After 13 years, do you all still believe in the conspiracy Edward Snowden revealed, or do you give him less credit now?
Personally, I think that even though Snowden doesn't really get 100% into the technical weeds (even though, by his own account, in his book — which I've read several times all the way through — he was one of the best people at the NSA and other places where he worked as an IT specialist, so I don't understand why he doesn't really go deep into the details for people who know the field, and I don't mean “this person did that” but actually showing code) — you could argue anything and the opposite of anything. For example, I wonder why encryption, all these years after revealing the alleged conspiracy orchestrated by the American government and the NSA, was so important to Snowden, when nowadays it's easy to tell people who don't even know what encryption is (for instance on WhatsApp) that “the stuff is encrypted,” and they don't even really know what that means — so why should any of that matter to these people? Do you really think a Snowden leak matters to anyone? Out of the whole world, how many people would actually be affected, without you all blowing it out of proportion just because you know IT people or people in the industry, or because you're American, or because you spend your days online? It all seems pointless, especially since the encryption keys are usually in the hands of whoever runs the apps or websites, or they can certainly be read natively by the hardware of any Intel computer (for example via ring -3), by the provider, or by spyware that infects part or all of the system (any system can always be breached, and the biggest power and money belong to governments, so it's entirely possible they've bought zero-day spyware to put on any device in the world, or that closed-source systems intentionally send data about all of humanity to someone, etc. — plainly, there's no fully open-source system on Earth that's controlled and known to us as citizens, even if the mnt comes very close). Encryption works if they don't have your keys, but it's obvious that certain companies or governments can get their hands on it through spyware, and they surely already have all or almost all of them. So why do you instead think we're all so pessimistic, short-memoried, out of touch with reality, and constantly shut out by ordinary people (especially among younger people, with the violence that results from that — at least here in Italy), when this is exactly the real state of things, and not the technology that we in IT keep getting blamed for being “not secure enough,” when it's obvious that as long as there's internet somewhere around that device, there will never truly be real security, and it's actually more and more of an endless nightmare? Just look at where this very website takes you after spending even a few minutes on it. If you think about it, we're all sick, and that itself is a conspiracy — and it's not technology itself that should just be a helping tool, like a cane for an old man; the first value in life is health, and they want to take it from us — remember that.
It would hypothetically have been easy for some American government agency to set Snowden up as the savior of a world in decline — someone who's also an IT specialist but who apparently wouldn't have known how to really talk about technology except to a general audience (by now everyone knows who Snowden is, just check any website) — talking about it not as a technician, and not even giving away all that much information (I'm talking about when the leak happened), and in fact not even bringing about major results as we can see now (since, compared to that year, we're now in the future and know in hindsight how things played out). Just think about all the accelerationism that has happened since the internet took hold so much in everyone's homes and pockets — digital tech, “apps” instead of websites, ultra-fast connections, us shutting ourselves indoors, etc. But I don't want to lump everything together; everyone's entitled to their own speculation. Honestly, I'm not much of a conspiracy-minded person — quite the opposite. I think being a conspiracy theorist is often harmful, and other times it's more about being overly optimistic (nice quote from a friend of mine, lol). I do think, though, that scientifically working to take apart certain things using real, objective knowledge — the kind of things we take for granted just because “we know them” — leads to conclusions that are genuinely very good and instructive for anyone.
I mean, isn't it strange that in a world full of hatred, where wars are raging everywhere and the climate is going haywire, instead of helping each other and pursuing our real interests, we drift away from reality over things that only make us feel bad and spiral — don't you think? Don't you think that's exactly what a government might want? Think about it — not in front of a screen, but maybe while eating something, or on a walk, or with someone — I don't know, you tell me. After all, it's always been shown that conspiracies themselves — at least from a psychological standpoint regarding people who believe in them — aren't good for you (at least according to some studies; far be it from me to say conspiracies are 100% false, there could simply be some hysteria mixed in, I think), and in fact Snowden was the first public, mainstream “step” where conspiracies became the norm and where we felt out of place. I hope you get what I mean — sort of like the saying here in Italy, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” What I'm getting at is: what if this were all some kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy,” because we're all inside one big “internet asylum,” and inside this “asylum” they've placed the “winners” — the richest people on the planet — who “mentally take possession of us”?
P.S.: Since I'm Italian, I decided to translate the whole thing using a translator (claude ai), so don't call me a bot or say I wrote this with AI — I know the internet is more full of bots than humans, but no, I'm not a bot.