A secret kept is sometimes more powerful than a secret revealed. This basic principle of romantic relationships and international diplomacy is referred to as “lording it over everyone’s heads,” and it can be a very effective strategy in terms of eliciting resentfully pantomimed gratefulness.

To wit: in an interview yesterday, *The Guardian’*s Glenn Greenwald told the Associated Press that the documents airport resident/leaker Edward Snowden has chosen not to release are far more damaging than those he has. “In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the National Security Agency does what they do,” Greenwald told the news agency. These thousands of documents “‘would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the N.S.A. does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.” Presumably Snowden himself has read said documents, which helps in explaining why one man was able to successfully purchase a plane ticket from Hong Kong to Moscow, board that plane, disembark from that plane, and pick up three-week’s worth of snacks and copies of Us Weekly before camping out in the Moscow Airport without the N.S.A. noticing.

However, according to the A.P., Snowden “has insisted the information from those documents not be made public”—which is, as both practitioners and victims of Lording It Over Everyone’s Heads know, a cue to the N.S.A. to profusely thank Snowden for being so reasonable, especially considering how stressed he’s been, and ask if there’s anything the agency can do in the future to avoid these kinds of “miscommunications.” Sounding un-patronizing while doing this will be key.