A lot has been said about Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed its secret PRISM spying program to The Guardian newspaper last week. Some have praised the guy as a hero for exposing what really is an outrageous beach of web user’s privacy rights, while others have taken a different stance and called for him to be imprisoned on charges of treason. But few will deny that as far as Snowden’s concerned, everything has played out just brilliantly.

For one thing, Snowden’s actions have had an immediate global impact, far greater than anything that Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks ever managed to achieve. More importantly perhaps, Snowden’s actions led to an almost immediate response from the government and companies concerned, and even – shock horror – an admission that what he was saying is basically true.

All credit must be given to Snowden for the way in which he’s gone about lifting the lid on PRISM, which was done in a carefully considered, escalating fashion that generated maximum impact and outrage.

First we had the news about Verizon, and the government’s secret court order that compelled it to hand over its customer’s phone call metadata without even being allowed to inform anyone it had to do so. These revelations caused mild outrage at the time, but as it turns out they were just a ‘softener’ for the real hammer blow that came less than twenty-four hours later.

Then we had the real bombshell – The NSA had direct access to the servers of nine leading US tech companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, PalTalk, and YouTube. Suddenly, it was the rest of the world’s turn to be shocked and outraged.

Later of course, we learned that “direct access” may or may not be true – Google and others bitterly reject any notion that the NSA has unhindered access to its servers, or any other form of back door – but regardless, the government admitted PRISM was true, and so unrestricted access or not, the net effect is more or less the same.

Leaving us alone to digest all of these revelations for a couple of days, Snowden then pulled off his masterstroke – revealing himself in an exclusive video interview from his bolt hole in Hong Kong. Snowden comes across as well spoken, calm and considerate, and from what we can tell it’s clear that he’s carefully considered everything that he’s done. He certainly doesn’t come across as being an attention-seeker, nor overly-paranoid, nor Anti-American – just an honest guy doing what he feels is the right thing.

Finally, on Tuesday, The Guardian played it’s last card (for the moment, anyway), revealing all it knew about Boundless Informant, which it describes as the NSA’s “most powerful tool for cataloging global surveillance data”. And once again, everyone, especially the Germans, gets extremely pissed at the Americans.

It’s not clear who planned to escalate the disclosures in this fashion, it may have been Snowden’s idea or The Guardian’s, or both. Even so, few will deny that the revelations were timed to perfection, giving officials just enough time to stutter out some kind of response, but not enough time to coordinate an effective damage limitation exercise, with each new revelation leaving them aghast. Not only that, but the timing of the disclosures has served to help keep this story in the news all week long, shoving poor old Apple and its developer conference out of the limelight.

As a result of Snowden’s actions, he’s successfully managed to put both the government and tech companies on the defensive – a big achievement in its own right – but more importantly, he’s also succeeded in achieving what I believe was his real aim.

By revealing PRISM, Snowden has managed to push the issue out into the open and kick off a national debate on whether or not its fair to compromise our privacy for reasons of “national security”. When it comes to something as important as this, it’s not right that the government takes it upon itself to decide what’s best for us. At the end of the day, we’re not babies – we’re adults, and we can make our own choices, this is supposed to be a democracy after all. It may well be that most people feel PRISM is a fair compromise, but even so, it should be their decision to make.

Snowden has given us the opportunity to make that decision – if enough people are outraged, the NSA will be forced to stop what it’s doing or at least limit its actions. And for this reason alone, Snowden deserves our respect.