When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points / IX's during the 90s that had just been called "some old police telco stuff, ignore it."

I think an unintended consequence was that it also emboldened a lot of authoritarian personalities to just say, "yeah, we do this, you are with us or against us, here's the line, toe it." A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.

Snowden's leaks were an unambiguous act of conscience. They made sustaining dissonance about how the sausage of empire gets made a lot harder for regular people - even if we also learned that most people really just like sausage.

I tolerate the spook-adjacent types in my field who parrot absurd official lines and slogans about russian interference because being seen to align with it is just how they are trying to survive, and I can't judge what people do to keep their families fed. But the ones who know what's true, yet take a kind of pleasure in repeating official lies because it makes them feel powerful - I think the real impact Snowden had is showing people like that for what they are, and how low the bar is for getting involved in public service and just doing better. There are amazing people in public service, and they are mostly sidelined by a minority of these eels who demoralize their agencies by normalizing small acts of deviance, corruption, and partisan favours. You can change that.

The best way for a technologist to leverage their skills to effect change in government is to go get a Privacy Professional certification https://iapp.org/certify/cipp/, and do work for your state, municipality, or a federal agency. Privacy laws everywhere got absolutely gutted over the pandemic, but the work privacy pros did in the decade prior prevented some of the worst abuses by people leveraging that crisis, and it's going to take a lot of smart technical people working in government to ensure there are technical limits on what a few sleazy appointees like the very ones who exploited 9/11 to build the panopticon Snowden exposed, can do.