Very good sentences

It is perhaps no accident that the ardour for liberty is no longer expressed through political channels. Its main outlets are morally ambiguous figures such as Mr Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US soldier who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. Technology will pose new challenges for all states. We are not in a world of John le Carré’s spies but one resembling CIA TV series Person of Interest, where states claim power over us ostensibly to prevent us coming to harm. But we cannot navigate this terrain by reinstating a form of moral hegemony where the rights of Americans count more; and the rest of the world be damned.

That is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the FT, the whole thing is excellent but the first two sentences cited above are the most striking of them all.