The Official Secrets Act says we can't disclose secrets
It's pretty draconian in that the people who define "secret" are not always -seldom - justified in so doing. However, it has a long long way to go to catch up with the Patriot Act! Just a few pleasantries...
Third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical and place of worship records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it's "trying to protect against terrorism".
Secret searches can be authorised by a secret court without accountability, so long as there is a putative "foreign intelligence" basis for the search.
An unknowing association with a "known" terrorist is a deportable offense.
It's even got us over here. If I do business with a UK subsidiary of a US-based cloud operator, even if I specify that English law applies and I mandate a UK-based data centre operating under EU data protection laws, the FBI can still get access to my data.
The point I was making -and still am - was that you have the Patriot Act DESPITE the rights that some (a lot) of Americans keep wittering on about in threads on gun laws and such. Yes, we have similar laws and government control and nanny state the EU is about as anti-democratic as it's possible to be but what we DON'T do is bang endlessly on about "Freedom" and "Inalienable Rights" and feel it our duty to export the ideal.
We just went about bitchslapping half of the World into the shape we wanted. Don't know why we gave it up. Everywhere has gone to the dogs, since and at least we were honest about our reasons for Empire.
