Clearly, many of you missed the short PBS run of the BBC documentary, Spooks, which details the exploits of MI5 in the UK. Peter Firth as the lead, great casting.
Joking aside, I don't understand all of the shock and awe at post-Snowden revelations about how various security agencies around the world operate. I have yet to see anything that comes off as remotely new knowledge since the Cold War. Yes, computers have made it easier in the years since the Cold War to store, catalog, and search data as well as automate human tasks. That's what computers were made for. Did people really think that the security services were going to act like the IRS and use the computer as a poor substitute for paper forms as opposed to modernizing and stretching technology's legs? Are people really so naive as to not understand the extreme manner to which computing advances have been driven by the needs of various secret security agencies around the world?