Guardian Article - Civil liberties: the world at their fingertips

In June 2008, the head of the US National Security Agency, Lt Gen Keith Alexander, visited Menwith Hill, the giant listening station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, and set the audience of British and American intelligence staff a provocative challenge: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?" he asked.

The tone sounds almost jaunty – but it meshes with a similar and entirely serious ambition revealed in internal documents from within GCHQ, the sister UK organisation charged with monitoring communications – mastering the internet.

Now we are forced to confront the reality that we are moving into a new age of human existence where every digital action – be it by phone, text, search, chat or email – can be collected, searched and stored.

The implications are profound.

The pace of technological change is more rapid than the law or oversight can possibly cope with.

The gravitational pull towards total surveillance is as inevitable as it is secret.

The gravitational pull towards total surveillance is as inevitable as it is secret.

The system depends on a vast and – at least in Britain – unprecedented infrastructure of secrecy, including closed courts, private hearings, confidential commercial undertakings and restrictions on the ability of the British media to say or write very much about it at all.

But there has to be debate – and over the past fortnight in America and Europe there has, indeed, been a vigorous discussion sparked by the revelations of the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

But there has to be debate – and over the past fortnight in America and Europe there has, indeed, been a vigorous discussion sparked by the revelations of the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

What are the processes for giving authority for building this gargantuan digital haystack – and then for finding the needles within it?

Do lawmakers understand the utterly changed circumstances in which legislation designed for an era of crocodile clips on copper wires is being stretched to cope with legions of engineers and analysts with the world literally at their fingertips?

Do lawmakers understand the utterly changed circumstances in which legislation designed for an era of crocodile clips on copper wires is being stretched to cope with legions of engineers and analysts with the world literally at their fingertips?

"Unwarranted government surveillance," he said last week, "is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society."

Mastering the internet may seem desirable and harmless to some in a comfortable era of coalition politics and – still – comparatively benign economic conditions.

We are creating a system of total surveillance which could, indeed, bring great benefits in terms of security but which, in the wrong hands, could severely curtail protest, reporting, privacy and hard-won freedoms of association and speech.