And last month, in another part of the forest, we had the director of the US National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, admitting that he still did not know exactly which files whistle-blower Edward Snowden had downloaded and taken with him when he fled the country two months before.
Well, General Alexander didn't exactly admit it; he just declined to say whether he knew, but that comes to the same thing. Two months after Snowden flew the coop, the NSA still doesn't know how many more of their embarrassing secrets are out there waiting to be revealed.
This may explain why a Brazilian citizen, David Miranda, who was changing planes in London, was stopped by British police under the Terrorism Act, questioned for nine hours, and then released - but police kept his computer, two pen drives, an external hard drive, and various other electronic items.
Miranda is the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been working on Snowden's documents, but the police wouldn't have gone to all that trouble just to harass him, particularly since their actions were probably illegal: all their questions were about Snowden and the NSA files, not about terrorism. And why would they even bother to confiscate Miranda's electronics? Don't they realise there are bound to be copies elsewhere?
It's less puzzling if you assume that the NSA asked for the operation (of course it did), and that its goal was actually to find out just how much Snowden knows, and can prove. Maybe it found out, maybe it didn't - but what it tells the rest of us is that the NSA is not really in control of its own data. If Snowden can take it away with him, so can others.
There are 850,000 potential "others" - with top secret clearance and access to the data - and some of them will not have the same high motives as Snowden for stealing the data. In fact, the NSA even catches an average of one employee a year who has been using the system to track a lover or spouse they suspect is straying. God knows how many it doesn't catch - but if its inability to figure out what Snowden took is any guide, probably a lot.
What the NSA has built is a system that is too big to monitor properly, let alone fully control. The system's official purposes are bad enough, but it cannot even know the full range of illegitimate private actions that it permits. And this is not a design flaw. It is inherent in the very size of the system and the number of people who have access to it.
Which brings us back to Nasdaq, Apple, Goldman Sachs et. al. If it can be done, it will be done. Algorithms will be written for automated trading at speeds measured in fractions of a microsecond, and the competition will have to follow suit. It will become possible to store immense amounts of data in a virtual "cloud", and the cloud will take shape. It will become theoretically possible to listen in on every conversation in the world, and the surveillance systems to do it will be built.
Every step onward increases the scale and complexity of the systems, until they are too big and complex for any one person to understand. They will run without supervision and when they fail the failure will also be hard to understand. And if you give hundreds of thousands of people access to the system, your secrets will not stay secret for long.
The volume of date moving on the internet and private networks is expanding very fast at the moment and system design is just not keeping up. Given time, it may be possible to catch up on that front, if the rate of expansion eventually slows. But it will be much harder, maybe impossible, to build leak-proof surveillance systems.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
