The intelligence and security committee is a watchdog that rarely barks. Indeed, its members have sometimes kept their harshest words for those who raise the alarm while they doze. Before Edward Snowden blew the whistle, the ISC never used its privileged access to the intelligence agencies to interrogate the bulk harvesting of communications data, or even to reveal that it happened. Perhaps it never knew. After all, it was – until he was caught chatting cheerfully about his light workload – chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Its members are nominated by the prime minister, and the technical expertise that it draws on often comes from former intelligence insiders.

In the week that the foreign secretary has said that it’s time to “move on” from Snowden, this slumbering scrutineer has finally got around to acknowledging the systematic trawling of web traffic and call records. This must be counted as progress – of a very British sort. Twenty-one months have passed since Mr Snowden shared his secrets, and 15 have passed since Barack Obama admitted to disturbing implications that required a proper debate. Only now, and without apologising for failing to shine the spotlight earlier, is the ISC ready to face the facts about the systematic way in which the state keeps tabs on so many citizens.

The ISC is still bewitched by the reassuring, but entirely misleading, distinction between metadata and content

Better late than never might have been a suitable verdict on Thursday’s ISC report if it had faced the facts and stopped there; but it also proposed some fixes. Yes, as the parliamentarians say, it would be nice to have transparent, codified rules to govern snooping. But what they seem to have in mind is a transparent and codified licence for the agencies to keep on keeping on. What the world knows about surveillance has been completely transformed since 2013, and yet when we move from ISC analysis to ISC prescription, it feels like time has stood still. The most obvious template for the sort of consolidated legislation it has in mind is an old idea that refuses to die: the snooper’s charter. The securocrats were demanding it before Labour left office, and have restlessly manoeuvred to revive it under the coalition.

So while there is no longer any pretence that the unsettling facts can be reinterred, the new suggestion is that we learn to live with them. The committee fails to reckon with the agencies as a professional vested interest, which, like any other, will always prefer arrangements that make its life easier and allow it to write its own rules. The demands for new powers follow automatically from every atrocity – from Woolwich and Boston to Sydney and Paris – irrespective of the fact that the perpetrators in every one of these cases had already been on the radar. Such atrocities thus make the case for better-organised and perhaps better-resourced trailing of particular targets, but certainly not the collating of more data on everyone else. The great difficulty of the agencies appears to be holding on to all the needles they pull out of haystacks, yet the lazy instinct is to demand ever more hay.

The ISC is still bewitched by the reassuring, but entirely misleading, distinction between so-called metadata, such as call records, and the content. While it may well be true, as the committee believes, that people would be less concerned about someone seeing their phone bill than listening in to their calls, the need for a warrant to tap a line is not much of a safeguard for privacy in the internet age. Whether or not passwords, locations or web searches constitute the substance of communication in particular cases comes down to the specific architecture of the sites being used. The committee talks about precluding arbitrary fishing expeditions by restricting the facility to sift out individuals “by name”, but this ignores the sheer variety of ways in which big data can be mined.

The head of MI5 can dismiss the suggestion that “knowing which websites people have visited” is “some substantial step up in intrusion”, but few others would. Browsing of abortion clinics and gay dating sites is merely the more obvious sort of internet history that many would wish to keep private. As a map of an ordinary individual’s anxieties, search histories can often be more instructive than the transcript of a therapy session. If there were, by contrast, a record of the ISC’s own explorations, it would reveal very little. For that body searches out nothing, and appears to have no curiosity or anxiety at all.