Bernard Keenan

Scotland has had its say, now it is the turn of the whole UK. The LSE has already begun. On 26 June 2014, the School's new Saw Swee Hock Student Centre hosted a very special celebration of democracy: ConstitutionUK's Constitutional Carnival. Filmed live at the carnival, participants and speakers discuss what they would include in a written UK constitution. Credits: Endurance Steel Orchestra.

1. Introduction This article takes the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 as a device for understanding the changed material conditions of state communications surveillance since the passage of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. It argues that the changes to the UK’s legal framework signal the increasing power of ‘surveillance intermediaries’ – privately owned communication platforms, primarily located in the United States – and the rise of commercial providers of intelligence analytics.

A media history of how the UK and US governments have surveilled citizens by intercepting their private communications. It may not be Big Brother (yet), but the state is watching you—watching all of us, in fact, systematically intercepting our private communications and putting them to work in its own interests.