Daniel Soar

On 21 August​ a UK-piloted Reaper drone – an unmanned aerial vehicle, remotely controlled from RAF Waddington, an airbase south of Lincoln, a few miles off the A1 to Doncaster – launched a Hellfire missile at a car near Raqqa in Syria. In the car were Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, two British citizens who had left the UK to join Isis in 2013. They were killed instantly. If this...

A new year​! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’ December/January yadda-yadda of diets and get-fit-quick schemes, to the cultural roundups of the year ahead. The steady increase in all this stuff – the annual binge – is one of the more...

What matters more: the leaker, or the leak? Any one of the following, you’d think, might have been the news story of the year, or the decade: the revelation that America’s biggest spy agency, the NSA, has information on every phone call made in the continental United States as well as abroad; that it claims to have direct access to the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and all the other major web companies; that GCHQ, the NSA’s British equivalent, is siphoning off the entire internet and storing some of it for thirty days; that online encryption has been subverted and nothing is safe from government spies.

If you’re not exhausted by or indifferent to the endless revelations about the NSA – another week, another codename, another programme to vacuum up the world’s communications – then you’ve probably long since drawn a single general conclusion: we’re all being watched, all the time. You may also think this is something we sort of knew anyway. Perhaps you see ubiquitous spying as a function of the post-9/11 authoritarian state, which gathers knowledge by any means possible in order to consolidate its control, and which sees us all as potential suspects.

The event that turned a story about a few hacked phones into a scandal that came close to bringing down one branch of the world’s most powerful media empire was a piece of mistaken reporting. For two years a handful of people – Nick Davies at the Guardian, the MP Tom Watson – kept insisting that the problem was bigger than a couple of ‘rogue’ journalists...