[seibelj]

How many people in the government knew about the NSA spying on citizens before Snowden finally spilled the info? That was a massive effort involving many (thousands?) of people. Then when Snowden reveals it, his life is destroyed and he’s forced to live in exile. Sends a very strong warning to any other potential do-gooders considering telling the truth.

[mickael-kerjean]

I'm not sure why this got downvoted, I personally wasn't aware of the conditions on which boeing were making plane before the accidents. My gut feel is nobody did care before something really bad happen and having access to a journalist who is interested enough to make a story ain't simple when you're not in their network. As an example, I did notice a few months ago that twitter did receive identifying information about youporn users (here's a proof: https://archive.kerjean.me/public/2020/twitter.jpg). At that time, I did contact a few journalist from techcrunch, gizmodo and some linux techies but never got any answer and the story never went out

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Before Snowden? Everyone in the tech field knew the US government was spying on everyone WELL before Snowden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[rsynnott]

Eh. In that case, there _had_ been prior leaks, for years; they were just much less complete and taken less seriously. As far as I know, there was never a pre-production leak that Boeing employees thought the MAX was unsafe.

[DanBC]

Yes.

For example, this report from the EU parliament from 2001: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP/...

This details a lot of what we knew about ECHELON from the mid 1990s to 2002: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affair...

[polytely]

While true, Snowden position as administrator placed him outside the usual compartmentalization (because he worked on connecting separate parts of the infrastructure)[0], and placed him in a unique position to realize what was happening and to exfiltrate the proof. I suspect most of the other people who knew the whole picture, were a lot higher up the food chain.

[0]: see his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast (it's really long and rambly but there are some fun nuggets in there) Snowdens book might be a better source but I haven't read it yet.

[michaelcampbell]

The NSA's secret boxes in the now famous AT&T closet were well known long before Snowden