When Darrell Anderson, 22, joined the US military he knew there was going to be a war, and he wanted to fight it. "I thought I was going to free Iraqi people," he told me. "I thought I was going to do a good thing."
Until, that is, he realised precisely what he had to do. While on patrol in Baghdad, he thought: "What are we doing here? Are we looking for weapons of mass destruction? No. Are we helping the people? No, they hate us. What are we working towards, apart from just staying alive? If this was my neighbourhood and foreign soldiers were doing this then what would I be doing?" Within a few months, he says, "I was cocking my weapon at innocent civilians without any sympathy or humanity". While home on leave he realised he was not going to be able to lead a normal life if he went back. His mum drove him to Canada, where I met him in 2006 at a picnic for war resisters in Fort Erie.
Anderson's trajectory, from uncritical patriotism to conscious disaffection and finally to conscientious dissent, is a familiar one among a generation of Americans who came of political age after 9/11. Over time, efforts to balance the myth of American freedom on which they were raised, with the reality of American power that they have been called on to monitor or operate, causes a profound dislocation in their world view. Like a meat eater in an abattoir, they are forced to confront the brutality of the world they are implicated in and recoil at their role in it – occasionally in dramatic fashion.
It is from this generation that the most recent prominent whistleblowers have emerged: Edward Snowden, 29, the former National Security Agency contractor, now on the run after passing evidence of mass snooping to the Guardian; Bradley Manning, who at 22 gave classified diplomatic and military information to WikiLeaks and now faces a court martial; the late Aaron Swartz, who by 24 was a veteran hacker when he was arrested for illegally downloading academic articles from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later took his own life; and Jeremy Hammond, 28, who is facing federal criminal charges for allegedly publicising the internal files of a private spying agency.
Just as America's military record abroad, complete with torture and "collateral damage", has helped push a section of disaffected Muslim youth across the globe towards terrorism, so the violation of civil liberties and privatisation of information has driven a number of disillusioned Americans to law-breaking dissent at home.
There may not be a dictatorship, but there is a layer below the surface where the life of society is being tracked. This is the subterranean world of surveillance. It occasionally rises to the surface, as has happened in the past few days with revelations from American Edward Snowden of secret US government programs to collect and monitor communications. Snowden, now in hiding in Hong Kong, had worked for the CIA and now works for Booz Hamilton Holding, which has contracts with the National Security Agency.
This should not be seen as merely an internal matter for the US government and its relationship to its citizenry. Technology has turned the world into a global village. It has also spawned new phrases such as ''data-mining'' and its NSA offshoot, the far more insidious ''Boundless Informant''. The latter is a tool that maps the information the agency collects worldwide. In March alone, it collected 97 billion pieces of meta-data - the numbers, locations, length of call. It is not the content.
As well, it has been revealed that the NSA is collecting the phone records of customers who use telecom provider Verizon and that a program called Prism is operating that allows the agency a gateway into the communications of foreign users of companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. It is true that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must approve a surveillance application, but of almost 34,000 applications from its inception in 1979 to last year, only 11 have been rejected.
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