We're All Edward Snowden Now

In the last several days, I’ve had three phone conversations with friends — completely normal people who have their wits about them — during which they have declined to say something for fear of government surveillance. They will be talking normally and suddenly catch themselves and divert the conversation.

The topics we were discussing were mostly innocuous, and I can’t imagine that government interlopers would care, but the impulse to self-censor was triggered anyway.

Free becomes unfree. Fear replaces liberality. Open communication becomes censorship. The curtain is falling fast on free speech. It’s happening all around us, and it is getting worse every day.

The first time I had this happen was about one year ago, when I was talking to a soldier stationed at a military base. He spoke to me almost in code, fully certain that his conversations were being monitored simply because he was speaking from a government facility. The phone was his, but he had the sense, which he probably couldn’t prove, that the lines of communication were not safe.

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