[shortly]

conspiracy nuts have been screaming all sorts of stuff from the rooftops for years.

if i say 'twenty' every time, eventually i'll correctly predict the outcome of a d20. this doesn't make me good at doing so, nor does it mean that you should have listened.

[at-fates-hands]

Yeah, but it's been well documented for many, many years:

http://www.mega.nu/cm/cm1.html

This site lists articles going back to 1982 about the NSA domestic spying programs. A whois lookup on the site puts the information on the site around 1997. It's fascinating to me people seemed to have no idea, yet the information had been out there for years and years.

I liken it to Jose Canseco. For so many years he was telling people guys in the MLB were all juicing. He got blacklisted and people hazed the crap out of him for the mere suggestion. A few years after his book came out, every player he named was confirmed as a steroid user.

Pretty much the same thing in my mind. . .

[snogglethorpe]

... but really it's always been more than just conspiracy nuts saying this.

It's essentially been common opinion in the tech community for decades that the NSA looked like they were building the capability for mass surveillance, and that in all likelihood was probably doing it.

Snowden provided a greater degree of proof, but anybody that was really surprised by what was going on wasn't really paying attention...