Bernard Ingham: Writers’ grand phrases are hot air in face of real threat

While I am pretty free with my thoughts, though not as free as I used to be because of political correctness, it is true that I regard my home as my castle and don’t expect people to be opening my letters.

But my telephone is becoming ever more an encroachment on my personal environment. Dammit, somebody from Bangalore (or so it seemed) rang me the other evening at 8.15pm while I was watching a soccer match, seeking to furnish their survey with my opinions. The poor beggar got short shrift.

And given all the hacking into phones and computers that seems to go on, I reckon my “fundamental human right” to privacy might well be honoured more in the breach than the observance long before the American National Security Agency and our own GCHQ ever get round to me.

In any case, I am followed or preceded wherever I go by cameras of one kind or another. Indeed, they are sometimes a comfort. Parking under one can perhaps reasonably be regarded as a protection.

All this introspection has been caused by a formidable phalanx of the world’s authors – most of whom I have never heard of, still less read. More than 500 of them have responded valiantly to The Guardian’s revelation, via that American whistleblower, Edward Snowden, now holed up in Russia, about the extent of state surveillance by calling for an international charter to curb it.

In the process, they have reminded me of my previously unknown right to utter privacy and claimed that its erosion is undermining democracy.

In fact, democracy across the world is being destroyed by far too many appalling dictators, some of whom, like the extreme North Korean specimen, take out their uncles with a bullet, and power-mad fanatics who clothe their ambitions in the raiment of religion.

Elsewhere, the democracies, of varying strengths, struggle – as they always will – to curb home-made abuses of power on top of threats from assorted terrorists who have no compunction about blowing up innocent people – in fact, the more the better to terrorise the world.

The response of the wealthier and older democracies, such as the UK and the USA, is to find a way of stopping them globally – and not just in their own countries. To do so, they laboriously go looking for needles in haystacks through what our grumbling authors regard as excessive electronic surveillance.

They seem not to realise that if you are looking for needles in haystacks you do need the whole haystack to give you a sporting chance.

To be fair, a UK author, Ian McEwan, says: “Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost.” And Tom Stoppard, no less, asks: “What is the society we wish to protect – optimal security at the cost of maximum surveillance?”

The only trouble is that these thinkers don’t answer their own questions. It is all very well petitioning the world about the alleged excesses of governments in response to bloody threats.

But it is not very edifying to do so when it is clear you haven’t a clue what would be an acceptable level of surveillance in the light of the risk. Nor are they ever likely to know because they are no more in a position to judge than the editor of The Guardian is able to determine what he publishes of Snowden’s massive leak is damaging to the national and global interest.

I have not the slightest objection to the authors of the world uniting to warn us of the propensity of security services to go over the top and governments to play safe, bearing in mind the questions they are likely to be asked if a writer succumbs to a terrorist attack. Nor do I object in the least to their starting a serious debate about the balance between security and surveillance.

But that is not what they seek with grand phrases such as “surveillance is theft”. They want surveillance curbed. Grand phrases do not cut much ice with me when tomorrow, courtesy of indiscriminate terrorists, I could be stone cold dead on a mortuary slab. Nor am I unduly impressed with their reminding me of a right I never knew I possessed and which is breached at every turn of normal, humdrum life.

I am afraid that in trying to be with it, these authors have lost the plot.