According to the BBC, the man who used to be in charge of listening to you, thinks all of us should be listened to a lot more. Not ‘listening’ in the sense of careful, attentive and responsive duty to serve: rather, listening in the sneaky, all-encompassing, watching out for bad guys style of listening.

I can’t help thinking that this is an echo of a dried-up, bureaucratic and increasingly irrelevant administration: reading the plaintive call of the uber-spook side-by-side with the quiet and simple statements of the man brokering the expenses leaks gives some idea of the error being made by the modern British civil servant.

The uber-spook is concerned with his job and nothing else: the leak broker is concerned with the entirety of civic life. The spook wants to use the most expensive, brute-force algorithm to go find his elephant, with no reference to the issues that clearly concern the arch-leaker.

The abstruse idea that motivates Mr Wick is that of the social contract: tit for tat, in essence. This asserts that any civil interaction which is one-sided is inherently unfair, and will deliver mounting resentment, avoidance, bad vibes – and eventually, payback. Mr Wick’s objection (he says) is to exactly the kind of blunt and omnipresent surveillance advocated by Sir David Pepper (our uber-spook). Just about the only thing these two men have in common is that they are unelected guardians of something that affects the lives of others in very real and immediate ways.

There is a networks angle to my Sunday morning meanderings here. I don’t know of any networks administrator who isn’t exquisitely aware of the results of poking around inside the data their networks present – it’s not just that reading HR’s personnel files is “not the done thing”, it is rather a career-limiting, stupid and explosive thing to indulge in.

In our case, as admins, we have the oversight which Sir David would like HMG to have – but there’s payback for us when we abuse it. Sir David’s need is not in doubt, but what’s not clear is the consequences for those less privileged than him who may abuse the data he collects in good faith. Part of being a good network admin is realising the value of information and appraising those who would have access to it – and appraisal is a face-to-face, personal, intimate thing to do.

Sir David’s proposal opens our data not just to well motivated intelligence operatives, but also to some pretty petty minded, poorly motivated and entirely invisible faceless bureaucrats. This is a pressure group which exists somewhat outside the traditional mechanisms of democracy, but whose actions definitely motivated Mr Wick’s leak brokering activities.

It seems quite clear to me that the bureaucrats are the ones unbalancing our social contract, and just for once the bit ofsociety outside government best placed to show society how to make this work better – how to provide security oversight without destroying faith in administration – is our bit. The bit that handles directory permissions, firewalls, VPNs, logs, and the rest.

Thing is, I don’t know who to go to with my suggestions, because the departments who set those standards are secret, and the standards they set are secret too.

Which is rather where we came in…