Worrying indeed. For all our hand-wringing over government overreach here in the U.S. we've ignored the fact that the U.K. has been leading the fight against privacy all along. They've been reading your emails since forever. There are 1,850,000 security cameras there, one for every 32 people in the country.
Why should we worry about that in North America? Because we always have to out-do them on everything. They invented heavy metal, we responded with Slipknot. They gave us the mildly annoying Spice Girls, we shot back with Justin Bieber (OK, so we had to outsource that one to Canada, but the point is valid) and Kanye West.