At the heart of the case of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who leaked a massive tranche of agency documents in 2013 and revealed the breathtaking scope of US government spying, there was always a fundamental absurdity. Snowden was hunted, pushed into exile, and forced to live knowing he could have SEAL Team Six kick down his door any moment and spirit him off to some clammy military prison, all for doing something that authorities and even the people going after him tacitly admitted was a vital public good.

Even as former president Barack Obama absurdly tried to throw Snowden in prison by prosecuting him as a spy, he publicly acknowledged that “in the absence of institutional requirements for regular debate . . . the danger of government overreach becomes more acute,” and that “this debate” — which Snowden had sparked with his leak — “will make us stronger.” He even put together a panel of national security luminaries and his own loyalists to review surveillance policy, which eventually recommended a range of limits to it.

“In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” the panel wrote about the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) notorious Section 215, which Snowden revealed had been used to indiscriminately store Americans’ phone metadata in bulk.