Panopticon of global surveillance

[Malcolm Pryce]

When Luke Harding's story appeared in the Guardian about the paragraphs of his story on Snowden being deleted before his very eyes, a number of people commented that what he witnessed was exactly what happens when the delete key on your keyboard gets stuck. The keyboard beeps, flashes and text gets gobbled up by a keyboard that spookily no longer responds to the owner's commands. If he had been writing an article about Snowdon the mountain in Wales and this happened his first instinct would have been there was a hardware fault. But because he was writing about Edward Snowden his first thought was that the Spooks had taken over his computer. Maybe they had. Or maybe he had a piece of cheese stuck under the delete key. Sometimes it pays to consider alternative explanations.