The mostly foreign-owned UK press exists to sell newspapers, not to conspire against the public on purported issues of national security. There's almost no coverage of the Draft Communications Bill or DRIP because the average UK citizen doesn't find some legislation that might be debated which might compel ISPs to hold the same sort of data they already hold for a bit longer to be particularly intelligible, never mind interesting when compared with tax credit cuts, migrants, people being blown up in Syria and the latest celebrity gossip. Or as Charlie Brooker, hardly the most technophobic or pro-government of commentators put it, it's the "the most tedious outrage ever". There was rather more noise made (on both sides of the debate) about the more emotive issue of Cameron's attempt to censor internet porn. It's not as if the media is seeking to hide the fact that private messages people have sent, websites they've visited or triangulated locations from mobile phones are regularly used in prosecutions and have been long before this legislation hit the drafting table. Or indeed as if proposed legislative measures are not being discussed at all: here's the far-from-supportive angle of the newspaper closest to being the informal mouthpiece of the Conservative government: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11964655/Police...

As for Snowden, even on this website where people actually understand the potential of surveillance techniques it's the stories about his personal situation and options, as widely run in all UK newspapers from all angles, that seem to have captured the imagination more than the details of what was revealed. And I'm not sure he and his allies, who sought to carefully control how PRISM was reported, even offered the files to other UK newspapers...