[DanBC]

It wasn't innuendo!

There were EU parliament reports; the industrial espionage was known; spying on friendly nations was well known.

The slides give more detail, they include names or programmes, and they are about modern abuses. But it is wrong to say that we didn't know that governments surveilled their citizens. Some people might have ignored it.

[epipsychidion]

As the saying goes, the devil was in the details. It's not the existence of spying but the extent that made everyone take notice. "surveilled their citizens" is too general a term;it can include anything from monitoring international communication for a handful of citizens to collecting metadata for every single phone call ever made (as was the case). I never said or implied that there was no proof that governments spied on their citizens so don't represent that as my belief.