For all the internet spying that GCHQ has been doing, it does not appear to be helping it in its primary job of tracking down serious criminals and terrorists.

According to the Daily Telegraph, GCHQ has lost track of some of the most dangerous crime lords and has had to abort surveillance on others.

The spooks are blaming the fact that  Edward Snowden revealed their tactics, although, they pretty much would say that that anyway.

One major drug smuggling gang has been able to continue flooding the UK with Class A narcotics unimpeded for the last year after changing their operations, moaned the spooks.

More intense tracking of others has either been abandoned or not started because of fears the tactics are now too easy to spot and will force the criminals to “go dark” and be lost sight of completely.

They have also been stuffed up because telecoms companies are no longer grassing up customers and are refusing to hand over evidence on the likes of drug smugglers or fraudsters because they do not pose a “direct threat to life”.

“We have specific evidence of where key targets have changed their communication behaviour as a direct result of what they have read.

Apparently gangs have moved to more secure forms of communication or moved entirely on to the dark web where it is far harder to track them. However GCHQ seems to want people to believe that serious criminals were not using the dark web before Snowden and that James Bond can only get into Internet places which can be searched by Google.

All that major drug smuggling network did to make it become invisible is to change a few lines of code in its web-pages which stopped its actions being seen by search engines.

Intelligence officers are now electing not to order deeper surveillance on targets, in the hope of gaining sufficient evidence to prosecute them, because they fear it could alert them to the fact they are being watched.

Of course GCHQ’s answer to the problem is to bring in even more internet spying because that worked so well before.