I'm not disputing that the NSA stuff is real - of course they're doing it, it's what the agency is expected to do.

I'm disputing whether these are leaks or announcements. The media might not even know they're part of the plan. Is it that farfetched for the NSA to say "Hey, we want to make this information public for some reason, and we're going to do so by using a whistleblower. You're going to release all these documents to a bunch of media sources and live abroad for a while and be hailed as a hero"? There's a long history of leaking information, factual or otherwise, for a number of purposes. There's potentially no end to the rabbit hole. Maybe Snowden doesn't even know he's part of the plan.

It's my opinion that the NSA, some group, or some individual, is letting us know they're watching closely. Maybe they're acclimating us to the idea of being spied on, or worse, distracting us from or preparing us for something else. I think the big picture has yet to be revealed.

Something worth considering is the conditions necessary for having both subjective and objective expectation of privacy. If nobody expects to be able to avoid the NSA, nobody can expect to have subjective expectation of privacy.

NSA will certainly know everybody's reaction to the Snowden leaks.

I figure the absolute worst case scenario imaginable is that USGOV is producing a list of sysadmins and privacy conscious individuals for extermination. Most "coding" seems to be happening now several layers up from linux systems. If the Government wanted, they could kill everyone who knew how to actually use a computer. Then they could "Teach low income Americans to program" and then just conveniently forget to teach them the full stack. Note, I don't think this is happening, but it isn't unimaginable.

In addition, the narrative has been very pro CIA since the very beginning. There have been a lot of people making the clear distinction between machine intelligence and human intelligence, which is definately a CIA line.