[mindslight]

The simple answer is that you have been consuming too much mass media, and have succumbed to its insidious bias.

This "weaponization" of the Internet narrative is based around casting vulnerabilities as if they're "nobody's fault", rather than mundane gross negligence. The digital realm inherently favors defenders - if there is no logic error, packets just bounce off. And this applies even in the less-certain psychological realm - foster a culture of rejecting sensationalized propaganda and it will no longer rule elections!

But a narrative based around shoring up defenses and being diligent would be pretty boring. And the news media certainly doesn't want to attack propaganda generally, merely stave off "Russian" propaganda to preserve their own authority. So the whole topic gets sensationalized as the age-old escalation-aimed status quo - governments saber ratting at each other to drum up internal support.

But free people are not countries and we are especially not governments. What Snowden exposed was how governments, specifically the US government, are attacking their own citizens in the name of this "security". Everybody involved in tech should have already known, but just didn't want to admit it to themselves because it is so "anti-American" and conflicts with the web 2.0 gravy train. Snowden certainly wasn't the first, but he was at the right time with the right information the public can grok (XKEYSCORE vs 641A).

Additionally, the government has no philosophical mandate without the oversight of and subservience to The People. If you want to throw around the term "traitor", look no further than these agencies that swear oath to the Constitution and then work to undermine it by escaping from its governance! No matter how much "collateral damage" was done to that game of USG spooks playing with other spooks, spilling the beans is justified to push these activities back under control of the People.

"Blindly trust us, we're working behind the scenes to keep you safe, but can't tell you how" is not the setup of a Free society. This is the overarching dynamic that the mass media generally downplays in their present narrative, preferring people identify with the power structure rather than emphasizing how it is acting against them.

[dTal]

>Everybody involved in tech should have already known

Yeah, I knew back in 2008 or so, well pre-Snowden, and it freaked me out. Room 641A was the major giveaway, but there were lots of little things. I told all my friends about it - and got shrugs. They either didn't care, or didn't believe me and wrote it off as conspiracy-theory nonsense. The sad fact is that it takes the media telling people something is a scandal before they'll believe it is one, and for that to happen there has to be an event to report on. Snowden's role was more that, and making the evidence really incontrovertible. Before that, what could we, as tech people, have done?

Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience. Only one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right". It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

[mindslight]

I don't know when I personally could claim to "know". It's more like reading rumors, looking at the motives of the parties, and accepting it as the most prudent understanding. Klein/641A was low level and so the major confirmation to technical people - we can extrapolate general implications from the fundamental setup. Binney addressed a higher level but was too early to be appreciated at large.

> "that can't possibly be happening" ... "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal"

At first glance these appear to be opposed, but they are actually both just cognitive dissonance modulo different unignorable facts.

> one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right".

This is called taking responsibility. The hurdle wasn't even the admitting you were right, but rather themselves coming to terms with the implications.

[torified]

>It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

Very perceptive. What blows me away is that even knowing the past, they still think the future won't be different.

I'm in Australia, and the amount of apathy is astounding.

Scary developments like the AABill which is to literally force citizen sysadmins to secretly spy on other citizens under threat of 10 years jail, with no oversight and no ability for legal representation.

Passed with bipartisan support, except for some amendments that were meant to happen in February which would have made the catastrophic bill just disastrous.

No amendments have happened, there is no media interest, and no concern from the lobotomized public.

[lern_too_spel]

> Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience.

It certainly was frustrating because "that" still isn't happening. It taught me the unpleasant fact that people will believe any conspiracy theory as long as a newspaper prints it, even if every other newspaper points out everything wrong with the conspiracy theory.