The high price of the Google guarantee

[Commentary] Let’s call it the Google guarantee. It may well be the future of the internet. Send a message or email, swap a photograph, engage in some banter with friends via a games app and you can be certain of one thing. The company standing behind these digital exchanges will ensure that your words, images and expressed intentions are forever secure from the prying eyes of state intelligence agencies.

There is a really big question behind all this. It is about who gets to decide what in a democracy. Should it be the masters of the commercial internet or, more prosaically, should it be the elected politicians who make laws and the independent judges charged with upholding the rule of law? All but the most extreme libertarians will accept that there is a balance to be struck between the privacy of the individual and the state’s duty to safeguard the security of wider society. Different nations will make different choices.