France and the UK are on the edge of Kafkaesque surveillance

Surveillance laws being debated around the world should avoid the recent fate of the French - and the scorn of Franz Kafka

The problem of our laws, wrote Kafka, is that they can involve arbitrary, secretive acts on the part of elites. The law, on this view, has "brought only slight, more or less accidental benefits, and done a great deal of serious harm, since it has given the people a false sense of security towards coming events, and left them helplessly exposed".

"We live", Kafka concluded, "on the razor's edge".