Also a good conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36227166
EDIT: Changed the link to an archive.org version.
What have we learned? Much.
The real question is, what’s changed because of it and how?
A lot changed. Facebook and most sites defaulted to http back then. Now most sites only do https, and even DNS encryption has made great strides.
https is more about security than privacy
Westerners generally do not care much about privacy, democracy and critical thinking, and will attack whoever their government media dictates them to (foreign boogeymen like China/Russia/DPRK). We saw Americans calling Snowden a traitor, and Wikileaks a Russian op.
Even the moderators of r/privacy (ourari here) on Reddit subscribe to this. https://web.archive.org/web/20220418214833/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/e9t4ck/a_user_here_threw_ad_hominem_at_a_wikileaks_tweet/
Today, its okay to ban exclusively Tiktok through RESTRICT ACT, a second coming of Patriot Act, but allow incomparably worse behaviours of indigenous surveillance social media companies because they work for NSA and CIA. Mind you, this includes Reddit with numerous US military/air force bases with redditor astroturfers.
the government sucks
Almost nothing. There was no public reaction countering Snowden’s targeting with US state violence, violence that forced him to flee, let alone any forced reduction in domestic spying or secret police activity. Both have probably increased. Nevertheless, self-serving narratives of being “the city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom and democracy, stay intact. It confirmed the biases of people who already knew this was likely happening, and those same people continue to be marginalized by an easily-propagandized public.
