Is NSA leaker Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?

You know the world's been knocked a little off its axis when arch right-wing paranoid Glenn Beck and left-wing anti-capitalist film-maker Michael Moore agree on something.

Both have come out in admiration of Edward Snowden, the bearded, thoughtful-looking 29-year-old former intelligence analyst who's ripped the cover off a vast data-mining apparatus run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

The explosion of praise and outrage over Snowden's revelations via Britain's Guardian newspaper rivals, and could possibly dwarf, the flap over U.S. soldier Bradley Manning's leak of embarrassing intelligence information to Wikileaks.

[ Related: WikiLeaks trial begins 3 years after Bradley Manning's arrest for massive leak of US secrets ]

Here's Beck's tweet on learning Snowden, a former CIA staffer worked for a private contractor employed by the NSA, was the source of the Guardian's scoop.

Which he followed up with this:

Moore is ready to canonize Snowden.

And added this:

Snowden worked at a secret Hawaiian facility that sifted the metadata of millions of telephone calls — when and where they were made, to whom and for how long — looking for patterns and connections that could reveal potential terrorist activity. A second program disclosed by Snowden, known as PRISM, gave the U.S. government access to Internet usage data with the same objective.

The programs didn't monitor actual phone conversations or Internet traffic and were aimed mainly at users outside the U.S., but inevitably Americans' private information would be caught in the net.

The Globe and Mail reported Monday that National Defence Minister Peter MacKay authorized the revival of a similar data-collection program in 2011.

[ Related: Internal government spying: Necessary to stop terrorism or an invasion of privacy? ]

Snowden, aware he'll have the book thrown at him just like Manning, fled to Hong Kong before offering the documents about the monitoring programs to the Guardian and the Washington Post.

The revelations have ramped up two separate debates: One on whether we need to accept the growth of the surveillance state as the price of being protected from our enemies, and the other on whether people like Snowden and Manning are public-spirited whistleblowers or misguided dangerous traitors.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks we've become used to, if not necessarily accepting of, an increased level of government intrusion into our privacy via security cameras and the ability to easily track our activities on phones, the Internet and routine transactions at stores and banks.

The powers that be tell us its necessary for our protection. We don't understand, they say, just how vital their information-gathering infrastructure is to national security. In the U.S., there's been bipartisan support for the programs Snowden disclosed, and claims they helped foil at least two terror plots.

[ Related: US government contractor risks prosecution, prison for surveillance data leak if extradited ]

And if you believe that, you'll see Snowden as a traitor. But you can also understand his concern that the increasingly sophisticated computer programs that make it easier to sift huge amounts of data have tipped the balance between security and personal freedom.

As the story broke, I kept thinking of a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

A post Monday by Michael White on the Guardian's politics blog points out that a paranoid streak has run through American politics since the creation of the United States, as evidenced by nearly a century of vigilance against the "Red Menace."

"So Edward Snowden, the techie from Hawaii, is the latest in a long line of patriots resisting the siren demands of the Patriot Act and of paranoid activity," White writes.

"There are always trade-offs between security and liberty, but fewer than the securicrats would have us believe and fewer still that require absolute secrecy. Up the republic."

This post on American Thinker also sums up the dilemma about Snowden in many Americans' minds.

"Snowden is being lionized by both left and right — at least, those who are reacting emotionally to his revelations," writes Rick Moran. " They are, indeed, serious and dangerous. The potential to make the US a police state is great, as is a loss of any sense of privacy for the individual.

"The potential is also there to head off terrorist attacks. And revealing these surveillance programs almost certainly gives terrorists who are paying attention a means to avoid detection."

Snowden would be better suited to a hero's cape if he'd stayed in the U.S. to face arrest, Moran argues.

"If the question is should Snowden have leaked such closely held secrets, I would reluctantly answer 'yes.' But if you are going to deliberately break the law in a civil society, you must be prepared to accept the consequences. Snowden ran away from those consequences. That does not make him a hero in my book. It makes him a criminal ...

"Let the law deal with Snowden while we debate what he has revealed and try to salvage a proper balance between surveillance and privacy."