Because the timeline is a simplification and because I didn't see (2015) in the title and thought "it's probably reasonable to speculate this mess will be clean

Because the timeline is a simplification and because I didn't see (2015) in the title and thought "it's probably reasonable to speculate this mess will be cleaned up in the next 5 years." Joke's on me -- it probably did get cleaned up in the last 5 years, the resulting cutoff of illegal dragnet surveillance probably caused the panicked rhetoric about "going dark" we've seen from the intelligence community, and I probably would have been better off putting 2020. Calling 2000 as the "year of dragnet surveillance" has similar issues, because you could argue that dragnet surveillance really got started in the telegraph era and scaled during -- was it WWI? If I think too hard about these dates I'm going to wake up tomorrow drooling on the keyboard from a wikipedia binge.