Yes. Some councils paid private investigators to follow and photograph families to try to "prove" that they weren't really living in the catchment areas for cer

Yes. Some councils paid private investigators to follow and photograph families to try to "prove" that they weren't really living in the catchment areas for certain schools but had just rented properties as a postbox address. So not electronic surveillance as such but powers that they were indeed using under RIPA 2000. I've tried pointing that out to people in the past (when the post Snowden legislation was being scrutinized by Parliament to try to encourage people to write to their MPs about it) and the reaction tended to be "see, they got caught and hardly any of them were doing it anyway so it proves that the system works". It's depressing.