THE case of Private Bradley Manning, convicted this week by a military court of leaking secrets to the WikiLeaks website and now facing up to 136 years in jail, looks as if it might be the high-water mark of America’s zealous security culture. It certainly ought to be. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, George Bush tipped the balance too far from liberty towards security, and it has stayed there under Barack Obama.

As Mr Manning awaits his sentence, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the American intelligence services, was reported on August 1st to have gone to Russia, where he has been offered a year's temporary asylum. He had set out to shed light on the warrantless warehousing by the National Security Agency (NSA) of private data belonging to millions of American citizens, possibly in breach of the Patriot Act and the Fourth Amendment. His revelations continued this week. Meanwhile the Obama administration has seized journalists’ telephone records and pursued leakers with a legal sledgehammer.

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