Hugo Rifkind: I spy complete indifference towards being spied

Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an outrage. Whether it’s forcing you to have health care, or denying you the right to own the gun that Al Pacino has in Scarface, or making you wear a seat belt, or taxing you, or threatening to silence your long-held and proudly defended right to put a pillowcase on your head and be a racist, Big Government is a villain. There are people, the American thinks, and then there is power, and the latter shafts the little guy every chance he gets.

It’s not like that in Britain. And, if you’ve been wondering, which you probably haven’t, why four months on, this country still doesn’t give much of a monkey’s toss about the revelations of Edward Snowden, this is probably the reason. Every few weeks the Guardian releases another blare, and nobody cares at all. Stephen Fry has just signed a petition about it, calling upon European leaders to be very angry with our leaders, and I doubt anybody will care about that either.

At first I thought it was a generational thing. Julian Assange makes a good case, I think, when he speaks of the ‘militarisation of cyberspace’, the state occupation of digital worlds. ‘It’s like having a tank in your bedroom,’ he writes in his book Cypherpunks, and I thought that British indifference lay in the inability of an older generation to grasp that anything online could or should be space as intimate or private as your own physical home.

But it’s more than that. In Britain we do not believe that government is instinctively malign. I certainly don’t, not least because I spent the first 20 years of my life having breakfast with a bit of it, but it’s a widespread perspective, even among those less blessed.