As he will have wished and we might have predicted, the bandwagon created by the GCHQ boss, Robert Hannigan, is gathering momentum. His demand that the internet companies abandon their stance on privacy now carries the weight of the British government.

Addressing the Society of Editors conference on Tuesday, Sajid Javid, the culture secretary, dismissed the right to privacy – in the form of the right to be forgotten – as “little more than an excuse for well-paid lawyers to hide the shady pasts of wealthy businessmen and the sexual indiscretions of sporting celebrities”. Last weekend the former home secretary David Blunkett jumped on board, accusing technology companies that offer encryption of “helping terrorists to co-ordinate genocide and foster fear and instability around the world”. Bernard Hogan Howe, the Metropolitan police commissioner, said this month that space and technology firms must do more to frustrate paedophiles, murderers and terrorists.

Hannigan’s assault on privacy has found friends in the highest places. Prior to the Edward Snowden revelations, the spymasters and generals directing the NSA and GCHQ didn’t write newspaper essays about their work. But times have changed, highlighted by Hannigan’s decision to use the Financial Times last week to accuse Twitter and Facebook – “the largest US technology companies” – of being routes for crime and terrorism.

Like pretty much everything else said by governments, and spy agencies in particular, since Snowden pulled the behaviour of the US and UK listeners into daylight, Hannigan’s comments were intentionally disingenuous. But also, like servants of various despotisms with whom he would be loth to compare himself, Hannigan’s frequent use of the word “democracy” is accompanied by a stunning contempt for the rule of law.Hannigan tells us that Islamic State (Isis) is bad because it tweets and makes strategic use of hashtags, like all the other small-time self-promoters out there. Despite the fact that “US technology companies”, not Isis, are the subject of his complaint, Hannigan does not accuse the companies of violating any law. Nor can he.

Though he uses his right of free expression in free society to associate law-abiding businesses in some obscure fashion with “murder” and “child abuse”, he cannot plausibly deny that these companies expend much effort and treasure to comply with the law of the United States, and other countries where they do business. He demands “greater cooperation” from those who are unquestionably doing everything the law requires of them.

Hannigan is, in other words, demanding extra-legal assistance from law-abiding businesses to invade customers’ privacy. He is not asking for legislation or proposing legal change. Instead he is deploying the most inflammatory and misleading language available, to publicly blackmail companies into abandoning the rule of law, to bludgeon them into providing assistance for the illegal surveillance of their customers.

It wasn’t ever thus. For decades, the NSA and GCHQ bullied, bribed and bamboozled telecommunications companies around the world into providing limited assistance. The companies who knowingly cooperated did so in secret. They had no reason to expect their customers to find out. If customers did, they had nowhere else to go: the telecomms were “natural monopolies”.

But skullduggery doesn’t work as it used to, because the internet is infinitely flexible. Google, Facebook and Twitter cannot remain in business if they lose their customers’ trust; and Snowden shattered that trust by showing the extent of their inadequacy as protectors of their customers against illegal state-conducted mass surveillance. If the companies cannot reassure their customers that use of their services is not tantamount to giving all your private data to the world’s spies and secret police, customers will desert them en masse, and their businesses will collapse.

If their customers want out, technology has already created higher-privacy options. The architecture of the net does not require us to use vast centralised arrays of servers and memory owned by companies in order to do our sharing with friends. With small technical adjustments at low cost, households and businesses could shift to secure and private modes of sharing and communicating that would cut out the middlemen.

That’s the listeners’ worst nightmare as well as the best outcome for democracy, because if we “federate” among cheap, reliable personal servers all the email and social data now being centralised at Google, Facebook, Twitter etc, governments will have no place to go to get all that data at once. They will be compelled to fall back upon mechanisms subject to control by the rule of law, such as search warrants.

Without the companies centralising data, the illegal listeners’ task becomes just as impossible as it deserves to be. The companies must protect their customers to the full extent the law allows them, or lose their business – and also must meet their obligations to law enforcement as defined by the courts of the places in which they do businesses. They cannot exceed legality in either direction without courting destruction.

Hannigan, for all his blowhard rhetoric, would be infinitely worse off without them, so he must bully them into action beyond the legal requirements. Hannigan-ites say “privacy has never been an absolute right”. The GCHQ boss is lecturing the countrymen of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Perhaps he thinks that to be free from state spying is not included in those endowments. One wonders what he thinks those ordinary Americans fought for who died to keep Yorkshire out of the Third Reich.Thus he presumably does not agree with Justice Louis Brandeis, the great US supreme court judge, that privacy, “the right to be let alone”, is “the right most valued by civilised men”.

Hannigan’s oft-repeated invocation of “democracy” is without content, without integrity. He should be fired. Instead the bandwagon rolls on.