So what follows Snowden? On the evidence so far, not a great deal. The biggest heist in the history of intelligence was supposed to change the world – to expose the calumnies of the secret state and redraw the boundaries in favour of individual liberty. For all the sound and fury, little has changed.
There are good and less good reasons for this. The good is that the central charge laid by Edward Snowden of mass surveillance by agencies determined to subvert freedom has proved hollow. The less good is that western societies have still to grapple with the way so-called big data has upended familiar notions of privacy and liberty.
There has been kerfuffle and noise aplenty since Mr Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, loaded his cache of laptops and memory sticks on to a flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong. Now in Russia, he is thought to have stolen 1.7m top secret files from the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ.