http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/surveillance-state-debate-goes-on

 

Surveillance and the state: this way the debate goes on

Thanks to Edward Snowden, the world now has a debate about the dramatic change in the contract between state and citizen
, Friday 23 August 2013 18.58 EDT

 

"Spies spy! Who knew?" Thus the world-weary shrug from too many people who ought to know better over the revelations deriving from the material leaked by Edward Snowden about what goes on inside the west's major intelligence agencies in 2013. We have all read our Le Carré, they sigh. We spy on them, they spy on us. Except in fiction, it must remain a secret world. The secrecy has to remain near-absolute because our national security depends on it. The best way for the state to ensure such secrecy is to have an armoury of criminal and civil laws − backed by punitive sanctions − to deter any leakages.
This used to work. But the nature of spying has changed: this much we have learned from Mr Snowden. What was once highly targeted has now become virtually universal. The evident ambition is to put entire populations under some form of surveillance. The faceless intelligence masters may say they are still searching for needles, but first they want the entire haystack. And thus countless millions of entirely innocent (in every sense) citizens are potentially being monitored. Their phone calls, web searches, texts and emails are routinely intercepted, collected, stored and subjected to analysis.