PRISM

Guys that chose chastity used to go to a monastery, under the illusion of never having to worry again about virginity or the temptation of dangerous pleasures.

Thanks to the report of the Deetman Commission, we know that a substantial percentage was — nolens volens — blessed as catamite, just like some of the girls who chose the convent as virgins but came out violated and traumatized.

Nowadays half the world deposits life’s everything in DropBox, Facebook, Google, Twitter, SkyDrive, Yahoo, YouTube or thousands of other caverns in the cloud — in the expectation that what you put on it remains unscathed in that digital monastery. Be warned: Whoever fears for privacy on the Internet needs to stay as far away as possible from the web. Of course PRISM exists, that secret program with which the FBI and the National Security Agency leisurely leaf through all our files.

Don’t ask me what it is called in China — although the letter R will not show up in it — but of course they are messing with everything they can break into over there. The KGB? Ditto. Our own AIVD probably also engages in things digitally that are on, or over, the edge. Just as naturally, it is no coincidence that the existence of PRISM leaked with a lot of noise yesterday.

It happened just a couple of hours before President Barack Obama received his Chinese colleague Xi Jinping in Los Angeles: Chinese cyberattacks on American servers were near the top of Obama’s agenda. That conversation will be a fantastic game of poker. Xi’s trump card is called PRISM now; the person who complains about Chinese mores on the Internet, for starters, should not spy on his own people.

Right, Mr. Obama?