In the weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama met at the Sunny-lands resort in California in June 2013, the US administration had spared little effort in portraying China as a villain in cyberspace.

The revelation made by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden just days before the Sunnylands meeting, however, exposed the real villain to the world. It showed that whatever other countries had done in cyber surveillance was nothing compared with the gigantic scale of operations launched by the NSA, often labeled "No Such Agency".

For the rest of the world, Snowden is a whistleblower and a hero because he revealed the US government's secret surveillance programs across the world, whose targets included leaders of countries that are US allies. Such spying, which violates people's privacy and civil rights, often involves willing and unwilling collaboration with several major US tech companies.