The troubling implications of what Edward Snowden did are starting to sink in, even at the New York Review of Books where they’ve previously been solid backers of Snowden and his publicist Glenn Greenwald: Snowden in Exile, by Amy Knight.

You should read the whole thing, of course, but the closing paragraph is striking.

More to the point, he is bound to suffer disillusionment with his new hosts—perhaps like what happened to [Kim] Philby, who arrived with far stronger ideological commitments. In an interview while he was still in Hong Kong in June, Snowden, referring to the interception of private communications by the NSA, said, “I do not want to live in a society that does this sort of thing.” He did not foresee that he would find himself now in a place where his every move and every contact would be monitored by a government that is far more controlling of its citizens than its American counterpart.

“He did not foresee” what it would be like in Russia? Apparently Amy Knight has telepathic powers, because nobody but Edward Snowden really knows if he foresaw this. But he would have had to be incredibly ignorant of foreign affairs not to.