The U.S. Prism surveillance of emails, phone calls, social networking, data storage and other personal communication around the world is the worst attack on freedom since World War II.

If that sounds overwrought, consider that in 1939, the West faced a force that intended to enslave most of humankind, a force that came very close to winning. Any sacrifice of freedom and privacy in the West was worth the cost.

Osama bin Laden’s assault on U.S. soil was minor by comparison. That the American war on the privacy and liberty of its own citizens — as well as that of foreigners like us — should have been prompted by a mere terrorist attack is the sorriest part of the tragic American overreaction. Bin Laden removed a chip of a brick in a wall. The U.S. has destroyed the building.

I am collecting clever lines. “Obama is like Apple, Google and Facebook: a once hip brand tainted by Prism,” ran Jonathan Freedland’s column headline in the Guardian, which broke the story. “Call it digital Blackwater,” said Salon.com. But they miss the point, as did a CBC.ca headline, “Should Canadians worry about data snooping?”

For one thing, it’s not mere snooping, it’s not one company and it isn’t even one president. Digital isn’t even the problem. Digital is just the way governments managed this appallingly successful assault on freedom. It’s a means to an end, and the means have always been various.

It’s the end that distresses me. The damage to freedom is all-embracing. “Why do they hate our freedoms?” became a simple-minded rallying cry in the U.S. after 9/11, then a comedy catchphrase. The joke now is that “they” refers to Washington, not ragtag terrorists in distant nations. The enemy is us. It certainly isn’t whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The territory won by George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the governmental assault on privacy is massive. “You can’t have 100-per-cent security and also then have 100-per-cent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said Sunday, defending Prism. But Americans now score zero on all three.

If you have a phone, store photos, use email, Skype, watch TV, etc., the government can “watch your ideas form as you type,” a U.S. official told the Washington Post.

Now it’s not your phone conversation or web link to one person that can trap you, it’s a link to somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else. It’s a pattern of purchases similar to the pattern of someone five separations down the line, a flight on the same plane, a lost cellphone, an array of things that make you a target.

“But I’ve done nothing wrong,” you cry. Perhaps not. You will not make the decision about your innocence. The data will. They have already been compiled.

I always admired Kafka’s The Trial, about a man, Josef K, arrested by a mysterious police force for an unspecified crime he has not committed. His despair is total, his exoneration impossible.

But it’s possible to read the book another way, as Jonathan Franzen explained in a 2006 essay on German literature. What if Josef K is guilty?

Franzen had a brilliant professor, George Avery, who suggested three possibilities: Josef K is innocent, his degree of guilt is undecidable, or he is guilty. Read the novel again. Franzen did. “I’d been blind the way K himself is blind,” he wrote. “I decided that K is a creepy, arrogant, selfish, abusive shmuck who, because he refuses to examine his life, is having it forcibly examined for him.”

That’s you, good-hearted oblivious reader. This week, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted, “Everyone should have something to hide — or at any rate, the right to hide it.” I’d go further. Everyone does have something to hide.

Most men cheat on their wives, for instance. I believe that. But that’s not what I mean. Money, sex, drugs, status, all desires: they lead us into little lies, subversions, petty crimes, larger vices, things that would displease our employer, family, voters, bank, neighbours, police, auditors, etc.

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The problem isn’t just that Prism knows or can easily find out. The problem is what they do with that knowledge. The sword of every little crime in your life hangs over your head. Josef K, he’s all of us now.

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