Our willingness to accept outrageous terms and conditions allows the security services to do as they wish

One night last week, I had a conversation over dinner with a student who is as puzzled as I am about why people seem so unworried by online surveillance. What would it take, we wondered, to wake people up? If the Snowden revelations did not constitute a “Milly Dowler moment”, then what would?

The next morning, a colleague sent me a link to a TEDx talk given in Brussels by Mikko Hyppönen, the chief research officer of F-Secure, a Finnish computer security company. It’s a terrific, measured account of the mess we’re in and of how we got here, and well worth watching on that account. But for me, two things stood out.

One was Hyppönen’s highlighting of an exchange that took place in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court (Fisa), which supposedly regulates and oversees covert surveillance by US intelligence agencies. Yahoo had decided to challenge demands from the security services for access to some of its users’ data. The hearing was, of course, held in secret, and we would never have known about it had not the furore over Snowden led to some of this stuff being retrospectively declassified.

The relevant extract from the court transcript reads:

Justice Arnold: “Well, if this order is enforced, and it’s secret, how can you be hurt? The people don’t know that – that they’re being monitored in some way. How can you be harmed by it? I mean, what’s… what’s your… what’s the damage to your consumer?”

Ponder that for a moment. It’s extraordinarily revealing because it captures the essence of the mindset of the people who now rule our democracies. It’s a variant on the “if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear” mantra. And it begs the question: who gave these people the right to think and act like this?

The long answer goes back a long way – to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and maybe Rousseau. The short answer is that we did. We elected these holders of high office – the home and foreign secretaries who ostensibly control MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the MPs who cluelessly voted through laws such as Ripa (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act), Drip (Data Retention and Investigatory Powers) and will do likewise for whatever loose statutes will be proposed after the next terrorist/paedophilia/cyber crime panic arrives.

Which brings me neatly to the second striking point in Hypponen’s lecture. Earlier this year, he and some of his F-Secure colleagues carried out an interesting experiment in London. They set up a Wi-Fi “hotspot” that offered free connectivity to anyone in the vicinity who was willing to accept the terms and conditions under which the service was offered.

One of these T&C clauses read as follows: “YOUR FIRST-BORN CHILD: In using this service, you agree to relinquish your first-born child to F-Secure, as and when the company requires it. In the event that no children are produced, your most beloved pet will be taken instead. The terms of this agreement stand for eternity.”

Everyone, but everyone, clicked “accept”.

This casual carelessness, this tacit acceptance of outrageous terms and conditions, is, as far as we can tell, universal across internet users everywhere. In large measure it explains how we find ourselves living in a comprehensively surveilled world. And perhaps it also helps to explain why it’s so difficult to get people to wake up to the implications of the world that our carelessness has enabled.

I used to think that imaginative failure explained the relative lack of public concern about state and corporate surveillance: people simply cannot conceive where this stuff might be taking us, which is why we needed novelists such as Orwell and Aldous Huxley – and now Dave Eggers – to help us visualise potential dystopias.

But now I wonder if the explanation lies elsewhere. Could it be that the reason there has been so little public fuss about the Snowden revelations (with some notable exceptions, mainly Germany) is because everybody feels compromised, to a greater or lesser extent, by their online behaviour. Sure, in principle, we think it’s creepy that Google reads our mail, that Facebook monitors our relationships and that the spooks have a log of everything we’ve ever read on the web, but, hey, the services are free and the security services are unlikely to be interested in little old us.

In that sense, we feel conflicted and compromised in the same way that we do over climate change. We know in our bones that we ought not to be driving diesel cars, leaving our lights on, flying to Tallinn on weekend breaks, putting off insulating our homes, etc. But we continue to do all of these environmentally disreputable things. Convenience trumps everything. And, like charity, it begins at home.