)actions in Ireland.

THis is why there are no bins on the underground, and why there are only hand full of ways to drive into the city of london.

another problem is that our media is on the whole sympathetic, or apathetic to spying. The mass hysteria surrounding paedophiles is a wondrous tool for ill thought out laws.

The public don't really like being spied on, but assume if you are against, you must be up to something.

We don't. We also know the committee meeting was a whitewash and the ISC is not doing their job. And at least some of us will punish MPs for this at the next election.

Answer: if I decided to point a camera out into the public street from my window and record everything I would expect to be allowed to do so. And as such, I extend the right to anyone else, so that when I'm in a public place, I'm fair game.

There's nothing anyone can do about it, so it's pointless worrying about or trying to control it.

I don't really like this phrasing:

"1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M"

And the later argument about proportions:

"That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial..."

I'm curious about the distribution of the 0.03M (30,000) cameras apparently "fixed" and publicly owned. If they are concentrated in certain regions, which is more like what I think I've read about before, then you really do have surveillance centers.

It helps that Britain ... has a curiously complacent attitude to civil liberties

These would be liberties like universal healthcare? Or perhaps the right to roam? Or what about when Britain made it a moral point to get its citizens out of Guantamo?

How about concepts like "Police don't need to carry guns day-to-day to do their jobs"? I've spoken here on HN about getting out of the car during a traffic stop because I was tired of the subtle power play where the police talk down to you while you're sitting. I had several responses, serious responses, from Americans saying that I was crazy because I was likely to be shot. Even after clarifying that I'm not being aggressive, just getting out of the car and even proactively handing over my license, they were resolute that such actions could lead to me being shot. Is this, as the author claims, the result of a population that expects their government serves them? What a citizen should expect, rather than a subject, to be so fundamentally afraid of being murdered by their own police despite having done no wrong?

There are things that are 'civil liberties' that are not listed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States. 'Civil liberties' are a grab-bag of things, and the US has nowhere near a monopoly on them, and while the CCTV surveillance is bad in the UK, it's not the be-all and end-all of 'civil liberties'.

Similarly, counter to the article's statement that US citizens expect their government to serve them and UK 'subjects' expect to serve their government, this simplistic statement is entirely undone by the attitude towards healthcare - a fundamental part of human life, where the expectation of the individual is the opposite of the author's statement. In healthcare, the UK citizen expects the government to serve them, the US citizen doesn't. It's not just healthcare - there are plenty of fields where if something is not ideal, the UK expectation is for the government to fix it, and the US expectation is for private enterprise to fix it. Hell, even the phenomenon of welfare dependence, rife in some areas of the UK, comes from the expectation that the government owes the individual something.

They violate no Bill of Rights or written constitution because Britain has neither.

A British lawyer put me to rights very clearly on this point: the UK does have a constitution. It's in an arrangement of documents that all together describe how the country is run - there just isn't a document with the title 'The Constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland'. Americans put an unusual highlight on the citizen's rights provided by the constitution - usually a nation's constitution is mostly how the political apparatus is arranged: there are two political houses, upper and lower; representatives are elected this way; judicial system has these powers and is selected that way; so on and so forth. The UK definitely has documents describing how it is run politically.

Keep in mind also that if you worship in particular the US Bill of Rights, you're missing out on the amendments that outlawed slavery and allowed universal suffrage. The US Bill of Rights is far from complete. Given also that constitutions don't usually go into human rights in detail, all this kind of criticism boils down to is sensationalism.

The US was never attacked in WWII. The UK was. Look at how extreme September 11th made us, even 12 years later, and you can imagine what WWII did to Britain.

> The US was never attacked in WWII.

Pearl Harbor comes to mind.

You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time. Anyway, it had nowhere near the psychological impact on the broader US public than the blitz did on Britain.

There was one lethal attack on the mainland - a fire balloon bomb. 6 people were killed. But yes, not on the same scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon#Single_lethal_atta...

>You are right, though remember Hawaii wasn't a state at that time.

I had to interview a lot of elderly people on their thoughts about hearing WWII for a high school exercise. Overwhelmingly they said their initial response was "Where is Pearl Harbor?" but it didn't matter because it was US military attacked by the proper military of a foreign empire If that doesn't say act of war to people, nothing will. The second thought reported to me most often was one of rage. Comments like "It was a dirty rotten trick!!!" and such.

I would just like to point out that many British people find the word Brit pejorative and that you shouldn't use it unless you want to offend.

Brit here, since when do we find that offensive?

Being 'offended' is bollocks.

I've never heard this in my life. I don't know a single Brit who finds the term offensive. Unless you're talking the. Brit Awarss. Now there's some bollocks.

I understand if you are fine with it. It has lost most of its meaning with history but I still cringe a little whenever I read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_names_for_the_Briti...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brit

I think the keyword here is historically…

What nonsense.

So by 'many British people' you're referring to the Scots? ;)

It does happen for San Fran.

Nah. We don' use it ourselves but recognise it's 'the American for British.' I guess the equivalent of 'Yanks.'

they don't. foiling curtain twitchers is as much part of british culture as tea.

Because we're craven.

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