Starts out using racism by claiming we need to restrict privacy (drugs) to prevent muslims (hispanics) from terrorizing us. Next it's associated with sexual deviants (reefer madness), and anyone who opposes it must be one of them. Then people start to realize that privacy isn't just an ideal, but it's a physical feeling of freedom - a feeling that they have never felt before, the freedom to be the captain of your life (damn hippies!) - people have tasted freedom and they want more of it. To fight against it, governments spends trillions of dollars hunting out anyone who provides privacy services (drug smuggling).
Eventually there is reform,etc etc... so, it took like a century for cannabis.. 20 years for privacy?
Not even close.
For one, many non-crackpots (IT/infosec professionals and academics) strongly suspected NSA possessed capabilities similar to these and were probably exploiting them for many years before Snowden. Most details weren't known, but many people were not remotely surprised by the revelations.
Actual conspiracy theorists tend to believe far more ridiculous scandals. Most of them believe mass homicides are orchestrated by governments to achieve political goals (Bush destroyed WTC to invade Afghanistan and Iraq; Obama murdered Sandy Hook children to pass stricter gun control legislation). If any conspiracy like that were ever proven in the same way NSA surveillance was, the shitstorm would (justifiably) be 1000x worse.
But it is true that history almost definitely will not treat NSA's current actions kindly. It's only a matter of how far away we are from that time.
The power of the NSA, et al. was probably overstated up until a few years ago - for example, if you're so powerful and omnipotent, why trust your top stuff to booz allen contractors? Also, Natanz was amateur hour - inside sources have essentially admitted that - it's not the sign of a robust or mature operation that had been in place for a decade. Also, only a small amount of the software/tools that the papers mention has actually been verified (if any at all, I have not been following it recently).
But that's unlikely and I do support a pardon if the accepted version of the events is true. Even if it did end up being psy ops, they might have jut been showing nefarious material to enough contractors until one inevitably leaked it. Honestly the way they are written is kind of odd, not like technical manuals an engineer would use. edit* - and yeah they're not even billed as manuals, just as a catalog. They kind of strike me as realistic ideas or concepts, maybe even with some prototypes - thrown in with a couple of things that do exist. There's nothing technically amazing about any of the things it describes though - if you watch old def con videos you could probably figure out how to do a lot of that stuff anyway (which you alluded to)
Do you stand idly by while the hostile ones (whatever that might mean) use it to their advantage, or do you get your government with their huge funds to help in this regard?
The latter, of course. Trouble is when that agency becomes rogue, which it certainly seems like the NSA have, with rubber stamping.
But we still need some form of accountable defense I think. It's just gone horribly wrong.
There might not be a single person in the world who understands all the moving parts well enough to say what's right.
It doesn't excuse all action to improve security, but we do have to occasionally align our security with modern standards. What would happen if we left all cybersecurity (including banks, power systems, etc) to the private sector?
And then, where do we draw the line? Is it okay for the FBI to target people who visit a child pornography site? Most would say yes... People who download The Anarchist's Cookbook? Probably another yes. But what about collecting info on the people who supported that whole ordeal with Clive Bundy? Or people who belong to a non-state sponsored militia? That's where the line starts to gray for many. The point being, it's never cut and dry.