But that was not the only big news from the world of espionage. It was also revealed that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – a UK law dating from 2000 that authorises signals interception for anti-terrorist and other purposes – had been used more than a dozen times by local council officials in Poole, Dorset, to investigate illegal shellfish dredging, sales of alcohol to minors, and whether out-of-boundary parents were trying to sneak their children into the local school system.

Spying is, depending on how you look at it, either a traditional endeavour in which technological advances have raised the stakes to apocalyptic levels; or it is a joke, an irrelevance, an anachronism that is now engaged in only by busybodies and compulsive violators of others’ liberties. Certainly it has grown harder in recent years to base the case for spying on the effectiveness of western intelligence agencies. The US CIA gathered too little knowledge about al-Qaeda in the years before September 11 2001 and too little about Iraq in the years after. CIA employees have fought one another over bureaucratic turf. They have blundered through minor scandals involving minor security lapses (such as former director John Deutch’s loading his laptop with classified information) and major ones (such as the mole Aldrich Ames).

The problem is stated concisely in the title of a new book by Frederick P. Hitz, former CIA inspector-general: Why Spy? (St Martin’s Press). Mr Hitz aims to counter a standard narrative about the CIA’s ineffectiveness, mostly pushed by conservatives and Republicans. It is that the stringent oversight of the CIA introduced in the 1970s has gelded the agency. Nowadays every operation must be presented to several congressional committees. In a polarised political climate, this makes secrecy impossible.

Mr Hitz does not really have a good rebuttal to this narrative. He often embodies the very politicisation that the CIA’s detractors complain of. He argues, for example, that the US finds it so hard to pursue intelligence work in the Middle East today because people in the Middle East are not fond of it. Getting access to more human intelligence “will require that we project a different image in the Middle East,” he writes. “Currently, because of our presence in Iraq, our support for Israel, and our position as the biggest promoter and beneficiary of economic globalisation, we are too often seen as insensitive and even hostile to Islamic culture and interests.” Whatever one thinks of Iraq, Israel and globalisation, surely this puts the cart before the horse. Spy operations ought to be dependent on the US’s foreign policy interests, not vice versa.

But Mr Hitz insists on another factor in the decline of spying that deserves our attention. It is that the kind of human intelligence contact-building and information-passing that was the CIA’s speciality in its golden years has come to be underappreciated. The often tedious “pick and shovel” work of human intelligence, as Mr Hitz calls it, traditionally accounts for about 5 per cent of the information the agency gathers. Yet it is vitally important, Mr Hitz thinks, “because it can often lead the analyst to information he may not be able to acquire elsewhere, information about a subject’s intentions”.

That is exactly right. What brings any story to life, keeps it from disappearing from our consciousness, is volition. (This is why we read more eagerly about Osama Bin Laden than about global warming.) And where no volition can be discerned, we tend, consciously or unconsciously, to supply it, as nature writers do when they resort to the pathetic fallacy and bloggers when they spread conspiracy theories. If you can gather 98 per cent of what you need from a satellite instantaneously, you may feel entitled to guess at the vital remaining 2 per cent, especially if it requires years of expense, assiduity and danger to figure out.

There are other problems, of course. One is the decline of states and the rise of voluntary command structures, such as al-Qaeda. In any authoritarian structure, anyone you gather information from will have some knowledge about the leadership’s intentions because those intentions will be conveyed to him, in the form of commands. The problem is getting access. All of the best nuclear physicists in the USSR had to be Communists, but they may well have been anti-Communists in their hearts. If they were, there was a chance they would share information. Al-Qaeda is a tougher nut to crack. If you do not accept the aims of al-Qaeda, you are ipso facto not in al-Qaeda.

But of the many ways globalisation undermines advanced countries’ mastery of the world, the main way is through outsourcing of curiosity. The west relies heavily on foreign intelligence services. The 9/11 Commission noted that, except for Arab-Americans, only half a dozen American students were majoring in Arabic at the time the World Trade Centre was hit.

As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out, anything that is labour-intensive in a labour-saving world comes to be prohibitively expensive. The examples he liked to cite were live classical music and nurses. Since the need to compensate individual humans cannot be got around, symphony tickets and hospital stays inevitably come to seem less and less affordable. Real intelligence-gathering is the same kind of endeavour. Knowledge about the inmost wishes of the rest of the world is pricing itself out of the market.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard