Looking through the responses to your comment, I would bet that most commentators in this thread are unaware that London is the most intensely surveilled city in the world. And the system of surveillance was set up to stop a very real threat - IRA bombings.
For a list of failures of this system, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_.... Most successes didn't get reported. However this history does leave people in the UK with a rather different perspective on universal surveillance than Americans.
For a list of failures of this system, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_.... Most successes didn't get reported. However this history does leave people in the UK with a rather different perspective on universal surveillance than Americans.