Last Post blown for privacy

The moral dilemma. To whistle-blow or not to whistle-blow.

Those who are privy to state secrets are bound by a responsibility to those they work for and to the perceived common good of their country. At what stage does that common good shift from the wishes of their masters to the need for the people to know just what is being done in their name?

In the US, Edward Snowden - who worked on IT security for the National Security Agency and the CIA - has blown his whistle; in New Zealand, United Future leader Peter Dunne claims he has not, although his links with the journalist who revealed that our spy agency, the Government Communication Security Bureau, had illegally spied on Kiwis has scuppered his career.

Before fleeing to Hong Kong, Snowden said the NSA had collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide. In the name of protecting the US from its "enemies", it invaded emails, phone calls and other communications that those involved might have assumed were private. Maybe they intercepted your emails; maybe mine.

Should we be surprised?

You can go back further than President Richard M Nixon and the bugging of the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building to find US agencies using black ops to undermine not just privacy, but democracy.

New Zealand doesn't have such a history but the October 2007 anti-terror raids with its illegal surveillance and trumped-up charges through to the Kim Dotcom saga and the GCSB's illegal activities give cause for concern. Or should we go all the way back to colonisation?

No, we shouldn't be surprised. History shows that those who hold power will do whatever they can get away with to keep it.

I give credit to Dunne for refusing to surrender the emails between himself and the journalist.

He bit the bullet of ministerial resignation, saying they were private correspondence.

The question is, in an era of rampant state hacking is it time we gave up on the very notion of privacy.