Here is the paradox. Edward Snowden sits in exile in Moscow, knowing that if he returned to the west, as he would like to, he’d almost certainly wind up in jail. Yet at the same time, no one disputes that Mr Snowden has sparked a global debate about privacy, which on Sunday saw the US Senate rein in the National Security Agency’s powers, most notably to collect the telephone records of millions of Americans. Three provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act have expired, and while replacement legislation will soon enough be passed it is likely to embody certain post-Snowden reforms. The American outlaw, then, is remaking the American law.
Elsewhere, too, Mr Snowden is still making ripples – especially in Germany, a country that learned the hard way to take privacy seriously, where there is a Bundestag inquiry into cooperation with the NSA. But in this world of flux, Britain is an isle of complacent calm. The principal change on the agenda is granting the intelligence agencies formal licence to continue doing what they were caught doing. Bewitched by Bletchley Park and James Bond, what passes for the UK debate proceeds on the assumption that those who spy for the state could never have any motive but saving the nation. Last week’s Queen’s speech briefing baldly rationalised a new data bill as necessary to “provide the police and intelligence agencies with the tools to keep you and your family safe”.
Elsewhere in the world, this “trust us to protect you” sales pitch would run into suspicion, particularly since the promise to help is often decoupled from any obligation to explain how – witness how No 10 continues to sit on the latest report from terror law watchdog, David Anderson. In many other countries, however, legislators are expected to interrogate the executive rather than to win promotion to it; the parliamentary committees that scrutinise intelligence are not hand-picked by the head of government; and suspicion of state power is found across the political spectrum, rather than – as in Britain – concentrated in a shrunken liberal centreground. Freed of their erstwhile Lib Dem partners, the Conservatives have not merely revived the snooper’s charter for the bulk harvesting of comms data, but have also proposed helping the agencies access the substantive content of more messages.
The demand is always to pile more hay on to the stack without asking whether the agencies can make sensible use of the great bulk of material they can already access. Bulk data has been no help at all with atrocities such as Woolwich, and yet call records are routinely accessed in run-of-the-mill investigations, with police officers making a fresh demand for access every two minutes, and in nine in 10 cases being granted it by the police colleagues who are the only check. The most important page in the in-house rule book for both the intelligence agencies and the police is provided by the Human Rights Act, which the Conservative party is pledged to rip up. That move from universal to avowedly British rights will only reinforce the dangerous parochialism of the UK’s debate.
Since the Guardian broke the first Snowden disclosures two years ago, arguments have raged over whether he is a traitor or a whistleblower. Now that Capitol Hill has felt moved to right certain wrongs he exposed, that row should be over. He deserves a pardon at home, or else asylum in western Europe, for revealing truths that US lawmakers have recognised required a response. It’s time Westminster woke up, too.