Every now and again an article comes along that assembles all one’s own inchoate half-thoughts into a free-flowing stupendous whole. This time Charles Moore delivers on the plight of wretched US über-leaker Edward Snowden:

Acting in the name of a morality which disdains allegiance to the rule of national law, he deserves to see what life is like beyond its protection. When he thought, last week, that Ecuador was going to give him political asylum, he wrote an oily letter to its president in which he declared that the US system of surveillance was “a grave violation of our universal human rights”.

Now let him find out how hollow those rights are when not guaranteed within a democratic legal order. Let him eat the free peanuts in the transit lounge of life, and learn, too late, what is needed to defend a free people…

The obvious beneficiaries of all of this are not civil liberties. They are those who wish to embarrass the West – the Chinese, who can now push back against US attempts to expose their cyberattacks on American government and industry, Vladimir Putin, German Leftists, South American populists and the sort of rent-a-mobs who are so confused that they burn the French flag in La Paz.

Poor Mr Snowden is hoping that some country somewhere will want him, and that he can find a way to get there. His choices currently appear to be Nicaragua (78th place on the 2013 Press Freedom Index), Bolivia (109th place) and Venezuela (117th place).

What I find odd about these not-so-heroic whistleblowers is that they seem to expect to be widely praised as heroes. They are bewildered that those they have betrayed might be a bit peeved at their behaviour. Having grown up in a system that for all its faults does have democratic processes and pretty clear rules, they deliberately break those rules and insult those processes in a way calculated to do maximum damage – and then refuse to accept the consequences.

Much as I might despise the Snowdens and Assanges of this world, I might have some respect for them if they were to leak the information they have acquired and then hand themselves in to the state they have betrayed. That position has some honour. It amounts to demanding that the state concerned lives up to its own highest values. It also opens the way for the core issues of principle (in this case individual freedom/privacy v the need of the state to use high-tech secret means to carry out key public responsibilities) to be hammered out in court before the public.

But no. Off they scuttle to places whose leaders largely hate any ideas of freedom and who would dearly like to use the information they have revealed to attack us. They hurt others but don’t want to get hurt themselves. This is pathetic, even infantile: I’ve been naughty – but don’t spank me as it’s not my fault!

Charles Moore moves into top gear:

This week in Cairo, as Arab Spring turns to burning, contentious summer, Western governments will be learning far more from their communications-monitoring than they will from ambassadors watching nervously from behind the curtains in the diplomatic quarter.

One of the most important things they will learn is how what happens on the Egyptian streets will affect Islamist extremists back here on our own. “Only connect”: to be even remotely safe, our new world of connectivity needs security vigilance just as surely as motorways need speed cameras and traffic police. You need to follow what the spooks call “the electronic exhaust”.

That’s not quite right. The whole point of ‘communications monitoring’ as Charles himself descibes is to process mountains of data using computer algorithms and then add human insight when certain patterns pop out.

Our Embassy may or may not be nervous in Cairo today. But a good Embassy adds all sorts of ‘live’ insight and feel and indeed raw information that no amount of remote communications-scanning can assemble. And even if you can listen to him in real time, what the chef de cabinet of the miserable ex-President Morsi is saying excitedly on his mobile phone may in fact not be correct. The trick for any government is to have just the right combination of different sorts of information-flow about fast-moving events, and combine that with judgement as to how best to respond (if indeed a response is wise). D Cameron’s team will be sinking under piles of blue-jacketed Omega Delta Sigma intercept reports – they’ll be delighted to read something from the Embassy that helps make sense of it all.

He finishes strongly:

The reality is that today’s James Bond is constantly accompanied not by Pussy Galore or a martini, but by a lawyer. Our intelligence services are governed by Acts of Parliament, their methods are invigilated by former judges and their most senior officers are questioned by a parliamentary committee. They have equivalent forms of oversight, even more elaborate, in the United States.

Indeed, it is no accident that the greatest trust in the intelligence world is that between Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – sometimes known in this field as the Five Eyes. This exists because of a common experience of kinship, language, war and living under law-based liberty. It is emphatically not the product of untrammelled state power, but of a culture that knows that its eyes (five pairs being better than one) need to scan the horizon to stay free

Good stirring stuff.

The problem is that we are increasingly unsure how far we can trust the state with this ability to monitor everything so closely. What if (say) the state’s tax authorities start abusing their powers to oppress certain political groups? Or what if in acquiring its information the state uses methods that go beyond the law? What if we can no longer rely on the law itself to uphold our liberties, when our law is interpreted either too far in favour of the state or too far in favour of terrorists by former communist judges pronouncing at the European Court of Human Rights?

No obvious answers. But plenty for E Snowden to mull over as he makes his lonely tours of that Moscow airport, knowing that most Americans hate him and that the only people who say they want him despise the ‘Western’ freedoms he purports to champion.