Former C IA staffer Edward Snowden's revelation about the US National Security Agency's (NSA) massive intrusions into private communications worldwide has smashed up the moral high ground the US has been leveraging in playing its self-appointed role of world police.

Over the decades, the US has been policing the world, "punishing" and "disciplining" the so-called "rogue" countries, as well as calling China and other countries names for not conforming to the Western style of political institutions and values.

In many cases, these actions were carried out in the name of advocating or protecting universal values in the world. However, the US authority's claim to such moral high ground has been rightly challenged by its own civil liberties watchdogs as a result of Snowden's whistle-blowing.

In a federal lawsuit filed last week against the Obama administration over the NSA's mass surveillance of phone calls, the American Civil Liberties Union charged that the agency's snooping program violates the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".

People from Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland and many other places around the world have also been victims of the NSA's snooping programs which carried out 61,000 hacking operations globally.

Privacy, freedom and rights are among the universal values advocated by the US. But the intrusion and surveillance fiasco exposed by Snowden shows that the US won't hesitate to sacrifice these much hyped values whenever they think they need to.

Taken in this sense, universal values, while much treasured by the world, are nothing more than political tools for the US to use for political expediency whenever there is a need. What is more unfortunate for Hong Kong is the fact that many of our self-named democracy supporters usually turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to such hypocrisy.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

(HK Edition 06/18/2013 page9)