ORDINARY Algerians are now more relaxed about speaking out to foreign journalists, but there is not yet the freewheeling debate found on the streets of neighbouring Tunisia since the revolution there a little over two years ago. In Algeria in the dark years of the 1990s, discussion of politics was risky. The Department of Intelligence and Security, better known by its French initials, the DRS, had eyes and ears on every street corner. Expressing your opinions too freely could get you picked up for interrogation without any legal rights. “Here comes the hnish (the snake),” was the coded warning used by young men chatting on the streets of the capital, as a local informant approached. The paid indicateur, as he was known in French, would generally be someone who knew the neighbourhood well but did not live in it. His own activities were monitored too—by local jobless young men in his area, with little to do all day beyond sitting chatting, watching comings and goings.

Old habits of caution persist, as a recent newspaper cartoon illustrates. Two men are depicted walking along a street. One is a manual labourer in a woollen cap. His friend is an earnest student carrying a briefcase of papers or books. The first man whispers, “You see those two guys behind me—they’re from the services.” The student looks alarmed. The pair referred to are heading in the other direction. One is a family man, bringing baguettes home for supper. The other is some kind of intellectual, with glasses. “You see those two behind us,” says the intellectual knowingly. “They work for the services.”

In fact, none of them does. The cartoon alludes to the suspicion that divides Algerians. Even activists who work valiantly for Algerian human-rights outfits or for opposition parties tend to dismiss rivals as having been bought off by those same services. It makes opposition so much trickier. And perhaps, as the cartoon suggests, the clothes of the DRS, the emperor who used to oversee political life, are not as magnificent as they used to be.

Kamel Daoud, an Algerian newspaper columnist, thinks people need to move on from the idea that the secret service is all-seeing and all-hearing. If this notion has some basis in fact, he writes, it is because the country has not yet managed to build up other strong institutions, such as a proper parliament or independent courts. Newly appointed ministers or senior civil servants still sometimes feel the need to call round at the DRS headquarters to introduce themselves and “pledge allegiance”, as it were. This is not, in fact, expected of them, a DRS man assured a bemused Mr Daoud.