This is a short history of U.S. government insistence on exceptional access, which is the requirement that encryption back doors be put in services and products used by ordinary people.

Obviously, the Snowden revelations put a lot of this into mainstream conversation. But it's important to note that none of the programmes identified by Edward Snowden have been formally sunset as a result of the public outcry.

All of this, whether it's secret NSA secret key provisioning services and recovery services, warrantless surveillance under section 702 of FISA, Prism, Upstream…all of these are ongoing programmes and not checked by any democratic body.

Most recently the Treasury Department’s office of intelligence analysis was revealed to be illegally rifling through the private financial records of millions of U.S. citizens, which it was collecting illegally from FinCen, the NSA was also accessing that data illegally.

There was a brief outcry about this, but this got caught in the bureaucratic turf war between the treasury, OIA and FinCen, both of which are Treasury Departments, there was a politicised aspect to this battle and so it just kind of quietly went away.

Just a couple of days ago the Wall Street Journal broke a story that the Arizona attorney general's office created a programme called track to collect data on money transfers from Western Union with the full collaboration of Western Union.

150 million money transfers are stored in this database. Also, completely illegal. It didn't go through the subpoena process. But again, we will see if there are any consequences for this.

What this points to is the incompatibility of a surveillance state with democratic governance.