NSA 'collected details of online sexual activity' of Islamist radicals

But this isn't necessarily a weapon restricted to foreign soil or only bad people. The fact is that a lot of famous people have different public personas to their private selves. Who's to say elections can't be rigged this way, or election winners blackmailed?

I think this is increasingly an issue about how we regulate the watchers. In a media-centred age, being the gatekeeper of privacy is a position of immense power.

There's also another, parallel question, of course: should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives? Maybe after a lot of NSA-led outings, Facebook photo exposures, sackings for what people write on bulletin boards, etc, we'll one day allow people to be complex and multifaceted.