The deluge of secret documents touched Thailand last week. All airlines received a confidential directive from the British government not to fly the accused leaker of US security secrets, Edward Snowden, to the United Kingdom. Mr Snowden, 29, who has bragged he is the source of revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA), is unwelcome, the British government said. It is a controversial but probably correct decision about what is best for British authorities. Thailand should consider doing the same.
The UK government and several Bangkok-based airline offices became upset with the media which printed that interesting revelation about Mr Snowden. The British Home Office alert, revealed by an airline-connected source in Chiang Mai, mirrors the entire Snowden affair, if in microcosm. Secret documents reveal information about government programmes - in this case RALON, the Risk and Liaison Overseas Network, which is part of the UK Border Agency. A major part of the controversy must be: Why are such documents secret in the first place?
As for Mr Snowden, whether he is heroic or traitorous has become a worldwide debate. This is precisely why Thai authorities - government, immigration, airline executives - should not get involved. Not that there is any indication Mr Snowden would feel safer in Thailand than under the care of China's communist officials. But in case he does, he should be told to move on. That is not a comment on his action, but a matter of our national interest, which is not to get caught up in a major case of international espionage which otherwise does not touch the country.
Mr Snowden's actual revelations should concern everyone. If true, as they almost certainly are, the NSA is hoovering up the "metadata" of most of our phone calls, emails, daily internet surfing, social media activities and more. Every Thai should care that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and other companies are directly helping this collection of our data.
As a sidelight, the US official in charge of this effort, James Clapper, served in the US army in Thailand in the 1960s as commander of the super-secret Ramasun listening post in Udon Thani province. In those now-quaint days, Col Clapper tried to identify threatening groups and people, and then sought to listen to their communications and read their mail. Now he tells us he needs all our records first, then he might be able to get the bad people.
No one, the NSA insists, is listening to our calls, reading our email or monitoring the content of our Facebook photo wall. Not yet anyhow, and perhaps never. What the spies including the NSA do is collect already existing records of our technological life. Every mobile phone company has a record of every call we make _ time, duration, the number we called, whether it was answered, where we were when we called (within a few or a few hundred metres).
We also have those records, in our printed or online bills. And now the NSA does, too, and we can be certain _ or at least strongly suspect _ that many other three-letter agencies around the globe also have them, possibly including Thai agencies, which can massage data with the best of them.
It is not whether we are willing to give up huge slices of our privacy in exchange for convenience. We made that decision when we adopted mobile phones and the internet. But we never agreed to share the information with powerful foreign intelligence agencies. Mr Snowden is unwelcome in Thailand, but so are the creepy-crawly collection arms of the NSA.