A BBC documentary series about life in the pre-1989 Communist bloc states of Europe was particularly memorable for the ‘peeping Tom’ film footage of some very ordinary couplings in some very ordinary rooms. In black and white, and clearly taken from the perspective of a spy camera in a hole in the wall, this footage came from the Stasi (secret police) archives of East Germany. It was used to show the extent to which the totalitarian regimes, with which those of my generation grew up as a fact of sinister life fairly close to home, monitored its citizens, leaving them deprived of their fundamental human right to privacy.

Europe’s tragic legacy of 20th-century totalitarianism has given Europeans a Pavlovian response to state-sponsored snooping and invasion of privacy. The first half of the 20th century was dominated in Europe by Fascism, which survived well into the second half in Spain; the second half by Communism, which split the continent asunder. The oppressive horrors of both Fascism and Communism are within living memory to different generations, and the oldest Europeans still alive today remember both, many of them through direct experience.

The words ‘Orwellian’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘1984’ have long been used as ciphers for state intrusion into the lives of citizens, so that even those who have never read George Orwell or know that these are references to a novel know all the same what they mean.

Now fresh debate about these matters, on how far a state should be permitted to go in using breaches of privacy to justify national security, has been started up again by the actions of one Edward Snowden, 29.

Snowden was until a few days ago an employee of the security services company Booz Allen Hamilton, placed under contract to the United States’ National Security Agency (a moniker which appears to have inspired the naming of our own cabinet minister Manuel Mallia’s rather cumbersome portfolio). While working on placement in Hawaii, Snowden copied a raft of classified documents, leaked them to The Washington Post in the US and to The Guardian in Britain, and then took a flight to Hong Kong, telling his girlfriend, quite like the wounded explorer Lawrence Oates on Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition in the Antarctic, “I am just going out. I might be some time.”

Like Oates, Snowden is unlikely ever to return (though not for the same reasons, of course) unless it is under armed guard to face trial as the full force of an increasingly frightening Big Brother comes down upon him. Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States, signed before the British handed sovereignty of the island to China in 1997, and implemented a year later.

Now Snowden, who has since checked out of his Hong Kong hotel and hasn’t been traced yet, has said he will seek asylum in Iceland, where he has been promised help by a civil liberties group. Snowden revealed his own identity – the newspapers to which he leaked the documents were prepared to protect their source in the face of a threatened criminal investigation launched by the United States.

Those documents are evidence that the US National Security Agency has been collecting data, for surveillance purposes, on the telephone and email communications of millions of US citizens, justifying this as crucial in the fight against terrorism. Exactly the same approach and justification (though minus the technology and the emails) were used in the fight against Communism, which the ‘war on terror’ replaced after a brief interval of little more than a decade between November 1989, when the Berlin wall went down, and September 2001, when the Twin Towers followed suit.

This is not comforting, because one is left with the feeling that the ‘five eyes’ extensive apparatus and network, a Cold War collaboration between the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, rather than being wound down after 1990, simply carried on and gave a rationale to their existence and operations by  making spying on terrorists, rather than Communists, their purpose.

But the reality is that the true era of terrorism coincided with the Cold War: in the 1970s and 1980s, half of Europe was locked behind a Communist wall while the other half was ripped to bits by the bombs and kidnappings of the various terrorist groups like the Bader Meinhof, the IRA and the Brigate Rosse. But nobody then spoke about the need to spy on millions of private citizens to work out who and what the IRA would blow up next. The crucial point here, I think, is that terrorism back then never reached the United States and remained largely a European problem in American eyes. Or maybe it’s just that there wasn’t the technology to do all that, and had the technology existed, ordinary British subjects would have had their telephones monitored in an attempt at finding out where the IRA planned to plant their next bomb.

Barack Obama campaigned against Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ paranoia but he has turned out to be more fixated in this regard. Edward Snowden said that he had hoped the surveillance of citizens’ communications would be wound down somewhat after Obama’s election, because of what he said on the campaign trail, “but instead it got worse”. But Snowden does not have the support of the Republican Party in his efforts against the Democrat President’s excesses. Senior Republican politicians have been among the first to call for his extradition to face trial.

The harsh reality is that Snowden, like Bradley Manning before him (he is being put through hell with no hope of respite while that unsavoury narcissist, Julian Assange, cowers at the Ecuadorean embassy in London) has ruined his life even as it is just beginning. The spying will go on and Americans themselves appear to be largely indifferent to it, if not actually supportive. The public line many are taking is, “If I have done nothing wrong, then I have nothing to fear”. This shows quite a shaky grasp of civil liberties by those living in the land which prizes them.

I would say that one of the most unfortunate aspects of this sorry tale is that the United States’ moral authority over China, in the matter of human rights and the surveillance of citizens, has been severely weakened. All the talk right now about the United States using trade diplomacy to work for improved citizen rights in China appears to be heading nowhere. The Chinese must be looking at this situation and gloating: an American citizen taking refuge in Chinese territory to escape the attentions of the US government after blowing the whistle on that US government’s secret surveillance of Americans. If there is an oblique way to say ‘you’re fine ones to talk’, when the first US diplomat broaches the subject of human rights in China, the Chinese will find it.