Edward Snowden did everyone a big favour when he revealed something of the extent to which major intelligence agencies, particularly in the United States, are monitoring electronic communications. It may well prove that one of those done the biggest favour is the US itself, even if, at the moment, it is concentrated on demonstrating its annoyance at Snowden and in bringing him before its courts. The Snowden revelations have been embarrassing to the US - and for that matter the primary (English-speaking) Western alliance communications intelligence community, which includes Australia as well as Britain, Canada and New Zealand - but it hardly caused any surprise to anyone who knows anything of what is possible in the world of intelligence gathering. The embarrassment, whether for the Americans, or for those such as the nations of western Europe who have now seen evidence that some such spying is directed at them, is about its being out in the open rather than about in having it in the open, and this having to be dealt with in public. The nation states concerned know perfectly well what is happening; they may not be very happy about it, but there is nothing they can do, and, in any event, most of them themselves engage in active espionage against other nations, including the US, including attempts to monitor electronic communications. Likewise, nations such as China and Russia are not only actively engaged in spying on potential enemies, but also on their own populations. Like the Europeans, they know approximately what their friends and enemies are doing, in part because they do it themselves, but they always have to confect outrage if publicly forced to confront spying by others.
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Organised interception, decoding and analysis of the communications of others has been going on for more than 100 years. An American politician once famously declared that ''gentlemen do not read each other's mail'', but alas, not everyone is a gentleman, and, accordingly, even the goodies do it. During World War II, both sides developed their capacities to listen to and decode enemies' signals, as well as to conceal the fact that they were doing so (for fear that the enemy would change their codes or communications systems). Australia was involved from the start, and was a party to the wartime Quebec agreements providing for sharing, if only at very high levels and under strict security, what had been gathered. The Cold War provided further impetus, on both sides, as did the development of satellite technology, the computer and supercomputers. September 11, 2001, which demonstrated the vulnerability of nation states to terrorist movements provided fresh grounds for redoubled efforts and extra resources - as well as some belated focus, in the US at least, on some weak external controls to prevent abuse of intelligence gained. But the march of technological capacity has not depended upon it. Meanwhile, as security services keep reminding industry, the very same technological capacity is being used by some nations, and some corporations, to spy on organisations in search of commercial and financial secrets and strategies, including negotiating positions.
One can expect that terror organisations such as al-Qaeda are highly security conscious and that this very fact requires counter-intelligence to become more sophisticated. As with Ultra intelligence in the war, this sometimes produces paradoxical results, whereby the value of some information gained is not as great as the fact that it was gained - which is to say the information is not used. Likewise, irregularity, illegality or unwillingness to discuss how extensive surveillance can be means sometimes that spies must choose between getting intelligence and getting prosecutions.
For the ordinary citizen, the spectre of such surveillance is 1984 and the ever-intrusive deeply authoritarian Stasi state. Yet intrusive as such technology has been for decades, some self-denying ordinance has seen most Western security agencies restrained in the exercise of their power. That can never be assumed - every nation needs strong checks and balances. But the focus should be on such checks and balances, rather than mere bans, for the simple reason that no nation will willingly tie its hands behind its back.
