Re:What Happened to the Snowden Archive
by dijit on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @02:56AM
(#49812582)
One thing I know for sure is that those leaks caused a lot of the tech community to go a lot harder into encryption.
The reason practically all sites are HTTPS now can be traced to this. Many, if not most, sites in 2012 were plain http. Which is actually difficult for me to remember despite working on sites as a sysadmin back then.
I don’t think anyone was convicted, maybe some resignations and a lot of very uncomfortable questions from the senate- and likely some policy changes, though I can’t point to them.
I hate to be so cynical, but among people who are concerned about privacy and american influence, these findings are sort of like "no surpise the military surveillance state that built the internet for military and surveillance purposes would continue using it for military and surveillance purposes." I mean after all, many of us grew up getting threatening letters from the powers that be saying "hey, we surveilled your network traffic on behalf of the private moneyed interests who own all the IP in this country and found illegal activity." Witch hunts like McCarthy going after communists are public record and known parts of our history. MKultra. COINTELPRO. FBI writing a letter to MLK asking him to kill himself. CIA selling crack. Lying about Vietnam. Lying about Iraq WMDs. This has always been a bit of a banana republic.