Snowden has exposed the obvious

The world we live in today is so different from what it was 40 years ago that the Watergate scandal seems like remote history. Yet here we are face to face with another surveillance and espionage drama - yes, that is exactly what former CIA agent and US National Security Agency operative Edward Snowden's expose is. It's a drama with a difference, though, because it is being played out on - and by - the media.

Perhaps - and contrary to the common perception - the NSA's surveillance program is (is, because it has not been terminated) aimed at getting a stranglehold on people and organizations not only to strengthen the US government's hands. It is also aimed at helping US corporations consolidate their hold on the global markets and thus make more profits.

Let's get the facts from the other side, the United States, first. Snowden initially violated his oath to safeguard the US national security secrets entrusted to him by revealing NSA programs, which could affect the "privacy of US citizens". This is what a Western newspaper says.

By claiming that hundreds of the more than 61,000 NSA global hacking operations were directed at the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, Snowden has given Beijing the moral upper ground in cyber-warfare, says the newspaper. The drama, as it turns out, is all about the privacy of American citizens, which the US administration has been violating anyway since Sept 11, 2001, and China.

Well, every other thing that happens in the US has to do with China - be it the cheap Chinese goods the Americans have been enjoying for the past couple of decades, the jobs they wrongly assume to have lost to Chinese workers or the trade imbalance that the US claims is the result of China's "skewed" currency policy.

That he chose Hong Kong to reveal the dirty secrets of the NSA has been used by some to also allege that Snowden is a spy in the employ of China. People even remotely familiar with espionage would see the absurdity of such an allegation, because that is not how countries run their spy networks.