The affair certainly offered copious lessons for artists, not just for what they directly revealed — a world of total
electronic surveillance — nor even for what they more indirectly illustrated: how very globally interconnected the contemporary world of discourse has
become, when a crusading journalist based in Brazil teams with a British
newspaper to unveil the inner doings of the us spy programme, with stops in Hong Kong and Moscow, as if in some kind of homage to the globe - trotting itinerary of James Bond.