>When Edward Snowden made it known to the world that pretty much all traffic on the Internet was collected and searched by the NSA, GCHQ (the UK Government Communications Headquarters) and various other countries' secret services as well, the IT and networking communities were furious and felt betrayed.

That's not how I remember it. Among those communities it was pretty well known that such surveillance was occurring. Knowing the scope of it caused a sense of obligation; that we should finally get around to adding some privacy protection to day to day internet traffic. Everyone knew that it was something that had to be done sooner or later.