We welcome the fact that the intelligence chiefs acknowledged that they need to be more open as a result of the Snowden disclosures, but were surprised that unlike in the US and Europe there was no substantive discussion at all about anything Snowden revealed.

The disastrous loss of classified data was not the responsibility of journalists but of the intelligence community itself.

It is only the involvement of global newspapers that prevented this information from spilling out across the web and genuinely causing a catastrophic leak.

We understand that the agencies will always warn that any form of disclosure has a damaging impact on their work – but this cannot mean the end of all questioning and debate.