[nly]

It's not fear, it's ignorance. Most people here have no interest in this topic. Snowden? Who's that? A lot of Brits still rely on newspapers and the evening news for their primary source of news, if they follow it at all. This stuff typically doesn't reach paper outside of the Guardian unless the Daily Mail are in a shit-stirring mood. Most of the coverage of Snowden for instance has focused on the politics and drama, relationships between Germany, us and the US etc, not what he has unveiled.

Once you start stepping on our rights we stand up like the best of them though. See recent stories about a guy who got told by his bank that he couldn't withdraw his money unless he told them what he wanted it for. That made dinner table conversation amongst my family. Net neutrality, data protection and privacy in the digital age is all too abstract though.

That said, it's pathetic that there are regular arrests here for people being mean to one another on Twitter (death threats aside). There's a large celebrity base calling for more of this, and it relies on the polices ability to access ISP records quickly for very little.