British journalists lock each other up and throw away the key

In the past few days, my colleagues on the Guardian have been publishing stories of national and international significance – indeed, if truth be told, they have been publishing them for most of the autumn.

The international scoop was that America’s National Security Agency tapped Angela Merkel’s mobile phone (along with the phones of many more world leaders). As the shock of the revelation has sunk in, most observers have grasped that the shrug-of-the-shoulder explanation that ‘spies spy’, doesn’t really work in this instance.

Spies in democratic countries are meant to be under democratic control. Elected politicians have few problems authorising surveillance on their country’s enemies. But when it comes to their country’s friends, they should balance their curiosity about what Merkel is saying with the political costs of an ally discovering that America is treating her as if she were an international terrorist. The whole point of democratic supervision of the intelligence services is that politicians can tell the spies that just because they can do something does not mean they should.