[toyg]

David Cornwell served in MI5/MI6 in the '50s and '60s, when the game was pretty different from today. Certainly the mediocrity is still present in intelligence agencies at some level (as testified by the Manchester attack), but Snowden proved that their technical capabilities for surveillance are as good as, or even better than, a lot of people feared. This is why casually dismissing the paranoid as tinfoil-hatter is out of fashion. You will likely notice the same happening to Godwin Law right now.