This is disappointingly poor for Jonathan Freedland. The most remarkable thing about the session he cites was how unremarkable it was; no one expected any great revelations and no one got any, as even Freedland himself said in a radio interview on the BBC after the session. It was just a bit of theatre.

The argument about CCTV cameras as evidence of complacency about surveillance seems silly and tired to me, as silly as an article would be in a British newspaper that concluded that Americans are obsessed with killing each other on the basis of gun ownership rates vs the UK. They're not, of course, the overwhelming majority of gun owners do not buy them with the intention of killing another person.

Likewise, the one camera per 11 people crops up a lot and (as far as I know, having a small interest in the actual figure) no groups trying to find evidence for it since have managed to do so, in fact the most high profile study that investigated the number concluded that there were 1.85 million CCTV cameras in the UK, of which 1.7M were privately owned, 0.03M were fixed and publicly owned, and 0.12 were on public transport. [1]

That's 92% of them under private ownership. They exist, by and large, to deter criminals from breaking into and stealing from stores and commercial premises, just as you might be put off from robbing a convenience store in the US in the knowledge that the store-owner might be armed, here it's completely normal to see signs outside a shop saying "These premises are protected by CCTV" - note the use of the word protected - and indeed most hardware shops will have this sign in stock right next to the 'no smoking' signs. They're there so you can give something to the insurance company and if lucky there will be something to help the police get an ID. I find their presence as much a threat to civil liberty as dash-cams are to the civil liberty of the average russian.

Likewise stuff is called 'Her Majesty's $FOO' for entirely vestigial, historical reasons. When Obama says 'God Bless America' at the end of every speech we don't honestly think that he's designed a policy whose success is contingent upon divine intervention, jokes about healthcare.gov aside.

There are differences in the relationship between people and their state in the UK vs other places just because of different evolutionary paths (socially rather than biologically!). For instance, an American economist friend expressed surprise that we didn't have a legal separation of church and state, and how dangerous it was, and how we should get one like in America. Well, people here are just not that religious in comparison to the US, and my experience of the US is that the church has enormously more influence over US politics than it does in the UK anyway, despite the law. It's just not really a thing here. I'm sure if a modern British Prime Minister were to say 'God Bless the UK' at the end of a speech he'd be sectioned under the mental health act, and the PR people would go into overdrive to explain that he didn't really mean it. Similarly, If UK employers were to switch to a policy of only allowing two weeks holiday per year, and why not add random drugs tests while we're at it, there would be riots at the outrageous and dangerous attempt at enslavement of the population, and the government would likely be overthrown if it failed to act. I use these just as an example to illustrate the differences in what's considered important, and of what people are vigilant, between the two nations.

"Many Brits accept the old securocrat formulation: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. " Do they? I don't think I've met that many people who think that - maybe I just move in the wrong circles - but my most prominent encounter with that sentiment was as an argument whose flaws we had to point out in a Critical Thinking class homework at secondary (ages 13-18) school, as part of one of the national school syllabuses.

I'm very worried about state surveillance, it's a constant fight, and while I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards and 90 days detention without trial - were rightly defeated, I'm under no illusions about winning a battle vs winning a war. But you have to pick your battles, and the reason I think this article is guff is because it misidentifies what to fight, and plays up to superficial and lazy observations of the UK from outside, as if to appeal to its intended audience. All that's missing is a reference to bad teeth.

Like I said, surprisingly bad from Mr Freedland, who otherwise has been quite eloquent on the subject, I think.

[1] http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv

Edit: typo.