It's time for the US Congress to grant Edward Snowden amnesty.

This week brought the frustration and sheer outrage over the NSA's spying programs to new heights.

Monday: Even the NSA's staunchest defender, Senator Dianne Feinstein, had had enough. For Feinstein, it was the foreign-policy penny wise and pound foolish surveillance of Angela Merkel's phone conversations that had crossed the line.

Tuesday: Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat from Vermont) and Patriot Act author Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (Republican from Wisconsin) released the text of their broad bipartisan reform bill, the USA Freedom Act, which would reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisc), outlaw bulk surveillance of telephone records, and restrict bulk collection of Internet communications.

Wednesday: we learned that the NSA is capturing much more data, with far less oversight than we had believed beforehand. Using the fact that internet communications are global, the NSA secretly tapped the fiber-optic cables between Google and Yahoo's data centers abroad, capturing vastly greater amounts of data.

And yet, Edward Snowden remains in exile in Russia. He has no prospect of ever returning home to the country that now embraces his criticisms of NSA surveillance but cannot bring itself to thank him for exposing the practices we now reject.

Of the spying on Merkel and other allies President Obama said: "I didn't know; I'm sorry".

Of the spying on Google's data centers, Google said: "I didn't know; I'm outraged".

Of the telephony metadata, Representative Sensenbrenner said, "I didn't know, and this is not what the Patriot Act I authored is about".

Well, now we all know. And we have one man to thank for what we have learned. It's time for Congress to grant Edward Snowden amnesty.

Congress has in its power the ability to bring home the man without whom all the abuses, errors, and oversight workarounds would have continued unchecked. Five years ago, when Congress passed the Fisa Amendments Act, the legislature included in that statute a set of provisions that immunized the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program from civil suits by citizens whose rights had been violated and from states that wanted to investigate or sanction these companies. That provision was roundly criticized by civil liberties advocates, but it does provide a legislative model for what Congress could now do to protect Snowden from criminal or civil liability arising from his disclosures.

Critics say that Snowden broke the law and should pay the price; they argue that facing the consequences is what civil disobedience requires; that is what we learned from Martin Luther King, they say. But do they really believe that ultra-segregationist Bull Connor's arrests in the civil rights era were justified?

Critics will also say that giving Snowden immunity encourages future leakers and whistleblowers to the detriment of national security. It is, however, highly unlikely that a future whistleblower or leaker will take the chance that their disclosures will so transform public attitudes that they could become the subject of a congressional amnesty. And if a precedent is indeed set, what exactly is wrong with the possibility of amnesty for people who break the law in good conscience to disclose practices that, once exposed, are outlawed or abandoned by Congress, the courts, or the executive itself?

Operational secrecy justifies keeping the lid on many leaks, from the titillating to the self-aggrandizing; but not where it leads to disclosures that instigate true public debate and the development of new legal and policy approaches. At the end of the day – except in the most extreme cases where lives are immediately and directly at stake – in a democracy, operational secrecy must give way to democratic governance.

Normally, it would fall to the president's pardon power to make the basic judgement that, in the name of justice or prudence, a person who violated the law should not be prosecuted or be pardoned after conviction. But President Obama, who has already been forced to become an accessory after the fact to torture by granting silent immunity to its perpetrators, is likely too amoral or too weak to stand up to the intelligence community and avail himself of that option.

It is, then, up to Congress to act. The USA Freedom Act, and any significant legislative proposal like it, should include amnesty for the man who risked a life in prison or exile to tell the American people that things have gone badly awry in the American surveillance apparatus. It is unconscionable for Congress to undertake the most significant legislative repudiation of the surveillance practices of the nation's leading spying programs in a generation, while leaving the man without whom that reform would never have come to pass out in the cold.