Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.

Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.

pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.

the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.

Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.

Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else.

I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".