"I never sign those things."

Sauntering out of our interview, wine glass in hand, David Davis playfully bats away the Union Press Officer’s pleas that he sign a release form.

"We need it," she insists.

"No you don’t."

He shuts the door. Davis takes this small opportunity to demonstrate the defiance he wants his young audience to exhibit.

Prior to Thursday’s Union debate – This House believes institutional intrusion into our privacy has gone too far  – Davis explained to us the importance of asserting our rights in the face of government surveillance.

"At the moment you don’t have a private life," he tells the internet generation. "The battle for you is to establish your own rights. They will be your successors’ rights."

Sir David Omand, former director of GCHQ, speaks in opposition to the motion later in the evening. He doesn’t buy the recent Snowden-induced surveillance panic. "The misrepresentation is grotesque," he counters.

But both men acknowledge that the citizen’s relationship to the state needs to be re-negotiated in the Internet Age. Davis’ frustration at what he calls the "intellectually lazy" approach of the British people to this key battleground is palpable. "We’re nowhere near as angry about this as we should be," he rails. "We have had such a fabulous long tradition of freedom and self-determination, that people aren’t really aware of the consequences of not having that".

Omand’s account of British surveillance history is rather different. For him, the "misrepresented" GCHQ revelations hardly amount to news. For those up to date on apparently widely available surveillance documentation, Prism should not have come as a surprise: "This argument could have taken place at any time". 

The relationship between citizen and state, Omand proposes, has always been a contract: "You give the state the monopoly on lethal force in return for which you get protection". The 21st century citizen must authorise the state’s extensive surveillance powers if they want to "uphold normality".

We point out that while Snowden’s leaks might have gravely misrepresented the facts, they prove that the public’s authorisation of this "contract" was never openly sought.

Omand seems genuinely incapable of understanding this anger. The government was merely complacent, he argues, implying that the public was not informed about the sheer scale of mass-surveillance because no one in the know thought they would be interested.

"If [the government] had argued the case rather better, the revelation that something like Prism exists would not have been a big story," he suggests.

According to Davis it is the complacency of citizens rather than their governments that will endanger the negotiation of this "contract". He fears that citizens will only begin to assert their rights in reaction to a crisis – when they find that "fraudsters, private detectives and stalkers" can mine the potential "honeypot" of data available online.

Omand envisages a calmer evolution of laws and regulation. He compares the internet to the invention of the motorcar: "First there were no rules about where you could drive and a lot of people got killed. But finally society works out a way to make safe rules for safe behaviour".

Thus an open discussion about government surveillance will persuade people to willingly accept Internet monitoring as legitimate and necessary. Omand explains that "the government is not going through all your personal emails". But we need to accept that they could look at any email.

This is precisely the honeypot of information that Davis feels uncomfortable with. Government surveillance should, according to him, be a matter of strict judicial oversight, and used "only when we need to use it". He admits, however, that this surveillance "may still impinge on everybody".

Davis’ involvement in the Andrew Mitchell scandal has done nothing to lessen his mistrust of unchecked government power. After helping put together a challenge to the official police account of ‘Plebgate’, Davis describes the incident as "a bit of government doing something very oppressive".

He suggests fitting every police officer with a camera and microphone, creating a database of their actions day to day. The creation of a further honeypot of information doesn’t seem to bother him; he argues that videos collected would be "too boring" to data mine. Much like the public’s personal emails, perhaps.

With the experts’ arguments full of contradictions, can we trust them to negotiate the relationship between citizen and state in our stead? We will have to live with the decisions they make now  – perhaps it’s time for the internet generation to get involved in this debate.