Claims, for example, that the US’s and others have shown, banks have legitimate cause to expect state agencies, paid for by their taxes, to help ward off criminals. JP Morgan said in early October that as many as 76 million households had been affected by a security attack. The issue has also taken a twist amid claims – strenuously denied – that the Russian government may have been behind some of the attacks. Such cybercrime is a major concern for the wealth management sector, as this publication has learned from figures in the industry. (See here.)

But if banks, in their understandable urge to protect themselves, get too close to government agencies, the guard dogs could scare off customers rather than the villains. It is proving to be a difficult balance to get right.

"There is a risk premium now with US products and services,” Robert Neivert, chief operating officer of Private.me, a California-based company that enables internet-goers to search online without the risk of being tracked, told this publication in a recent call.

One worry has been that if different countries become sufficiently angry about spy agencies snooping via certain channels, it could break up the global internet. (In reality, there is not a completely unified global system at the moment anyway, as evidenced by China’s controls on what people can view from outside the country, for example.)

"If the Internet is broken up, it will be increasingly more expensive to go from country to country. This will make it much more expensive and difficult to grow globally from Silicon Valley, with so many different standards and barriers, companies will be forced to build local data centers and hire local employees to service any given country or region,” Neivert told this publication in a recent phone interview.

“It as people might think," said Johnson.

Banks of different types have in recent years asked for technical and specialist assistance from organisations such as the NSA, such as over denial of service attacks, he continued, and referred to a number of recent breaches at large organisations.

Banks now share information about potential and actual breaches via the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which was created in 1999 by the Clinton administration.

As this publication has reported recently, cybercrime and internet-related problems are now a major issue for the world’s wealth management industry. At a recent conference in London, Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK’s M15 domestic intelligence agency, said state security agencies were being asked to provide expert advice to firms about electronic attacks. What remains to be seen is whether the idea of calling in Big Brother to foil the bad guys also means Joe Public gets scared off as well.