I'm a Brit too. The idea that we don't have a constitution to be violated is ignorant nonsense.
It's true, we don't have a nice convenient piece of paper with 'The UK Constitution' at the top. The UK constitution is mostly common law (recorded in caselaw -- decisions by judges) with common law principles such as the rule of law and access to justice (e.g. ex p Withham), together with a bunch of 'constitutional statutes' (in the Metric Martyrs sense - e.g. the Bill of Rights, Acts of Union, and more recently the ECA, Human Rights Act, etc), constitutional conventions (written and unwritten), and international treaties (the EU treaty, the ECHR, etc.).
The UK has been ruling actions of the executive illegal under our constitution since longer than the US has existed. E.g. Entick v Carrington [1765], which was cited as the inspiration behind the fourth amendment.
If you want to learn more, try Peter Leyland's "The constitution of the United Kingdom".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_King...
There are about 60 millon Brit and approx 7 billion non-Brits. Surely, if you believe that all humans share equal rights, the rights of the latter group outweigh, for simple quantitative reasons, those of the former, especially in the light of the dreadful record of UK secret services collaboration with imperialism, not to mention the recent collaboration in the assault on Irak which left, by conservative estimations, a six-figure of people dead.
Secondly, the article explains that by their own admission the UK government have said that "knowing about it" today means no undermining of anything at all. It's important to remember that the news story has been buried for some time by our newspapers though. The only people who don't know about it are the public.
Thirdly, in response to your last paragraph, I have no words...
Edits - I am a brit
The fact that "this" Snowden published Britain related documents should concern british citizens very much, because shows how tightly the contry is connected to USA, and how the wrongdoings of the latter will (and did) fall back on the former.
Accepting/supporting surveillance strategies today, both internal and foreign, has more to do with totalitarian and imperialistic objectives more than security itself.
As for the second paragraph, the more cooperation between intelligence systems, the more benefit for each system as well as the more risk to each when one is compromised. I imagine this is a demonstration of the violation of some rule of compartmentalization in intelligence theory. If you don't want to get any American damage on you, don't run with Americans.
Of course, if the British secret state is in fact a highly competent totalitarian entity aiming at hiding their powers, that might be just exactly what they'd want you to read.. :)
Seriously for a moment though, I think the article, though well worth reading, kind of misses a significant point that protecting us from the Communist Threat (sorry, the Islamist Threat, nowadays) is not the be-all and end-all of MI5 &co's raison d'etre. I believe a significant part of their resources has, at least for the last 50 years or so, been aimed at suppressing non-criminal organised domestic dissent, and ensuring the continued dominance of the traditional rulers of our nation. For examples, tapping CND's telephones, involvement in smearing the Wilson government, infiltration of trade unions and the labour movement, etc. etc. none of which groups posed any serious criminal threat to "the establishment."
I suspect a detailed accounting might find a good deal more success in those activities than in the ones alluded to in Curtis' post.
We suffered massively from American foreign policies in recent decades and we continue to suffer from, in this case, "renegade" NSA agents that defect to Russia and upload all British secrets to the internet.
The absolute peak of the Snowden story in the UK was when it was disclosed that some GCHQ "Spooks" took an angle grinder and baseball bat to some computers in the basement The Guardian headquarters. Mainly because it reminded them of some sort of comedy sketch. After that blew over and nobody cared anymore. That's why it's only tech publications like The Register seemingly carrying this more recent story.
The reaction in the UK was lacklustre, I believe, because privacy in the UK was already eroded a long time ago. For example you can't even walk 10 meters in London without being recorded on some CCTV system somewhere. Or drive more than a couple streets without your car's registration being recorded on police cameras.
I'm one of the few that actually 1) has an opinion 2) it happens to be contrary to the typical expected American view of "this violates a tiny amount of my privacy therefore let's burn it at the stake".
They should, though. And they will if the state decides to take the gloves off and use all of that illegitimate power against them.
Secondly, yes the press has been gagged for some time but it was still Snowden that leaked it all in the first place. I don't think you have a point here.
My taxes fund things like this and it pisses me off, slightly, that some American has effectively limited the "return on investment" we are now going to get from it.
It's one thing for this American Snowden to assault his own country's practices, since they have a constitution that is arguably being violated. But it's entirely another for him to assault the UK and for which does not have a constitution that's being violated and even if it did he is not a British citizen anyway so it should not concern him.