>>4341449 (lb)

>The effect was to put all the bad attention on the NSA … while nobody looked at the CIA anymore.

My opinion of both agencies is pretty low, so if that was the purpose of Snowden's move, it didn't work - at least on me. I've studied these agencies' histories extensively, and boy are they ugly.

Did you know that aside from the total surveillance they now practice, the NSA was also responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin false flag that dragged America into Vietnam? They like to toss around allegations that Snowden's revelations supposedly got people killed, while hoping that no-one will notice that they got 60k+ Americans killed in a war launched over lies.

The CIA? Don't get me started. To me, they'll always be a bunch of murdering clandestine death camp operators, and unethical human medical experimenters. See: Phoenix Program, for example.

CIA might have a bloodier history, but to me, NSA is the greater, and possibly existential threat. Every genocide of the last century was coordinated through various forms of mass surveillance - that's why we have those laws against it, that rightly define it as a tool of tyranny.

Freedom can't exist beneath total surveillance.