Quote of the day - Peggy Noonan on responses to spying scandals

****

Peggy Noonan was, of course, speechwriter for my political hero. Here's what she wrote about the response of some pundits to phone tapping and spying scandals:

Particularly obnoxious on this question are the American policy thinkers and journalists who, when asked about the Merkel taps, put on their world-weary professional wise-guy face, looking like tragic suburbanites who once read a John le Carré novel and can’t forget the shiver of existential dread, and say that everyone does it, governments spy, get with the program, this is the way the world works.

* * *

Sorry, but tapping the private telephone line of one of your most important friends in the West is not how the world works, it’s how, once she finds out and the world finds out, it falls apart.

And frankly we're no better in the UK.

...

The Government is spying on us...

The Government is spying on us:

Excluding renewals there were 2,701 property interference authorisations during 2010-2011, which is very slightly down on the previous year. There were 666 renewals of authorisations compared to 717 in the previous year.

And...

Law enforcement agencies granted 13,780 authorisations to conduct directed surveillance during 2010-2011 with 2,413 still extant at 31 March 2011.

Plus...

In the period to which this report relates, other public authorities recruited 234 CHIS (covert human intelligence sources) of whom 153 were cancelled during the year with 106 extant authorisations at the end of the year

Perhaps we should worry a little more about this?

I also wonder - have had some idle moments - just how much use the police and security services have made of this phone "hacking" malarkey? I don't believe for a second that it hasn't cross the occasional febrile copper mind. And the spooks - they've got to be using the techniques haven't they?

Perhaps this should be part of the multitudinous enquiries into how media folk are spying on us?
....