This was an incredible documentary. I was too young to grasp the whole Snowden thing when it happened so this was a great recap. But I have a question. This all happened, but what was the aftermath of these leaks? It seems people today have completely forgotten about this or don’t really care, so that domain kind of failed. And were there any consequences for the NSA, any legislative intervention, anything at all, or was it just <insert “we’re sorry” south park meme>. Do we have to assume nothing changed and the surveillance is still in place or probably even worse?
Some people became aware of the tracking. Some confused Snowden with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and assumed he raped a woman and leaked classified data to the Internet. Snowden got trapped in Russia.
No policies changed. Things actually got worse, as you can see with Flock cameras as an example. No one even apologized.
the biggest is that everything is now encrypted as standard. letsencrypt came after this and allowed everybody to use industry-standard encryption even for trivial stuff, for free.
back then, even google’s servers communicated with each other in cleartext. sipping off that pipe allowed the siphoning of all data.
The only thing that changed was the public became more aware. The government is still tapping all our communications. Cell phones are being hacked, and Flock cameras are tracking everyone 24/7.
Our society is very very good at ignoring inconvenient truths. Even when it becomes so obvious it can’t possibly not be seen, we’ll rather invent conspiracies and hunt scapegoats than even acknowledge the actual problem.
Not much happened. Everything is worse now, pretty much. There’s another documentary “Terminal F” about Snowden being trapped in the Moscow airport for a month. It looks like it was re-released in the US under the title “Chasing Edward Snowden” and IDK if they cut it or otherwise messed it up, but the original version was good.
