Spying is here to stay, so why not enjoy it?

One of the curious things about people in the United States is that they think they own their government. This plays out in a number of ways, but there is one constant: Ordinary citizens want to know what the government is doing in their name. And when it does something secretly to which they object, they want it dragged into the sunshine.

Edward Snowden provides one example.

A survey published in Newsweek magazine after Snowden's first revelations about NSA spying found that 55 percent of US respondents thought he was right to expose the government. Only 29 percent thought he was wrong.