NSA and the 5 eyes were the baddies and they got caught. They got caught because they had been demoralized from within, and there were dozens of other Snowdens

NSA and the 5 eyes were the baddies and they got caught. They got caught because they had been demoralized from within, and there were dozens of other Snowdens waiting in line because the agency had obviously and demonstrably lost its way. If NSA thought they were keeping the world safe from totalitarian communism, they had one job, and the leadership of each of those countries and in europe today suggests that America actually lost the cold war and is collectively too stupid to know it. I suspect the IC has been seduced by the conceit that they are essential to the movement whose activists have infiltrated it and is using the agencies to ratchet its people into government. The IC people just don't get that this movement won't need the NSA when it has Google and Apple. It doesn't need the FBI when it has digital currencies. It doesn't need any of them when it has snitch networks and legions of the mentally ill denouncing people for counter revolutionary thoughts. The last thing on earth it needs is professional bureaucrats with networks of relationships, let alone sentimental beliefs about nationhood and freedom, and who know where its blind spots are. The simple reason behind 20th century atrocities is they were all committed by people who thought they would be the exceptions, and it was accepting the exceptions that enforced the rule. Snowden showed us that we were all the suckers at the table with NSA, but I would observe a decade later that now the IC as a whole doesn't know who the sucker at the table is anymore. If you don't believe me, then tell me, the flag on your boss' desk or hanging in classified areas, its stripes, what colours are they?