Heartfield: A product of his generation.

What actually happened in 1984 — history’s version, not Orwell’s — was that William Gibson published a novel called Neuromancer, about a hacker. That same year, Stewart Brand told Steve Wozniak at the first Hacker’s Conference that “information wants to be free.” (He also said information wants to be expensive, but the second half of that paradox gets forgotten.)

It was the beginning of an era in which we fully expected the government to lie to us, even perhaps to prosecute us for invented crimes, but we also knew we would have a way to fight back. This attitude is nicely expressed in Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. The way to keep a check on government power in the information age is to know what the government is up to.

This is the creed of Edward Snowden’s generation. Snowden leaked details of U.S. government surveillance programs such as PRISM. In 1984, he was a baby. As a millennial teenager, he was a regular in online forums at Ars Technica, presenting a persona that was an almost Simpsons-esque, grotesque caricature of a narcissistic nerd, mixing his gaming and programming posts with boasts about his job and his romantic success. As a Buzzfeed headline put it, “He came from the Internet.”

Snowden might have been grown in a pod to be the ideal leaker: he was clever enough to get into a position to know secret information and he had the ideology to feel it was right to share what he found out.

I don’t know him, but what I’ve seen doesn’t make me think I’d like him much. His decision to run to China of all places, apparently because he thought he had a decent chance of getting asylum there, made it look like he was more interested in playing geopolitics to his advantage and protecting his future than in freedom and accountability.

But whatever his motives and like him or not, he’s the leaker we’ve got. Do you want to know who’s monitoring your communications and to what extent? If the answer is yes, then we have to find out about it somehow. Yes, there are consequences for breaking the rules, as Snowden clearly did. But a possible 30-year prison sentence on espionage-related charges seems excessive.

Critics who say the government should throw the book at Snowden, who call him a traitor, make two arguments that don’t sit very well together.

The first is that the PRISM program is no big deal, that everyone expects governments to keep track of these things, that there is no expectation of privacy in metadata, that it is equivalent to the front of an envelope. You wouldn’t write secrets on the front of an envelope, would you? That argument assumes that nobody — including terrorists — would consider this kind of data in any way “private.”

The second argument is that terrorists routinely write their secrets on the fronts of envelopes, that they had no idea until Snowden came along that the government might be spying on such data, and that Snowden’s leak now means terrorists are coming to get us.

John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, moved smoothly from one argument into the other in a recent CNN interview. Here he is making Argument 1: “It’s really inappropriate for people to be believing that this is somehow an invasion of their privacy because there’s no person identified with any of this unless a court were to approve it. The Congress of the United States has approved this, the judiciary approves it, the executive has approved it, this has been United States policy for some years.”

And here he is making Argument 2: “People may die as a consequence of what this man did. It is possible the United States will be attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn’t know before. This is a very dangerous act.”

Either it’s so innocuous as to be expected behaviour, or it’s the supersecret way the U.S. government finds terrorists. The only way those things can be reconciled is to say that Snowden’s crime wasn’t in making the surveillance public knowledge, but in forcing official acknowledgment of it. In that case, it’s a PR problem, not a security issue.

In any case, citizens ought to be the ones to decide whether it’s warranted. Citizens in democracies can choose to give up civil liberties in exchange for security. But they have to know what they’re giving up. We aren’t talking about the details of a one-off secret mission; this is ongoing, widespread government policy. That’s the kind of thing citizens get to know.

As Snowden himself has said, “The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.”

The U.S. government is not Big Brother; not by a long shot. The way to prevent it from ever becoming something beyond its citizens’ control is to make sure Little Brother is right there watching.