That's sort of backwards. Over the past 30 years, poverty has fallen massively, democracy has spread to more people, child mortality has fallen, literacy and education have risen [1], and rate of war deaths has fallen [2]. Maybe the direct death-and-suffering problems have now mostly been solved and that causes us to look to more intangible problems like human rights, freedom of speech and inequality. It's a common misconception that the world is getting worse but it's actually getting better.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace/

Maybe the great lengths they went to against Manning and Snowden were because they released massively more data than anyone in history? People selling secrets to the soviets were dealt with just as harshly despite releasing far less information.