Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?
People affected is my bigness metric, in this instance.
Nixon got outed for spying on a hotel room. The Executive Branch just got outed spying on pretty much everyone.
Watergate was also in a time when people were, by and large, a little more literate about the supposed balance that's supposed to exist between the government and the individual. I was a teenager during Watergate and recall more than one adult being outraged that the president would spy on anyone and shared their outrage.
Today, the almost absolute apathy about being spied on is as disturbing to me as the surveillance itself. It doesn't bode well for the American political future.
The NSA and Watergate are very different types of things. In Watergate, the Administration engaged in targeted, illegal spying on political opponents. The NSA has Congressional approval for a surveillance program, and there has not yet been evidence to point to them using that for political gain.
Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?