Politicians Exposed

Edward Snowden is proving to be one of America's consequential whistle blowers, after Daniel Ellsberg, the man who gave us the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war. The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak about the United States National Security Agency's super secret surveillance programmes said, "I'm not here (in Hong Kong) to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality." What Snowden saw at work in Geneva disillusioned him about how his government functions and what its impact is in the world, "I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good." Naturally the first to bray for his blood are politicians, calling him a lone wolf terrorist who is bigger danger to society than Big Brother.

John F Kennedy was a serial womaniser - alleged to have had a threesome on his inauguration evening while his wife was dancing downstairs - and a highly amphetamine dependent drug addict to ward off the pain from an old football injury. And he never wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, "Profiles in Courage", ghost writer Ted Sorensen did. Richard M Nixon took mind-altering drugs that caused his advisers so much concern that they instructed military chiefs not to take orders from him without seeking confirmation from the Defense Secretary or the Secretary of State. Lyndon B Johnson was a crude man, a congressman described him as "damn crude - always scratching his crotch and picking his nose in mixed company." Mao Tse-tung operated on the Taoist belief that sexual activity prolonged life, and was fixated with pornography and sexual excess. Mahatma Gandhi "allowed" teenage girls to sleep naked with him as a form of "testing" his vow of chastity. Winston Churchill, who called Gandhi a "half -naked fakir", was observed by a wartime close friend  Robert Boothby, "Winston was a shit, but we needed a shit to defeat Hitler."

All that, and more, were compiled before the advent of WikiLeaks, by Phil Mason in his book "What Needled Cleopatra... and other little secrets airbrushed from history." If the foibles of Churchill the war-time genius and Gandhi the poor ascetic can be airbrushed, imagine what Photoshop can achieve today.

Ellsberg, in defence of Snowden, said that contrary to claims that NSA's monitoring programs are only collecting meta data -- such as the time and duration of phone calls and the subjects and IP addresses of emails -- he was confident the NSA is saving far information more than it lets on. "We're not a police state yet, but the foundation has been set," he said. "It could happen overnight." That's the slippery slope the licensing of news websites is leading us right to.