Edward Snowden has warned that Britain s GCHQ spy agency is a bigger threat to privacy than the NSA, as it uses illegally collected information in criminal prosecutions and, unlike in the US, has relatively few constitutional checks on its activities.

The UK's threat to invade the Ecuador embassy  also made it clear that this case was not about questioning Julian Assange regarding a possible criminal case in Sweden. Few could believe that the UK government would have resorted to such extreme and illegal measures if this were just a matter of extraditing a foreign citizen to a foreign country where he is not even charged with a crime.

Ofcom is said to have close ties to Britain's royal family. And the cables released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks show that Press TV's programs on the royal wedding, which many in the country described as extravagant, angered the royal family.

The London attacks of 7 July 2005 were a watershed for counter-terrorism. Although UK citizens had been involved in terrorist activity outside Britain and had been arrested for planning terrorist acts inside the country, the suicide bombings by four young British citizens, killing themselves and 52 others, put an exclamation mark on the threat. The murders triggered considerable soul-searching within the UK and hurried and ill-considered responses by the government of Tony Blair

The latest release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks contains allegations that Sudanese president Omar al Bashir may have stolen $9 billion from his country and deposited it in London with the Lloyds Banking Group.