[jwalgenbach]

Except it wasn't. Carnivore was a thing that people knew about, and the US government backed away from it when it was publicized. Total Information Awareness was a thing that was known and not a conspiracy theory. The Patriot Act was a thing that took a lot of steps towards a surveillance society.

Snowden's information was just a confirmation that the US government was pursuing these things in secret when doing them in the open failed. It's not a lizard people/flat earth/q-anon level thing. There was plenty of "prior art" for the Snowden revelations.

There are conspiracies. I have never seen or heard of one that turns the world upside down. They seem to be all continuations and expansions of bad behavior that is currently accepted as fact.