Global security gymnastics

GEORGETOWN, Guyana - It is now nearly six-and-a-half years since Julian Assange and Wikileaks started releasing official government documents, revealing to the publics of the world information deemed to be classified and forbidden from exhibition, because such release might injure the security of particular states and by extension (in the eyes of their governments) the safety of citizens. Up to the present the individual mainly responsible for the acts of exposure, Julian Assange, remains in London, in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he has been granted asylum by the government of that country, a refugee from those who would like to prosecute him. But now he has company of a sort, though geographically distant, and in some measure an accomplice, the American Edward Snowden, a sometime contractor to the American security system, irritating the United States and indeed other Western governments with a new release of documents.