Peter Hitchens sets out to test a claim that sounds paranoid until the evidence starts piling up: that Britain's post-9/11 security laws have quietly eroded the freedoms they were supposed to protect. He travels the country meeting ordinary people caught by new police powers and anti-terrorism legislation, people fined, detained, or investigated for offenses that would once have seemed absurd. Hitchens argues the country is sleepwalking into a surveillance state, and he puts that argument to the people who built the laws and the people who watch them. Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer defends the government's record, Lord Carlisle, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, weighs in from inside the oversight system, and Shami Chakrabarti of the civil liberties group Liberty makes the case for how far things have already gone. The film stays close to individual cases rather than abstractions, using them to ask what protection actually costs when it is measured in everyday liberty rather than headline security.