In September, I spent a day at the United States military academy at West Point, an elite, 213-year-old academic institution. I’d been invited to lecture by the Army Cyber Institute, a new academic department that focuses on cybersecurity and policies related to the military implications of attacking and defending electronic infrastructure.

It’s not my usual speaking gig. I grew up as an organiser in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement; my experience of the military mostly revolves around protesting outside bases, not being invited inside them. West Point was the first military audience I’d ever addressed, yet I’d heard that they have used my young-adult novel Little Brother, which concerns net-savvy kids in San Francisco who form an underground movement to resist Homeland Security incursions on civil liberties following a terrorist attack.

West Point is an American oddity: a leafy, ancient (by US standards) campus on a lazy river with academic standards to match any Big Ten or Ivy League university, but with a student body that is far more likely to come from racial minorities and poor people than any of America’s notoriously high-ticket educational institutions. I’ve done teaching stints at American universities where annual tuition ran to $50,000, and the contrasts between the student body at those schools and West Point could be the subject of a dissertation on American history, sociology, race relations or economics.

The school is built in a revolutionary war river fortress. Its stone battlements and vaulted halls filled with ancient cannon and oil paintings of past leaders feel distinctly Commonwealth, similar to the halls of the University of Toronto or Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario – educational institutions that date back to the era in which Americans and Canadians alike saw themselves as Britons.

West Point Military Academy campus. Photograph: John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images

My lecture hall featured several hundred young men and women in identical pixellated modern camouflage – a nightmare for someone mildly faceblind like me, who relies upon clothing differences to tell strangers apart. They listened with as much attention as I’d expect from an undergraduate audience – in other words, a few kids in the back fell asleep after a night’s cramming (or, possibly, drinking), while their keener colleagues down front took copious notes and asked good, difficult questions.

The West Point bookstore was much like the bookstores at America’s top academic institutions too, split between selling logoed merchandise to visiting families and textbooks to students, with some discretionary reading around the edges (military biographies and histories featuring heavily here). I signed books for the students, and had each one sign my gift copy of Bugle Notes – a small, hardbound book that new West Pointers are issued upon arrival and expected to commit to memory.

After my lecture I spent an hour in the bookstore, shaking hands with students, discussing their areas of study and their thoughts on my lecture. One kid held back to the very end, and once the others had gone, he approached me with a mixture of shyness and belligerence.

He shook my hand and quietly told me that after graduation he wanted to work for the NSA – and what did I think of that?

If no one who cares about civil rights and the law joins the NSA, how will they improve?

I asked him why. He reminded me that I’d just lectured for an hour on the ways that bad tech policy has turned the internet and its connected devices into a potential dystopian nightmare where all of us are vulnerable to attacks to our livelihoods and even our lives. He’d seen how his family used the internet, and he knew just how many risks they were taking, even if they didn’t. The NSA was America’s cybersecurity bulwark, and he wanted to work for them because he wanted to use his technical skills to keep his family, and his country, safe.

“What about the illegality in the NSA, its abuse of powers?” I asked.

He had a good answer: “If no one who cares about civil rights and the law joins the NSA, how will they improve?”

People who work for the US government have to be careful about the Edward Snowden story. Technically, they’re not supposed to read or pass on classified material, even if it’s on the front page of the national newspapers. So I said: “I suppose you haven’t read much about Snowden, but you should, even if it’s just the profiles in magazines like Rolling Stone.

“Snowden was gung-ho,” I explained. “He was part of a multigenerational military family. He tried to join the special forces at first, and if he hadn’t broken both his legs in basic training, he wouldn’t have ended up in intelligence. But he did, and he was one of their best and brightest. He was an undercover spy for the CIA in Switzerland, worked for the NSA and its contractors all over the world, and was recognized as one of their top IT specialists.

“He carried around a copy of the Bill of Rights, sent whistleblower notes up the chain of command, disrupted meetings to argue that what they were being asked to do was against the law. After literally years of this, he was so frustrated that he literally risked a firing squad to go public with what he knew, and ended up in seemingly permanent exile in an autocratic basket-case state, Russia, where he is in constant peril.

“The question is, what do you plan on doing that he didn’t do? What different tack or tactic have you thought of that he didn’t try? What theory do you have that supports the idea that you’ll make a difference? Because as much as I love the idea of a difference being made, unless you have a theory about how you’ll succeed where he failed, you’re setting yourself up to fail, too.”

I could see that one land. He went quiet and thoughtful, then asked what I thought he should do.

We talked about the State Department’s projects to protect privacy and anonymity online, like the Tor project, and the new work that the National Institute on Standards and Technology was doing to recover from the NSA’s program of sabotage on its standards. I told him that his government had a lot of initiatives that needed good people to help truly improve the security of cyberspace.

He told me he’d think about it, and I believe him. Because America does have a cybersecurity problem – but the NSA is part of it.