Whatever, spying has to have a purpose beyond outwitting another country's spies, doesn't it? Sometimes I wonder.
I don't wonder for long. Life's too short to spend on riddles that are probably not important. Information that matters tends to be available to any interested mind and there is so much of it to read.
I can completely understand John Key's "brain fade" in a briefing by the Government Communications Security Bureau on its role in the Dotcom investigation. Likewise Bill English, standing in for Key a few months later and forgetting to mention to him that he had signed something to do with Dotcom for the GCSB.
I'm glad they had more important things on their minds.
This interminable spy story arrived at some sort of conclusion this week. Our mega-loaded German guest will keep it alive in the courts for a while yet but how many of us care that the external intelligence bureau went beyond its brief when it monitored a New Zealand resident?
There was always likely to be a reasonable explanation and so it turned out.
The Cabinet Secretary, Rebecca Kitteridge, looked into it and reported that the bureau had been acting in the belief it was permitted to help a legitimate police investigation of a New Zealand resident or citizen.
Common sense would say that, but in the view of lawyers the legislation governing the GCSB since 2003 does not. In that time it has spied on 88 of us.
This week the Government put a bill into Parliament that will ensure the bureau can monitor your communications and mine if the police or the Security Intelligence Service gets a warrant.
Should we care? I can't think of a reason. Nor can I fathom why the GCSB's job was ever confined to foreign communications. If it intercepts messages of concern they will often involve a New Zealander.
If Mr Dotcom persists with his court case on this issue we might even be told exactly what data the spies passed on. That would make a change.
There was a hint of it in Kitteridge's report. She mentioned that the agency had believed it did not need a warrant to collect "meta-data" which, she explained, was the sort of information contained on a phone bill.
That is probably the level of information spy agencies usually produce - fragments of "intelligence" that seldom add up to anything.
A nation's real intelligence are its diplomats.
Information of most value comes, I am sure, from contacts and confidences cultivated by friendly, perceptive, up-front diplomacy, not from telephone taps or manila folders slipped to secret agents in dark alleys.
It was infuriating to see Key's efforts for this country in China last week distracted by a leak of the Kitteridge report.
Those trips are busy, embassies arrange meetings and engagements for every available minute of a state visit.
Key had infinitely better things to do than face questions from home about domestic spying. If spies can find the leaker it would give me a little more faith in them.
My doubts that intelligence agencies really know very much dates from my first sight of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. It was quickly apparent that the West's knowledge of the Soviet threat must have come entirely from the Moscow cocktail circuit.
Outside, where diplomats needed permission to go, the country was creaking and the people dispirited. The system was rotten at the core and terminally weak. Yet Western intelligence was still pumping out the fear we had been fed since childhood.
Intelligence services have been no better in the era of "terror". For all the talk in the 1990s of a new stateless threat, the CIA had nobody close to al-Qaeda.
Kitteridge has let us see spies as public servants much like any others, except for their habit of secrecy that hides how little they know.
