[DanBC]

> If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional

A person can still be operating under a conspiracy theory and talk about pervasive government surveillance. Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

But also, for your example, anyone paying attention had been saying, pretty loudly, that governments were surveiling their populations. See, for example, the EU parliament report into ECHELON. We know about ECHELON in the early 1990s. Thus, if someone had said "They've done it before, look at ECHELON, they're probably doing it now" -- that's a reasonable bit of evidence and a reasonable conclusion. If someone says "I hear clicks on my phone line and so the government is spying on me" that's a conspiracy theory (because the evidence is bogus) even though it's true (governments do spy on citizens).

[V-2]

I agree.

It's also a typical trait of conspiracy theories (in the negative sense) that they pretend to have figured out more than they possibly could have.

I mean they don't just sell you suspicions (that might even be reasonable), but overdetailed debunkings which are clearly fabricated.

As if they believed that the winner is whoever provides more details, wherever these would come from.