COLUMNISTS New details emerged this week of how Syria managed to conceal the secret nuclear plant it was building with North Korean help, and how close to producing plutonium it was before it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike last autumn. But that was not the only big news from the world of espionage. It was also revealed that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – a UK law dating from 2000 that authorises signals interception for anti-terrorist and other purposes – had been used more than a dozen times by local council officials in Poole, Dorset, to investigate illegal shellfish dredging, sales of alcohol to minors, and whether out-of-boundary parents were trying to sneak their children into the local school system.
Spying is, depending on how you look at it, either a traditional endeavour in which technological advances have raised the stakes to apocalyptic levels; or it is a joke, an irrelevance, an anachronism that is now engaged in only by busybodies and compulsive violators of others’ liberties. Certainly it has grown harder in recent years to base the case for spying on the effectiveness of western intelligence agencies. The US CIA gathered too little knowledge about al-Qaeda in the years before September 11 2001 and too little about Iraq in the years after. CIA employees have fought one another over bureaucratic turf. They have blundered through minor scandals involving minor security lapses (such as former director John Deutch’s loading his laptop with classified information) and major ones (such as the mole Aldrich Ames).
