Nye, like other Washington D.C. insiders, insists the US is different because, well, it's different. Unlike China and Russia, the US only spies on foreigners; a spurious claim given the daily breaking news of US domestic email interception, back door access to recorded phone calls, metadata sifting, NSA information sharing with the FBI without a court order and other assaults upon the US Fourth Amendment against unlawful search and seizure.

Nye hews close to party line talking points, emphasizing that the NSA prevents terrorism, a canard that gets repeated like a mantra despite little documentary evidence of its efficacy. Nor does the repeated wolf-cry of terrorism begin to explain the extensive and intrusive snooping (including trade and economic issues) on friends, citizens and allies, which Nye rightly questions in his even-keeled apologia that acknowledges, "Americans are not without sin".

Despite this, Nye sees no hypocrisy, just "untidiness", in the way the US lives up to its democratic principles. He implies that the long reach of the NSA, which puts ears and eyes in the homes of hundreds of millions of people, is a "modest trade-off" in the name of security.

Finally, Nye engages in a deft sleight of hand, claiming that the reason we can have such a debate in the first place is because the NSA - draconian though it may be as it snoops, steals secrets, suppresses accountability and stifles debate - has, despite its lack of accountability, somehow prevented harsher draconian systems from taking root.

Would such a debate be taking place now if Snowden had not blown the whistle on NSA's over-reach? Where are the safeguards to prevent the NSA, with its capability to collect any and all personal information, from becoming a turnkey totalitarian control system?

The Internet, long hyped by its evangelists as an unstoppable force for good, has indeed grown bigger and bigger, almost beyond belief, year after year, but to what end? One day the gluttony for information and obsession with spying will cause the edifice of the NSA to face its Tower of Babel moment, whereupon the excessive noise, interference and babbling in its Panopticon might create just enough fear, loathing and pandemonium as to herald the demise of the Internet.

The author is a visiting research fellow at Cornell University, New York.

(China Daily 09/04/2013 page9)