I am tired of this historical revisionism that nobody believed the NSA was spying on americans when this shit has been in the mainstream press since 1988, had a major hollywood movie based on this premise, and was fucking in bloomberg, in wired,, and the new york times hasn't shut up about warrantless wiretapping since the signing of the damn patriot act. Someone was writing a book on the subject with some high level interviews before the leaks came out. The Wired Article, by the way, completely correctly guessed the extent of the surveillance by noting the way the government setup the Utah Data Center meant that only mass surveillance was possible as their bandwidth/storage outstripped their processing/filtering capabilities, whereas the more hard news sources gave some insight into how PRISM worked legally but not its extent.

What really happened was more that the conspiracy therorists were completely blindsided by the whole NSA thing, saw it was a winning cause, and latched the fuck on. Then, people started slowly making up that they knew about this all along to sound smart, and then people started lying after seeing other liars, and now threads like these are filled with vague statements about how the conspiracy theorists saw it coming all along. However, since they DIDN'T actually see it coming all along, while you can find, plenty of vague suggestions that the conspiratards knew all along, you can't for example find any primary research on the NSA coming from popular conspiracy theroy sources (whereas you can from MSM sources like wired NYT etc) because they weren't actually interested in the issue before snowden. Because you know, the idea that the only conspiracy therorists believed the NSA was doing mass surveillance was completely made up here on reddit and it was actually pretty concretely a privacy/IT issue.