For months now Snowden's revelations have shown the true shocking extent of massive state surveillance. Much of the anger has rightly focused on the United States and the NSA. But as Edward Snowden put it, the UK and GCHQ "has a big dog in this fight" too.
Amongst what we've found out is the mass and indiscriminate collection of email, phone calls, website visits, facebook posts and tweets. The breaking into, tapping of and collaboration with large corporations such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.
Where there are laws surrounding the collection of these data which would prohibit our security services from collecting them, the collection was deliberately handed off to a foreign power not covered by those laws.
The talks surrounding the delegation of powers to the UK's security services which were abandoned last year were a farce; it was merely an attempt to legalise what was already happening, not a real discussion on the reality of surveillance.