I just feel like using a VPN, while legal, might already put you on some list of "suspicious" users. Surely, if you have something to hide, then you are worth investigating closely.
The reality is that no one in the know thinks this has anything to do with terrorism and everything to do with political control.
If you don't have the right to privacy then all other rights are subverted, previous governments have used the state security apparatus to monitor perfectly legal political activities, they've proven again and again they can't be trusted with this kind of power and we let them give themselves more (and legalise all the illegal shit they where already doing).
The reality is the UK (which traditionally has been a less free society for a 'free' society) is rapidly sliding into something you can't realistically call a free society.
You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.
Trading the rights of millions of people to combat terrorism hurts more people than the terrorists could ever hope to touch.
This doesn't even factor in solutions terrorists can use to avoid surveillance, or answer the question of if all this surveillance even reduces terrorism in the first place.
More people than that died in 1 week of road accident deaths in the same year, and in 2 weeks of road accident deaths in 2013 [1]
Talking about numbers and causes of deaths in the UK, for comparison:
The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) published that death registrations increased from 2014 to 2015, saying "There were 24,065 more deaths registered in the first three months of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, with 11,865 of these extra deaths registered in January alone, when flu was circulating at its highest levels." - totals, 501,424 deaths in 2014 and 529,613 deaths in 2015. [2]
ONS also published: "In 2014, nearly a quarter of all deaths (23%; 116,489 out of 501,424) in England and Wales were from causes considered potentially avoidable through timely and effective healthcare or public health interventions."
and "In 2014, just under a third of deaths (32% or 1,443 out of 4,571) in children and young people aged 0 to 19 years in England and Wales were from causes considered avoidable through good quality healthcare" [3]
In the news today, NHS people are warning that there isn't enough money to provide all the services it needs to, even with the planned budget increases. [4]
There just isn't any comparison in the numbers. Terrorism is not fiction, the hugeness of terrorism is fiction - at least, it appears to be, absent any concrete details of numbers of plots discovered and averted, which we'll never get.
But if 52 dead is one of the biggest attacks in the UK in decades, how likely is it that avoided attacks would even approach 1400 children per year who die of preventable causes, let alone 11,000 people/1 year who apparently died of flu while flu vaccines exist?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-road-fatal...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
[3] http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthand...
How do you think that murder rate will change if you don't seek to address it at all?
USA should ban private gun ownership, obviously. This would do a lot for their murder rate, it would do a lot for their "people killed by toddlers" rate, and it would be a lot cheaper and less invasive than ISPs logging 300M internet access records for a year.
Prioritize things which have high impact, are easy to address, and have specific good outcomes. Not "anti terror" metrics which are vague, difficult and expensive to address, and have extremely low impact.
TSA isn't a good system. And it doesn't become a good system just because 'we have to do something about some crimes'. Sure. Do something better, and do it about more important problems.
Targeted attacks by intelligence agencies and police forces are probably a lost battle anyway.