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It is a very fair point that Snowden's revelations definitely had an impact. However, the impact you note was mostly technical.

The public backlash to these revelations is what seems lacking. It had very small political effects, and seemingly very little effect on the NSA. They did not change their stance much, and their weren't really consequences for what the NSA was doing.




What’s more important though? The public can’t particularly change things at that level. They don’t live at that level. It’s our job to help them. Just as they help me on non computer related stuff all the time. A barber shouldn’t be in charge of web encryption. It’s on us.


Also, I think the public has no problem with the government spying on other people. They just don’t want it spying on them. So in that regard, it opposing the policy, but instead mitigating the risk to your own communications is an expected result.


Though that gets... interesting, when we remember that the revelations were that the NSA was spying on <insert person here>, as it was/is untargeted dragnet “surveillance”. People still didn’t care though, politically




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