Henry Porter, the Observer journalist who spent 2006 sparring with Tony Blair over civil liberties in his weekly column, sets out to see how far Britain's surveillance state has actually reached. He tracks the legal shift since New Labour took power in 1997, from ASBOs introduced under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act to the erosion of the right to remain silent and the retention of records on where people travel and who they call. The film follows Porter across the UK and the US, looking at CCTV networks, communications interception, and the databases being built to hold it all. Security researcher Adam Laurie gives the film its sharpest scene, demonstrating on camera how easily some of these tracking and identification systems can be bypassed or hacked. Porter's own runs-ins with Blair's government give the reporting a personal edge rather than a detached survey. The film's case is that surveillance has expanded quietly and largely without public consent, and asks how much of it citizens actually agreed to.