Earlier this week, Charles Lane wrote an impassioned defense of the National Security Administration in the Washington Post, taking on German critics who had likened the agency’s newly disclosed surveillance practices – Spiegel reported in late June that American intelligence services were monitoring some 500 million electronic and telephone communications each month – to those of the old East German Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. Lane derided the claim of Spiegel columnist Jakob Augstein that ‘no matter in what system or to what purpose, a monitored human being is not a free human being.