How to find the needle in Edward Snowden's haystack

So what follows Snowden? On the evidence so far, not a great deal. The biggest heist in the history of intelligence was supposed to change the world - to expose the calumnies of the secret state and redraw the boundaries in favour of individual liberty. For all the sound and fury, little has changed.

There are good and less good reasons for this. The good is that the central charge laid by Edward Snowden of mass surveillance by agencies determined to subvert freedom has proved hollow. The less good is that western societies have still to grapple with the way so-called big data has upended familiar notions of privacy and liberty.

There has been kerfuffle and noise aplenty since Mr Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, loaded his cache of laptops and memory sticks on to a flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong. Now in Russia, he is thought to have stolen 1.7m top secret files from the NSA and Britain's GCHQ.

Only a fraction have so far been disclosed by the Guardian, the Washington Post and other international publications, so there may be shocks to come. You do not have to be a paid-up spook to assume the information has also fallen into the hands of the Russians and others who wish the west ill.

The technical prowess and the reach of the US and UK agencies has provided ammunition for the curious alliance of rightwing libertarians and leftish civil liberties groups now gathering around Mr Snowden. Even some intelligence insiders have been startled by the ingenuity and scale of the NSA's Prism data-mining system.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been enraged by disclosures that the NSA listened in to her telephone calls, and politicians across the world have reacted strongly to the way the NSA scoops up electronic information without regard to national borders. In Britain there are some concerns about the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and the NSA.

The big tech and communications companies, which had been quietly collaborating with the spooks, are now crying foul. These commercial behemoths draw their revenues from the collection of vast amounts of personal data. Heaven forfend that governments have tapped into this vast and valuable digital store.

What have not changed since Mr Snowden's revelations, however, are the ineluctable facts of modern intelligence. The combination of a rising terrorist threat and an explosion in digital communications has transformed the challenge facing democratic governments. Technology has greatly expanded the opportunities of their enemies. It would be more than curious if these governments disarmed themselves.

Not so long ago the task of the NSA and GCHQ was to track a relatively small number of hostile governments. Intercepting Soviet signals, bugging the communications of foreign embassies, decrypting military codes - none of these was easy, but it was straightforward. Now, the eavesdroppers must keep tabs on thousands of individuals scattered around the world. Some are known; many are in the shadows.

A second unavoidable fact is that these new enemies now hide in cyber space. It was once easy enough to tap the telephone of a suspect. Jihadis know how to conceal their messages in the electronic blizzard of innocent connections provided by the web, email and online games. Intercepting one suspect's email requires collecting vast amounts of otherwise useless data. The reason the agencies might tap into online games is that their "chat" functions provide an ideal hideaway.

Iain Lobban, the head of GCHQ, likens his agency's work to building a haystack from which to extract a needle. Accumulating raw data does not amount to mass surveillance. What count for individual freedom are tight legal constraints on the way the data are interrogated. This is the needle in the vast, obscuring haystack created by Mr Snowden.

Barack Obama has thus proposed only small changes at the NSA. The US president has promised that legal oversight will be strengthened - and rightly so - and that the storing of electronic data may be transferred from the federal government to a third party. Bugging friendly heads of state will require presidential approval. But the US government has no intention of handing cyber space over to its adversaries.

In the UK, most of the additional safeguards suggested by Mr Obama are already in place. GCHQ, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) already have three layers of outside supervision: government ministers, two intelligence commissioners drawn from the judiciary, and a parliamentary oversight committee.

Overall, the British services operate under much tighter rules than most imagine. Forget James Bond. MI6 has to seek the explicit approval of the foreign secretary for each and every operation that might either test the boundaries of legality or create political risk. On average, it seeks such political authority about 500 times every year. This is not an organisation running out of control. Nor, for that matter, is GCHQ.

None of the above should be taken as cause for complacency. One good outcome from the Snowden affair is that these agencies are now obliged to be more open about ends and means. Systems of oversight and protection for citizens need to be dynamic enough to keep up with the pace of technological change and capability. This exercise of healthily sceptical supervision can be separated from the secret state paranoia of Mr Snowden's cheerleaders. What most people will take from recent events is that, by and large, the spooks are on our side.

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