Some people in the Western democracies, of course, have not forgotten. Angela Merkel has made clear, to the excruciating embarrassment of the White House, that she has a vivid recollection of what it was like to live under the Stasi, and finds the attentions of the US National Security Agency (NSA) altogether too reminiscent. Barack Obama makes tactful diplomatic noises, but does he really sympathise? Does David Cameron — with his very British world-weary acceptance that everybody spies on everybody all the time, so let’s all grow up — really understand the terror of a life without privacy, without the true freedom that can only come with the sanctity of confidentiality, and a clear distinction between public and personal space? And surely this old assumption, that everybody had to spy on everybody else, is a relic of the Cold War — in which everybody’s agents had to be suspected of working for the other side — that ought to be up for reassessment.