Top secrets

This week’s exposé of the US National Security Agency has been heralded as the greatest intelligence leak since the Pentagon Papers. It is nothing of the sort. Far from revealing some institutional outrage, the whistleblower Edward Snowden merely appears to have found what any low-level intelligence source might find. Intelligence agencies try to find things out about certain people. Spies spy, and can be innovative in their techniques. Rapid technological advances mean that the amount of snooping is growing at a faster rate than laws and regulations have been able keep up. But where is the scandal?

The most specific allegation from Mr Snowden — made from his sanctuary in the People’s Republic of China — is that the American and UK governments have been using a reciprocal arrangement to get around certain domestic laws on spying. They snoop on each other’s citizens because they can’t snoop on their own, and then swap notes. Even if true, this has not proven to be a matter of any great concern for the general public. Opinion polls on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that people are not particularly bothered. People appear to recognise that the security agencies must exercise unique powers to intercept and thwart people who wish to harm us.

The same is not true for the taxman, who would quite like some of these powers for himself. The government’s ‘snooper’s charter’ is an attempt to give any government department, even town halls, various degrees of power to pry in the name of ‘national security’. In reality, MI5 and MI6 already have powers to intercept anything categorised as a ‘communication’. Permission is needed — but it is sought and granted. It is wrong for MI5 or the CIA to engage in a ruse to cut out the paperwork. But let us not pretend this makes either into a 21st-century Stasi.