Edward Snowden's image is being carefully burnished for sainthood, and, if necessary, martyrdom, by his supporters. We are told that, in the cause of freedom and privacy, he has given up a comfortable life and a $200,000 annual income, and gone on the run from the omnivorous government agencies he has exposed.

Snowden, 29, has been busy self-romanticising. His code name on the internet was Verax, the Latin for truth teller. In negotiations with The Washington Post and The Guardian he wrote that US security "will most certainly" want to kill him if they find out what he was doing.

The fawning treatment Snowden has since received after revealing the US government's PRISM internet surveillance program, which sweeps Microsoft, Facebook, Google and major web-servers looking for clues and patterns in the search for terror activity, is a re-run of the fawning selective treatment given to the arch-narcissist, Julian Assange, and, to a less cultish degree, the US Army leaker, Bradley Manning.

Like Assange, Snowden says he will be seeking asylum in a sympathetic country.