For the last of those years she lived in a care home near the sea front in Great Yarmouth, a Victorian guest house converted by an enterprising local doctor. On good days she took her medication, but regardless she spent her weekly state allowance on daily litres of coca-cola and packets of cigarettes.

Before that she had lost a finger to domestic abuse and was then abandoned. She had shared a flat with ‘diabetics’ who took her in and then beat her and robbed of her benefit money. They were heroin addicts.

After one beating, at her lowest ebb, she had up in a hospital ward where, out of some heroic kindness, someone assessed her and diagnosed a schizophrenia that had afflicted her for years. Finally she got help with housing.

All this I know from my mother, second-hand. The last time I saw her was at my grandfather’s funeral, over twenty years ago.

I stopped letting her know where I lived to avoid the long rambling letters with accusations of murder and worse. But also because of my own guilt at having been a lousy brother, at my inability to help her, and her inability to be helped – to be a good victim.

She was difficult to deal with: violent, obstreperous, a fantasist. My mother says only: ‘a troubled soul’.

My father’s poor health made it impossible for her to live with my parents after her husband threw her out. My work took me all over the world. My mother made long drives to the coast to pay her visits and try to fix up somewhere for her to live.

In the end ‘the system’ ended up helping her where we could not. The state – that big soulless, joyless collective noun, so despised and ridiculed – came to her aid. It gave her comfort and shelter, and employed long-suffering people to help her. The path did not run smooth, but the state was my sister’s keeper.

When my mother became ill this year, I realized that the day might soon come when I would have to make the visits, remember her birthday and Christmas. It never came.

I was born in the front bedroom of the two bedroom house my grandparents rented from the council. It was February 1965, The Kinks were at number one for homes with record players and without teenage mothers.

A year later, my brother was born in the same room.

If the front bedroom was for being born in, the back bedroom was for dying in. At any rate, the back bedroom was the room in which, three decades later, my grandfather died.

St Luke’s Terrace in Cobholm was a poor place all my grandparents’ lives. It was a poverty that pools coupons crossed off, a poverty unanswered in the weekly knock of insurance collectors. It was clean and hard and smelled of coal tar soap.

It wintered as grey fog without and grey smoke within. Cigarettes and chimneys back to back. Lines of black mould on steel window frames. The syrupy yellow vapour of the Maltings.

It was a poverty of spirit with only the wireless for companionship. Too poor for pubs or clubs. Too proud for church or chapel congregations.

My grandparents, like my father, are dead now. What has half a century of progress done for this place and the people that are like them – now living? No more coal fires, no more Maltings, PVC window frames.

Half a century of progress…

Here are the words of the ACORN survey:

This category contains the most deprived areas of large and small towns and cities across the UK. Household incomes are low, nearly always below the national average. The level of people having difficulties with debt or having been refused credit approaches double the national average.

The numbers claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance and other benefits is well above the national average. Levels of qualifications are low and those in work are likely to be employed in semi-skilled or unskilled occupations.

The housing is a mix of low rise estates, with terraced and semi-detached houses, and purpose built flats, including high rise blocks. Properties tend to be small and there may be overcrowding.

Over half of the housing is rented from the local council or a housing association. There is some private renting. The relatively small proportion of the housing is owner occupied is generally of low value.

There are a large number of single adult households, including many single pensioners, lone parents, separated and divorced people. There are higher levels of health problems in some areas.

These are the people who are finding life the hardest and experiencing the most difficult social and financial conditions.

These are the people…

A person commits an offence if—
(a) he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or
(b) he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind.

and

An examining officer may examine goods…for the purpose of determining whether they have been used in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism

So flu researchers and train spotters beware, in fact almost anyone doing anything a terrorist might find useful should be careful – and who knows what terrorists find useful? And even asking such a question, let alone researching it, might turn up information which said terrorists may indeed find useful.

Bad laws may well appear absurd, but they are laws nonetheless, and they can lead directly to jail. But the issue here is not law, or acting in solidarity with an embarrassed ally, but powers that are on the brink of destroying the ‘watchdog’ function of journalism, and a society where a legislature with the resources of the 19C attempts to oversee a secret executive with the powers of the 21C.

When it comes to Edward Snowden, the security services clearly feel that they, and not journalists or MPs, are in the best position to decide on what elements of his revelations constitute a threat.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who published them, was told by one intelligence officer overseeing the destruction of a secret-stuffed laptop: “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.” The literary equivalent of “Nothing to see here. Please move along.”

Clearly the scope of the terrorist threat is perceived to be any evidential questioning of the security services’ relationships with other powers and agencies, or any factually-based challenge to the mechanisms through which they monitor and interfere with lives.

The clarity ends rather abruptly. The evidence and facts required to make such challenges are – by the very nature of the activity – secret and therefore must likely be obtained or held illegally.

To make matters muddier, the argument has to be conducted largely by proxy.

No one speaks directly for the security services, or if they leak on their behalf, their simple message is that the public – and the press – must trust them: that the oversight mechanisms which govern them are more than sufficient; the powers under which they operate barely adequate.

This is hardly a unique position. Many of us feel that we should have more freedom to act, fewer restrictions on our behaviour, more resources at our disposal. As Lord Leveson discovered, newspaper editors are no exception, especially when it comes to the freedom to humiliate and shame celebrities, politicians, and anyone foolhardy enough to enter the public line of fire.

By comparison, the security services might be considered models of restraint. And there are indeed real plots and real threats.

Yet the revelations that our phone calls, internet searches, emails and texts are digitally stored and sifted, and the potential for such information to be bought and sold (see Leveson above, although not just by journalists but by lawyers, insurers, and private individuals) is a cause for concern that silence, or simple faith, cannot meet.

Thoughtful, liberally-minded providers of digital surveillance services to governments acknowledge the problem. This is Alex Karp of Palantir*:

In the case of government agencies, he suggests an oversight body that reviews all surveillance – an institution that is purely theoretical at the moment. “Something like this will exist,” Karp insists. “Societies will build it, precisely because the alternative is letting terrorism happen or losing all our liberties.” Forbes

No one seems likely to build it soon. Or to suggest how to oversee such overseers. In the meantime, we are witnessing the end of anonymous whistleblowing on the secret affairs of the state. As Rusbridger wrote in the piece linked above: “it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources.” This will make official scrutiny more necessary, and the bar of conscience yet higher.

Let us not be under the illusion that whistleblowers are saints, and journalists their priestly confessors. But let us neither imagine that surveillance is a sword only wielded by the just, and secrecy their only shield.

Absent a public debate and we must trust that our new security structures contain no young digital Edgar Hoovers awaiting their moment, and that the most sinister results of surveillance are embarrassments at airports and not the Stasi-esque nightmare fictionalised in The Lives of Others. If history suggests anything, it is that we will only find out long after the event. Technology, meanwhile, is finding out ever more, ever faster.

*Palantir is a member of the Technology Pioneer community of my employer, the World Economic Forum.