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.