Just from my experience, the Snowden thing was the best thing to happen for getting people to notice government abuses of power. Before him, if you were to say

Just from my experience, the Snowden thing was the best thing to happen for getting people to notice government abuses of power. Before him, if you were to say something like "the government is tracking everything we do on the internet", everyone would call you a conspiracy theorist. Now it's treated like common knowledge, and I even hear it taken even further than what has been verified.