Edward Snowden: The self-regarding idealist whose warnings of tyranny ring hollow

At what point did Edward Snowden, the rogue US defence contractor who revealed some of the inner workings of America's National Security Agency (NSA) and our own GCHQ, cease to merit even a shred of sympathy from the public he vowed to protect? Was it when he first popped up in Hong Kong, rather too close to China for many people's comfort?

Or perhaps when he extended his "gratitude and respect" to Russia and Venezuela, two egregious violators of basic rights, for their "stand against human rights violations"? And if not at that point, then surely when he declared this week that he would not give away secrets that might endanger the lives of US intelligence assets, "even under torture". What next? Levitation? Invisibility? No, ably assisted by The Guardian newspaper - which knows more than a thing or two about this subject - Edward Snowden has become a monster of self-importance.

His biggest misconception is the fallacy, popular with both the liberal Left and the libertarian Right, that countries like the US and the UK are just a click of an NSA mouse away from becoming what Snowden calls a "turnkey tyranny". It is time this silly claim was shouted down for what it is - not only wrong-headed and contrary to common experience, but also offensive, since it draws an equivalence between the US and the UK and places such as China, Russia and Venezuela that really are surveillance states.

He may get the chance sooner rather than later, but Snowden should actually go and live in those countries to see first-hand the difference between them and us, and then he might start to understand how back-to-front his world view really is. He fears the "tyranny" that could result from the abuse of the NSA surveillance apparatus, but apparently doesn't stop to think why it is that the US president or the British prime minister cannot use it to silence their enemies, augment their personal power and browbeat the citizenry.

That, of course, is not true of Putin in the Kremlin, the Chavistas of Venezuela or China's kleptocratic ruling elite who all - as Snowden's new friends at Amnesty and Human Rights Watch will attest - abuse the powers of the state on a daily basis. It shouldn't need to be said, but the fact that we don't have kangaroo courts, gulags and an emasculated, propagandist media is not - as Mr Snowden seems to think - some lucky accident.

Even he seems to concede that the US is not yet in the grip of tyranny, but warns that it could only be one bad president or one terrorist attack away from dissolving into dictatorship. The apparatus of repression is in place at the NSA, he warns - it just requires someone to use it. But that's the exactly the point. That's why America's founding fatherns wrote the Constitution and codified the kinds of checks and balances that keep it from sliding back into the darkness of dictatorship. The internet doesn't change that.

Independent courts with judges that have lifetime tenure, a free media that publishes Snowden's leaked files and a bicameral legislature that hobbles the executive and makes the laws that govern the NSA, keep the country from that now, and always. This is not complacent faith in the goodness of government. On the contrary.

We know government cannot be trusted - think of the McCarthy trials, Watergate, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, the dodgy dossiers of Iraq. But we also know from experience that when one branch over-reaches, another pulls it back. It's a messy, imperfect and sometimes slow-to-react system, but over time it has shown itself to work.

Instinctively the American public knows this to be true, which is why it has greeted Snowden's "revelations", if that is what they are, with a collective "meh". The majority do not fear lapsing into a surveillance state because they see no evidence of it. For all the paranoid fantasies of the liberal and libertarian fringes, people do not - as they do in China or Russia - disappear in the night, or have their careers ended or their businesses closed merely for disagreeing with Mr Obama or Cameron.

That's why they call it the "free world" and Mr Snowden, with his priggishness and self-regard, simply insults all those in actual authoritarian states who really do suffer on the long walk to freedom. He calls himself a "whistleblower" and yet has failed to produce a single concrete example of an abuse of a spy apparatus which he claims is trampling the Constitution. He asserts portentously that NSA operatives like him "had the power to change people's fates", but cannot show where actual wrongs have been committed.

Had he done so, Snowden would have at least merited the title "whistleblower" - but even then he would not have proven his claim that America is becoming a surveillance state, only that the mechanisms that keep it from becoming so are in good working order.

There is, as Obama concedes, a debate to be had about the appropriate balance between privacy and security in an age of information, but Snowden and his supporters live in a world outside the margins of reality.

As with any form of power wielded by human beings, there will always be mistakes, over-reaching and sometimes downright abuse; but there will be no "turnkey tyranny" because wise men foresaw that threat and, unlike Snowden, did something real and profound to prevent it.