© David Cheskin/PA'When I heard William Hague say the innocent had nothing to fear, I distinctly heard Le Carré give a hollow laugh. I thought of the Lawrence family, bugged to get dodgy coppers out of a hole. I thought of British families discovering their dead offspring had their identities stolen by police.
Whistleblower and writer both finger the enemy as their own side. But the full horror of truth always outdoes the imaginationShocked, or not shocked? The chasm widens. The New York Times this week carried a story from a whistleblower close to Washington's foreign intelligence surveillance court, known as the
Fisa court - a secret body set up in 1978 to monitor federal phone taps. It now gives legal cover to intelligence trawling of millions of individuals, at home and abroad.
The recent revelations by another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, accused the court of
breaking the fourth amendment to the US constitution. This entitles Americans "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The operative word, as so often, is unreasonable.
The new leak alleges that
more than a dozen new "rulings" have been passed by Fisa, declaring categories of data-scooping that were within the "special needs" of security, and thus no different from breath-testing or body-searching at airports. NSA operations such as
Prism,
Tempora and
Boundless Informant - many in collusion with Britain's GCHQ - used covert access to Google, Apple and Facebook to go where they pleased. They could cite not just terrorism but espionage, matters of interest to a foreign power, cyber-attacks and "weapons of mass destruction".
These judgments, all in secret, confirmed the gist of Snowden's evidence - and validated his motive. The reason why a previously loyal ex-soldier broke cover was not to aid an enemy. It was to inform a friend, his own country. He was simply outraged by the lies told to Congress by his bosses about NSA operations. As
Harvard's Stephen Walt said, Snowden was performing a public service in drawing attention to a "poorly supervised and probably unconstitutional" activity.
Comment: Leaked recordings of Anglo-Irish phone conversation during outbreak of 2008 financial crisis: Banksters joked about defrauding the Irish people