In his testimony, Mr. Rusbridger pointed out that newspapers in the United States, including The Washington Post and The Times, had reached the same conclusion about the leaks — that what they revealed was of vital global significance. Given that The Guardian had shared some of the Snowden material with The Times, Mark Reckless, another committee member, asked whether The Guardian should be prosecuted for that. “I think it depends on your view of a free press,” Mr. Rusbridger responded.

Mr. Rusbridger made his own view clear: “It’s self-evident. If the president of the United States calls a review of everything to do with intelligence, and that information only came into the public domain through newspapers, then it is self-evident, is it not, that newspapers had done something which oversight failed to do.”

At the same time, the British government has used the so-called Defence Advisory Notice to let other newspapers in Britain know that it would take a dim view of efforts to follow or add to The Guardian’s reporting.

Theoretically, the structure of our government is supposed to keep us safe from government abuse, but the rise of an enhanced security state after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has created a kind of short circuit in that diagram of accountability. That is where journalism comes in, where China gets it wrong, where Britain has lost its footing. Transparency, however painful in the moment, allows democracy, business and the citizenry to thrive in the long run, a point that Mr. Biden made in his speech and that Mr. Rusbridger made in his testimony.

“There are countries, and they are not generally democracies, where the press are not free to write about these things and where the security services do tell editors what to write and where politicians do censor newspapers,” Mr. Rusbridger said. “That’s not the country we live in, in Britain.”

By now, most people know that The Guardian and The Washington Post published articles in June that set off a global debate over the implications of government surveillance, and put citizens everywhere on notice that their private communications are subject to inspection by the National Security Agency. Since the leaks first surfaced, there have been many new disclosures exposing fresh insults to privacy. Last week, The Washington Post revealed that the N.S.A. was gathering about five billion records a day on the location of cellphones around the world.

Barton Gellman, who helped write that article and broke much of the news about the Snowden material that appeared in The Post, has had a busy few months. But he did notice that Mr. Rusbridger seemed to be on trial this week for committing journalism. For all the complaints about the administration’s aggressiveness in prosecuting leaks, America is still a better place to reveal uncomfortable truths. After all, no one knocked on the door seeking documents and demanding the destruction of hard drives, as happened at The Guardian.