Yesterday, Jeffrey Toobin and I taped a segment about the Edward Snowden leaks with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, for his “GPS” show, which will be broadcast this weekend. You—and Jeff Zucker, CNN’s ratings-conscious president—may be disappointed to hear it didn’t come to fisticuffs; it was all very polite. Jeffrey reiterated his objections to Snowden’s behavior—he broke the law, he compromised national security, he fled to Hong Kong—and I repeated my argument that he has performed an invaluable public service.

Clearly, there are two sides to this issue. But, in light of the questions that have been raised about Snowden’s conduct—and not just by Jeffrey but by other liberal writers who might have been expected to be supportive, such as Josh Marshall, of T.P.M., and Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones—it’s worth expanding upon a few points.

First, speculating about Snowden’s motivations, his character, and his level of technical knowledge is all very well. Given the scant details we know about his life, it’s probably inevitable. But there may also be an element of intellectual snobbery involved, and there’s certainly a lack of appreciation of the risks to which the leaker has exposed himself in going public.

Apparently, Snowden didn’t finish high school. So what? When a geeky high-school dropout, such as David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, sells his tech start-up for a fortune, he’s lauded as an American original. When Snowden reveals that the federal government, for seven years, has been logging practically every phone call that Americans make, some people question his technical prowess and whether he really knows how the National Security Agency works.

Well, he knows enough to have provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post the secret order the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court issued to Verizon for its calling records. He knows enough to have provided to the same newspapers a series of slides about the National Security Agency’s Prism program, which enabled it to tap user data from Google, Apple, Facebook, and other U.S. Internet companies. It’s the documents that Snowden brought to light, and the information they contain, that are the important thing, not his educational background, or his theories about the Triads.

What about his decision to skip out to Hong Kong? To be sure, it would have made life a bit easier for his defenders, such as myself, if he’d chosen to stay inside the United States and face the consequences. But that doesn’t mean he is a coward or a narcissist. In deciding to contact journalists with the information he had, and then in choosing to identify himself publicly, he has destroyed his career and put his personal liberty in great jeopardy. My guess is the Hong Kong authorities will eventually deport him to the United States, and he will be brought to trial. (Evan Osnos has some further thoughts on this.) It is a peculiar form of narcissism that drives a twenty-nine-year-old white-collar worker, in the pursuit of exposing something he believes to be wrong, to give up his job, his family, and his girlfriend, and to expose himself to the serious possibility of spending decades in jail. To me, anyway, bravery and heroism still seem more appropriate descriptions of such behavior.

But that’s not my main point here. This story goes well beyond Snowden, his motivations, and what happens to him next. It’s about the sort of society we want to live in. Do we want the United States to turn into Britain, where extensive domestic surveillance, judicial gag orders, and extensive official secrecy are regarded as routine? Or do we want to try and preserve a more open society, with strict limits on domestic surveillance and a broad right to privacy, elements of which were in place before 9/11?

For those of us in the latter camp, the hope is that Snowden’s revelations will help shift the debate about how far we should go in rolling back some of the official overreactions to 9/11. On issues like the Iraq War, renditions, waterboarding, and Guantánamo, there has been extensive public discussion—and, in some cases, major policy changes. For some reason, the big expansion in domestic surveillance that the Bush Administration undertook, and that the Obama Administration has sustained, had, until recently, been excluded from this reassessment. Thanks partly to Snowden, and partly to others, such as the journalist James Bamford, the American public now knows a good deal more about what the intelligence agencies and their supposed overseers in the FISA court and on Capitol Hill have been up to. From Rand Paul to Jon Tester to Al Gore, various players in the political arena are already reacting to this information.

Can that really be a bad thing? In all whistle-blowing cases, there is a trade-off between the breach of trust that the person has committed and the damage that may result from his or her actions, on the one hand, and the public service that is done by making the information available, on the other. In this instance, where there is little evidence that national security has been undermined, the balance surely comes out in Snowden’s favor.

Illustration by Matthew Hollister.

Read more of our coverage of government surveillance programs.