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by DanBC 4817 days ago
ECHELON was revealed by Duncan Campbell in 1988.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_(journalist)#E...)

He also wrote a book about the amount of police surveillance going on in the UK.

I hated Thatcher. I wouldn't put the surveillance down to just her. There were plenty of other people involved in making lists and monitoring people. (The building industry would use blacklists of agitators. This was so severe it was one of the drivers for the data protection act, and it was this list that caused the act to be extended to cover non-computerised information too.)

Certainly, it would be odd for people to blame Thatcher for the number of CCTV in the UK now. The UK has about 20% of all the world's CCTV! (I haven't checked this, it was a comment on a Radio 4 news programme so maybe it's nonsense).