[Cyther606]

Snowden steered the conversation towards the US political establishment's _massive_ hypocrisy. At the time, the US was wagging their finger hard at Chinese tech companies, as if to say US tech companies would never stoop to the level of backdooring consumer hardware or spying on their users and handing that data over wholesale to government spies.

In addition to embarassing the American political establishment, Snowden revealed JTRIG; he revealed acts of industrial and political espionage; and he revealed the undermining of public cryptographic standards by government henchmen. This to me is the big one, and it's why it's so unlikely for Snowden to be a limited hangout.

Prior to Snowden, if you weren't being paranoid, you were just sticking your head in the sand. You would be exposing yourself to the risks of parallel construction, backdoors in hardware, sabotage of public cryptographic standards, and the manipulation of online discourse if Snowden hadn't given people like me the power to credibly parry critics who are all too quick to discredit with terms like "troll" and "conspiracy theorist".

Snowden showed James Clapper to be a criminal, too. And the IRS claiming its own electronic paper trail of criminality could be somehow "lost" in this age of pervasive surveillance lends credibility to the idea of there being a clear divide between those who are above the law, and the rest of us. The Rulers and the Ruled.

[junto]

Yet no one has been indicted, apart from Snowden (well 'criminal complaint', not an indictment, but even Obama mixed them up).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/12...