THE case of Private Bradley Manning, convicted this week by a military court of leaking secrets to the WikiLeaks website and now facing up to 136 years in jail, looks as if it might be the high-water mark of America"s zealous security culture. It certainly ought to be. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, George Bush tipped the balance too far from liberty towards security, and it has stayed there under Barack Obama.
As Mr Manning awaits his sentence, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the American intelligence services, was reported on August 1st to have gone to Russia, where he has been offered a year"s temporary asylum. He had set out to shed light on the warrantless warehousing by the National Security Agency(NSA)of private data belonging to millions of American citizens, possibly in breach of the Patriot Act and the Fourth Amendment. His revelations continued this week. Meanwhile the Obama administration has seized journalists" telephone records and pursued leakers with a legal sledgehammer.Neither Mr. Snowden nor Mr. Manning is a perfect ambassador for a more liberal approach. Both broke the law by revealing secrets they were under oath to keep. America"s spying agencies cannot function if their employees squawk—and, when "mass leaking" has become politically fashionable and technically feasible, deterrents are needed. Mr. Manning"s public-interest defence is especially thin: he leaked over 700,000 files with little judgment about what harm or good this would do. Mr. Snowden"s initial disclosure was selective, but his flight to Hong Kong and Russia was damaging, and he has ended up disclosing secrets about how America spies on China. America is right to want to put him on trial, like Mr. Manning.But both men also show how America still leans too far towards security over liberty. Every intelligence service will impinge on individual liberties—and America"s has succeeded in its main job: to prevent attacks. But every democracy also needs to keep those impingements in check and to hold its spies to account. Of all the world"s democracies, the one that should best understand this tension is the United States. Its constitution rests on the notion that the people in charge are fallible. As Mr. Manning waits to hear the judge"s sentence, it is time to remember that.