Privacy in Britain

From today's New York Times:

Constant Surveillance Rankles Britons

...A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore.

But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same.

Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighborhood school, local officials here began a covert surveillance operation. They obtained her telephone billing records. And for more than three weeks in 2008, an officer from the Poole education department secretly followed her around, noting on a secret-agent-style log the movements of the “female and three children” and the “target vehicle” (that would be Ms. Paton, her daughters and their car).

...