To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence part analysis) was actually true.

The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.

This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.

I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.

Cryptome… haven’t thought of that site in ages. At the time it was hard to know how real it was, but years later we learned it was on point.

> the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden

Yeah, but keep in mind there was growing awareness of mass surveillance in the years leading up to the Snowden revelations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Similar to how the show 24 manufactured consent for torture, imperialism, etc post-9/11, part of me wonders how much of a role POI played in doing the same for mass surveillance.

POI had full-take surveillance of domestic data, which Snowden's docs showed wasn't true, despite many people believing it before the dump.

> To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden

Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done.

Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden.

Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.

Even the part of the "too much data to analyze" was real, before we knew about it.

NSA capturing all data was conspiracy level. But even the problems with having too much data to sift through, also turned out to be correct.

And of course, even more ahead of its time, having AI solve the problem of sorting through the data, is coming true today.