I have to admit: I am having difficulty parsing it all; and this difficulty is not limited to the current media circus around PRISM. For example:- last year I

I have to admit: I am having difficulty parsing it all; and this difficulty is not limited to the current media circus around PRISM. For example:- last year I heard my grandfather-in-law admit playing a part in a massacre, which I am pretty sure is this one, 60 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lari_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lari_Massacre. The story was coming via a translator, so I am not sure of the details, but I got the vague impression that he was one of the organizers. What do you do with information like this? How should I feel? Mostly, I feel confused. Ironically, my wife was working with the FCO legal advisers when the survivors of abuses committed during British rule originally sued - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/05/mau-mau-victims-kenya-settlement http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/05/mau-mau-victims-...). Funny how the tentacles of past misdeeds reach to the future! Perhaps blown by that ill wind of legend? Moving on to more contemporaneous misdeeds, when I bore mute witness the UN happily paying off drug dealers in West Africa: http://reliefweb.int/report/guinea-bissau/un-peacebuilding-fund-grants-28m-guinea-bissau-pension-fund-defense-and http://reliefweb.int/report/guinea-bissau/un-peacebuilding-f... ... not that the alternatives were any prettier, but still: When you deal with all the evil and mess of the world, you get a bit tainted yourself. As per my grandmother's folksy aphorism: "When you throw a glove in mud, the mud doesn't get 'glovey'. " Compared to all the evil that is out there, PRISM seems pretty sweet and innocent - and, to be honest, the revelations were hardly a surprise since the (phone metadata bit) was leaked (or obliquely hinted at least) to me over 12 months ago. So: I think my sense of unease is more strongly related to our collective capacity for evil than anything else.