The dust appears to have settled on the spying accusations leveled at Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE by the US government. Espionage, however, remains very much front-page news with Edward Snowden, former CIA agent and US National Security Agency contractor, leaking highly controversial documents to the international media.

Essentially, Snowden has blown the cover of a project named Prism, which allows the US government to spy on Internet activities around the world. This appears to be a different espionage story from that of Huawei and ZTE, but the two are related. In fact, it may well be that they are part of the same story, which has little to do with US national security and prevention of terrorism, and everything to do with the inevitable decline of the US as an economic superpower.

According to the documents Snowden has leaked, the NSA has been collecting astronomical amounts of information from ordinary citizens' online activities with the aid of American IT giants such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Apple over the past six years. Files leaked by Snowden reveal that almost 3 billion pieces of information from around the world were collected through project Prism in only 30 days ending in March this year.

What is really behind such covert, intrusive activity on such a massive scale? Of course, the US government has been quick to downplay the scope of project Prism, while attempting to steer the media frenzy toward security and terrorism issues.