Edward Snowden, the young man who purposely revealed the monitoring of telephone and email patterns in the U.S., is seeking asylum in Ecuador. It probably beats getting tried for his crimes in the U.S. but after a while it will begin to pall. Meantime, the moral and legal debate goes on around the world. More than anything else it seems to reveal the diabolical nature of the threat of terrorism in the digital-nuclear age. Do we want to be safe, or do we want to take our chances that there are plots brewing out there that we just miss altogether? And does it matter that if the people know what the government is doing, so do the disaffected bomb-throwers? In an innocent age still within living memory censors in Canada opened millions of letters and read the most personal of information in the name of Winning the War. It was taken as a necessity and there was no doubt that everyone knew what was happening.
