I am greeting the news that Obama is watching me with a shrug.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
