Is Edward Snowden going to Venezuela? Alexei Pushkov, a member of the Russian Duma, tweeted on Tuesday that Snowden, the N.S.A. whistle-blower, had accepted an offer of asylum from that country’s President, Nicolás Maduro—then deleted the tweet. Pushkov is someone who might be expected to know; he is close to the Vladmir Putin regime and the chair of the Duma’s international-affairs committee. But in another, post-deletion tweet, Pushkov said that it was just something he’d seen on television. That is somehow of a piece with how Snowden’s entire stop-and-start journey has gone: his flight has been improvised not out of bits and pieces but out of very large geopolitical parts barely held together with a schoolroom glue stick, or whatever you can buy in the transit zone at Sheremetyevo airport.

Snowden’s other choices, apparently, are Nicaragua and Bolivia. If he ends up in one of them, it will be, in some measure, because Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, was treated like an airborne stop-and-frisk suspect last week when he tried to fly home from an energy conference in Russia. Several NATO countries wouldn’t let his plane pass through their airspace; that Snowden might be onboard seemed to have been more urgent than that the President of a sovereign country was. The plane refuelled in Austria; on his return, Morales talked of a “kidnapping.” There was an angry regional meeting. (Revelations about N.S.A. surveillance of Brazilians didn’t help.) France apologized; Spain complained that it had been told for sure that Snowden was on the plane, the Guardian reported. All of it yielded more offers of asylum than have the maneuverings of Snowden’s advisers.

But you can’t take up asylum in Venezuela if you can’t get to Venezuela. Morales is unlikely to have his plane stopped for a while, but the airspace issue is tricky. Already having gone through Hong Kong and Moscow, Snowden might find himself deciphering terminal signs in a few more languages before landing in a Spanish-speaking country.

He would do so having revealed an unacknowledged bilingualism practiced by the American government. Some of Snowden’s documents expose practices that don’t fit with the government’s assertions that it was working within the law, unless some very common words don’t mean what one thinks they do. And it seems that, in the government’s lexicon, as rewritten by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, they don’t. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the N.S.A.’s license to collect data on the American public en masse depends on secret court opinions redefining the word “relevant” to “mean, in effect, ‘everything.’ ”

“Relevant” is a key word in determining what sorts of business records, for example, the government can ask for without a warrant, and it’s a word that other courts—non-secret ones—have thought a great deal about. It’s supposed to be fairly specific; otherwise, you could assert, for example, that every person in New York City could have his or her home searched because a stolen item would likely be hidden inside—and so homes are relevant. The FISA court has apparently made a parallel decision: since someone, somewhere, probably used a phone or e-mail in a way related to foreign intelligence, entire databases of calls and e-mails are relevant. The FISA court also has its own definition of “foreign intelligence” that seems to include things involving neither of the words in that term.

The world is a curious place—which the FISA court has interpreted as meaning that the government can be curious about anything. It can’t. And it certainly cannot have a secret court—whose judges have, as the Washington Post pointed out, all been appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, and before whom the government has no adversary—write what Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall called “secret interpretations” of the law. Can people in our national-security establishment please stop rationalizing their actions like characters in a bad comic book inspired by Leo Strauss? The use of language must be a clear thing between a government and the public. To act otherwise is not to be guided by very serious legal opinions; it’s just lying.

Snowden, in his video interview with the Guardian released over the weekend, made the point that his revelations did not go up against silence so much as against statements that, in one way or another, were not true. That is an important distinction. The government gets its secrets, but not secret law. Snowden has got himself in a difficult position, with about thirty agendas that may be quite different than his own (including Putin’s). But there are questions here that the Obama Administration still must answer, rather than simply studying the skies over Moscow, searching for relevant planes.

Photograph by Miguel Angulo/Miraflores Press Office/AP