On January 31, 2008, in a Democratic primary presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama when speaking about the war in Iraq, made one of the most memorable and seemingly significant statements of the campaign:

I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.

Many of those of us who found Obama’s promises of hope and change too vague and superficial to mean much, took his declaration on ending the mindset that got us into war as a bold repudiation of the Bush-Cheney era — an important signal that he understood the primary effect of U.S. national security policy, post 9/11, had been to generate a culture of fear inside America.

After taking office, not only did Obama fail to follow through on his commitment to change this mindset, but through the expansion of America’s drone war, widening the war on terrorism, sharply increasing the use of the Patriot Act in order to conduct mass surveillance inside America, and by starting an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, this president has done more to expand state power and secrecy than any of his predecessors.

If George W. Bush was preoccupied with presenting the tough posture of a national security president, the change Obama has brought is to dispense with the posturing and instead focus on the expansion of the national security infrastructure.

The only significant challenge he has faced showed up unexpectedly in the form of a 29 year-old whistle-blower.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, for the first time since 9/11, Americans have refused to be silenced by government fear-mongers. They no longer accept the assertion that the need to “combat terrorism” is a national imperative that trumps all others.

As the czars of the national security establishment once again pull out the terrorism card in the hope that they can stifle debate and deflect tough questions, they are discovering for the first time in over a decade that their prized asset has suddenly lost much of its value.

While the media’s attention has often focused more on Snowden than the information he leaked, this focus is what has given the story such longevity — for better or worse, people have more interest in stories about people than they do in the analysis of policy. That NSA surveillance has become a focus of public concern, is not in spite of the extent to which this became a story about one individual, but on the contrary, because the issue could be embodied. (Obama apologists who profess an interest in civil liberties should take note.)

Ultimately this isn’t a story about Edward Snowden, yet it wouldn’t have become a story about issues that affect everyone without it first being a story about him.

Duncan Campbell is a veteran investigative journalist who began unearthing evidence of the NSA’s mass surveillance operations decades before most people had even heard the name, “National Security Agency,” let alone had any understanding of the scope of its operations. Campbell is unequivocal in describing Snowden as a hero who has done a public service in the interests of protecting civil liberties across the world.