I think you miss how mind-numbingly boring all this stuff is. The evil is in the overarching character of the programs and infrastructure -- not the minutia. B

I think you miss how mind-numbingly boring all this stuff is. The evil is in the overarching character of the programs and infrastructure -- not the minutia. But without seeing the minutia you cannot see the program. Imagine that the year is 1942 and someone leaks you a stack of bookkeeping records from some german labor camp in poland. In it, the records account for gassing prisoners by the truckload, but to your eyes it's all just just the cryptic numbers and administrative filler of any complex bureaucracy. To make any sense of it, you need many layers back of the surrounding documentation-- not just to establish what you're looking at, but to establish what you're not looking at. Communication that shows that the data is real, not an exercise, that the prisoners are being killed rather than that the accounting is just covering deaths from natural causes, that it's really a big intentional program sponsored from on-high and not just a fluke where a local administrator or two went nuts. Without a wealth of supporting material it would be easy to dismiss Snowden's reports as "sure well, there was some overreach here and there. It wasn't officially sanctioned and the relevant parties have been sacked, James Clapper had no idea and did not perjure himself and we haven't been systematically lying to the public for a decade." In a world where the NSA was accountable to the public, Snowden would only have to reveal enough to force them to account and disclose and continued inquiry would unearth the rest. But we do not live in that world: The NSA's actions are not open to public inquiry. One shot is all we got for any real transparency into the mass surveillance apparatus. Consider the byzantine dismissals that Jewel v. NSA experienced. ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-nsa-mass-spying-citing-secrecy-claims https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/judge-dodges-legality-... ) It seemed pretty obvious to me that Snowden purposefully obfuscated what documents he took by accessing everything-- a fact you seem to have exploited in a number of posts to exaggerate the scope of the documents he took, according to our best understanding of his actions per the journalists he worked with-- in order to create a situation where the administration's ability to tell additional lies to cover up the situation would be limited by the risk that somewhere in the stash Snowden had a document which blew the latest lie apart. For another example: There is an absurd number of patents filed on most of the technical tools being used for the mass surveillance on the internet-- and their feature sets often end up leaked in product documentation and internet standards. They're not even particularly well hidden, some with co-authors who's linked in pages brag about their TS/SCI and work in intelligence... Yet, pre-snowden, people pointing to this wealth of details even combined with first hand accounts of how it was deployed, were just treated like kooks. Without the ability to open a real inquiry it isn't enough to prove that something suspicious is up, the proof must be utterly overwhelming to have a meaningful effect.