I heard about those taps in 2008&#x2F;2009 I think. Snowden hasn&#x27;t really given us anything truly new. It&#x27;s also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was&#x2F;is accepted as fact immediately without question.<p>I think it&#x27;s way more likely Snowden was intentional. He&#x27;s still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on all their own citizens...and nothing happen. No real revolution, and no real end to the surveillance.<p>I mean yea, we have better security practices, more people use encryption, more people are aware about security ... but overall the landscape hasn&#x27;t changed except in one crucial aspect: people are talking less publicly. People are afraid that what they say is monitored. There has been a chilling effect.<p>The Snowden narrative needs to be questioned. Since when does an NSA contractor working from home in Hawaii get VPN access to all the government secretes? Like...people actually believe that?