#daniel soar

Every time one of the spies' methods comes under the spotlight, questions of legality arise. The law is changed, purportedly to stop such abuses happening again. But inevitably the new law includes a new route by which some version of the old system is made valid again, and a program that once had to be kept highly secret can be discussed in public as much as you like. In response to the Snowden revelations, a new bill has been put forward, the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act. It sounds benign, but if you're of a paranoid disposition, you have reason to fear what it might bring.

There are 7 billion people on the planet, and nearly 7 billion mobile phones; 6 billion emails are sent every hour; 1.2 petabytes of data travel across the internet every minute, the equivalent of 2,000 years' worth of music playing continuously, the contents of 2.2 billion books. The NSA claims, with loving wording, to 'touch' just 1.6% of global internet traffic, or about 35 million books' worth of data a minute. So the question has to be not so much 'Is Big Brother watching?' but 'How in hell can it cope?'