A man holds a poster in a demonstration of support for Edward Snowden  in Hong Kong on June 15.

Edward Snowden's revelation that the U.S. systematically cyber spies on its own citizens, foreign nationals and foreign countries (including China) meant that one man's actions transformed an international debate. Prior to June 6, when Snowden revealed the existence of the U.S. Prism surveillance program, a well-orchestrated U.S. government campaign was being carried out against China's alleged cyber espionage.

Experts knew this campaign was fraudulent. They pointed out that the U.S. possesses the world's most advanced computer technology and the world's strongest international security agencies. Anything China was doing the U.S. could do on a far bigger scale. The historical record of U.S. intelligence operations, including supporting military coups and fabricating evidence to justify wars, revealed that the U.S. had no inhibitions about using security services in a relentless and illegal fashion. China stated that it was subject to U.S. hacking attacks.

Other commentators understood reality via the history of organized U.S. government campaigns to fabricate or distort crucial evidence.

In 1964 the U.S. Congress passed the resolution authorizing the use of military force in Southeast Asia after claims that Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin had attacked U.S. warships. In 2005, newly declassified documents revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency knew that the U.S. ships had fired first and the Johnson administration suppressed this information claiming the Vietnamese vessels fired first.

Similarly, to justify the Iraq War, the U.S. government presented, in the UN and the media, false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to "justify" an invasion.

The campaign against China on "cyber-hacking" clearly employed similar methods.

Although experts realized what was going on, the public did not – until Snowden supplied definitive evidence that the U.S. government was hacking China, spying on its own citizens and foreigners and that U.S. Internet companies Google, Facebook and Apple were complicit.

Bloomberg then revealed on June 15 that: "Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits." Bloomberg revealed concrete details – for example Microsoft informed U.S. security agencies of bugs it had found in its software – so that they could be exploited for hacking, before it informed customers how to fix them. The U.S. computer industry was essentially supplying information to, and in some cases guiding, U.S. security services.

What was explosive was the revelation of these U.S. government operations in "real time." U.S. intelligence agencies are not stupid, they are aware that the truth eventually emerges. The truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident is now on public record and few people now continue to defend U.S. actions over claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Normally, however, revelations of the real facts come out only after a delay and after the actions they were used to justify have been executed. Only then do the revelations correct historical "facts."