Edward Snowden has given up almost everything in his previously comfortable life so that we could know at least some of the ways in which the US government is spying on us. So what will happen to him now?

The executive branch of the US government has never been fond of leaks or leakers, of course – Nixon's impeachment was, via Watergate, the end result of his "plumbers" going after Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers – but no administration has been as hostile to the public receiving insider information as Obama's. We probably won't kill him – even though the current administration has decided that it's OK to kill US citizens without a trial as long as we invoke "national self-defense" – but Snowden will face relentless pursuit and prosecution, for the foreseeable future. If the way the trial of Bradley Manning is being conducted is precedent, we can expect similarly opaque proceedings for Snowden, should he come to trial.

Snowden is one of a long line of whistleblowers warning the US public about the NSA's powers, from Bill Binney to Mark Klein to Thomas Drake. All these people went public with roughly the same message – the NSA has a boundless appetite for surveillance, and has come largely unmoored from any significant oversight or limits – but it is Snowden's leak that seems to have kicked off a serious and widespread conversation about the appropriate limits of the US government's power to surveil its citizens. What is it about Snowden leak that is special?

It's not the contents of the leak itself. The information that Snowden leaked is fairly minor – a Powerpoint document detailing the Prism program, which seems to confirm what Klein and Drake said: namely, that the distinction between gathering information on particular targets of investigation and members of the general public has collapsed, while the loophole for gathering "incidental" information has expanded so broadly as to allow for wholesale acquisition and storage of electronic communications of any person anywhere, forever.

If Snowden had merely confirmed those earlier reports, his leak would probably have created a similarly muted reaction. What makes Snowden's leak different, though, and electrifying, was its particularity. By informing the public, via this newspaper, of a specific program, and of its widely used commercial targets like Facebook and Google, he has confirmed that the security state that exists inside the United States continues to metastasize – in a way that seems relevant to the lives of ordinary citizens. Oddly, the banality of the Powerpoint form, with its sentence fragments and terrible graphics, served to render the program much more real than hearing from an ATT employee that the NSA was recording American's phonecalls wholesale.

Snowden's leak also added force to earlier claims that the security apparatus run by the most powerful government in the world has broken almost completely free of the checks and balances needed in a democracy. Earlier this year, US District Judge Colleen McMahon, concluding that she could not compel the Obama administration to disclose its legal reasoning for the targeted killings of US citizens, said:

"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me … I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret."

Similarly, Senator Ron Wyden, was reduced two years ago to saying, presciently but impotently:

"When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry … many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It's almost as if there were two Patriot Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters."

Neither the judicial nor legislative branches have been able to compel the executive branch to explain themselves to the American people. And into that breach stepped Edward Snowden.

Part of the reason the Obama administration will now go after him hard is to send a message to others with high security clearance but troubled by the legal implications of warrantless spying: don't get any ideas. Because if people who know what the government is doing in secret begin to behave as Snowden did, it will become much harder for the government to keep such secrets in the first place.

It seems crazy to have to spell this out, but it should be hard for a government to keep secrets from its own people. National secrets are a necessary evil, of course, but the necessary part should not blind us to the evil part. Deciding to try to keep any given piece of information secret should be difficult, and expensive, and prone to occasional failure.

Interviewed about Snowden's leaks, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence, Shawn Turner, said:

"Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law."

What such a sentiment doesn't get at is what someone should do when protecting classified information may mean breaking the law – in this case, not just any law, but but one of the core protections of the US constitution.

The spread of information from WikiLeaks and the hacker collective Anonymous has demonstrated that anonymity can be a powerful tool in defying government secrecy. But Edward Snowden knew, given his familiarity with the work of his previous employers, that after leaking the Prism document, he would be able to run, but not hide. And he did it anyway.

We may now decide, after the long-overdue conversation on civil liberties that is now beginning, that we want the NSA to have such powers. And it may be that if he is arrested, extradited or turns himself in, Snowden will get a fair trial and be convicted. But even those acts will serve to weaken the security state.

In the absence of any real limits on executive power imposed by the other branches of government, Snowden reminds us that resistance is still an option.

• Editor's note: whistleblower William Binney's name was originally misspelled; the article was amended at 12pm ET on 11 June