BY THE time Edward Snowden is finished with us, we won't know our elbows from our posteriors. Yesterday the Man from PRISM left the US government biting on a diplomatic dispute with Hong Kong, with mutual recriminations flying over America's mishandling of the case and Hong Kong's failure to honour extradition treaties, as he waltzed off to Moscow. This morning he followed up by dekeing a planeful of journalists from Moscow clear to Havana. Elsewhere, other journalists are arguing with each other over who accused whom of criminal behaviour, politicians are threatening unspecified consequences for Russia and China and who knows where, thumb-suckers are pontificating that all this excitement over Mr Snowden's flight is distracting us from the real story, and everyone except for the unfortunate protagonist in the story is having a wonderful time.

But Mr Snowden's most elegant fake-out of all is the one that has left the entire American political class dizzy: we don't know our right from our left anymore.

In Congress, Mr Snowden's chief defender is the libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul. The most vociferous voices denouncing him as a traitor have also been Republicans, including senator Saxby Chambliss and John Boehner, majority leader of the House. Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Bill Nelson have called Mr Snowden a traitor as well, and have defended the NSA surveillance programmes he made public. On the other hand, that Democratic eminence grise Al Gore thinks the programmes are unconstitutional, and Democratic senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have introduced legislation to restrict the NSA's ability to gather information.

In the media, Mr Snowden's revelations have divided both conservatives and liberals. At National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy is denouncing Mr Snowden's "traitorous sharing of US classified intelligence". Kevin Williamson is "no admirer of Mr Snowden" but says that's largely because he isn't living up to the demands of civil disobedience: unlike Henry David Thoreau or Martin Luther King, he hasn't volunteered to serve jail time for the crime he's committing. Mr Williamson appears to agree with the thrust of Mr Snowden's argument that the NSA cannot be trusted, though he won't quite come out and say it. And some libertarian and conservative reformist voices are unapologetically supporting the leak, if not the leaker. *

Liberals are in just as much of a tizzy. At the New Yorker,Amy Davidson is clearly sympathetic to Mr Snowden's case if not to the man himself, John Cassidy thinks he's a hero, and Jeffrey Toobin thinks he is "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison." I could go on listing examples of left-wing commentators on either side of the issue, but frankly I think you get the point.

There's a reason why they, and we, are confused about this. Our ideological sympathies are not good predictors at this point of how we feel about issues of digital privacy and electronic freedom. The fact that these issues don't have a clear ideological colouration yet is important because they are among the most crucial issues of the 21st century. They are crucial because our identities and social selves, in this century, increasingly reside online. They are crucial because money, in this century, increasingly accrues to holders of intellectual property, particularly to those who control the ways we engage in online commerce—the very same companies (Google, Yahoo, Apple, Verizon) that hold the databases which the NSA accesses via PRISM. In this century, digital knowledge is the key to both property and power. Good algorithms and massive amounts of data are what you need to have in order to succeed in retail, to defend your country from attack, or to run a successful presidential campaign.

Anxiety over digital rights and freedoms is a driving issue for people under 40, and it cuts across partisan and ideological lines. It's an open question whether this makes political action on this question easier or harder. On the one hand, this is one of very few areas where one could imagine bipartisan cooperation taking place in Congress at the moment. On the other hand, no politicians need to worry about being voted out of office on this issue, because there is currently no good way to translate your feelings on this issue into votes. At Netroots Nation last weekend, Nancy Pelosi was booed by young, digitally conscious left-wingers for failing to stick up for Mr Snowden. The same thing is sure to happen at libertarian gatherings on the right. The last time we had a major issue that truly cut across partisan divides in America, it was racial integration, and the result was that a bipartisan racist alliance was able to frustrate any serious progress until one party finally decided to embrace civil rights and write off the racist vote for a generation. It may be that the challenge Mr Snowden laid down this month will not be taken up for years, until the pressure for action on this issue builds up such a head of steam that one party or the other decides to risk writing off the national-security vote and identify itself as the party of digital freedom. The ideological free-for-all unleashed by Mr Snowden's odyssey is so confusing that at the moment, I wouldn't be prepared to wager on which party that will be.

* I initially stated that Josh Barro and Conor Friedersdorf were "unapologetically" supporting Snowden and the leak. That was not true and was based on my misimpression. Mr Barro thinks Mr Snowden belongs in jail; Mr Friedersdorf says he is "an independent enthusiastic about the leak, agnostic about Snowden's motives, and critical of his critics."