Spy if you must, but don’t give the game away

The Snoopers’ Charter. I ought to care about this. I’m a sort of libertarian. I believe in personal freedom. I’m a trustee of Index on Censorship. The state as Big Brother is everything I’ve always fought in politics. So why can’t I quite summon the requisite indignation? Why do I find all this Edward Snowden stuff vaguely irritating? Why does the crusading column for the Times, railing against state surveillance, somehow keep failing me, though time and again I’ve opened my laptop and tried to make a start?

Partly, I think, because as a longstanding and vehement opponent of British military adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve believed (and always argued) that our resources are better directed not to regime change abroad, but to protecting ourselves at home. We need to invest in counter-terrorism; to make good use of intelligence, tracking domestic threats and keeping tabs on possible terrorists. Not being a spy, I don’t know how this is best done, but am loth to start barking at the professionals who think they do. Is it really fair to complain that invading foreign countries is not the way to tackle the security threat at home — and then to complain when the British state invests in non-military means of underwriting our security?

Realising that this would be a lazy justification for accepting any or every incursion into the private sphere, should I then develop strong views on the proper limits to state snooping? How far should they go? What should and what should not be done in the name of national security? Shouldn’t I at least reach firm conclusions on that?

The honest answer is that no timeless definition of ‘legitimate’ surveillance occurs to me. One of the reasons for this is that it must depend on the level of the threat, and I neither know what that is, nor trust the assessments made either by the security hawks or the Guardian doves.