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So much was revealed in the European Parliament's ECHELON report back in 2000 that I found it hard to understand why Snowden made the big splash that he did. It all seemed pretty old hat to me.

The chattering classes love counter-cultural packaging. That is why they embraced Greta Thunberg much more than they embraced Al Gore despite the messaging being the same.

The ECHELON report revelations were packaged into a formal (boring) European Parliament report. Meanwhile Edward Snowden had the counter-cultural packaging of a cool dissident hacker.

And the Utah data center that stores days worth of the entire Internet and then they just keep the most interesting parts and the parts they can't hack into for later analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

In fact it even had a Wikipedia article a number of years before them: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Room_641A&oldid=6...

In 2006, Mark Klein working for AT&T leaked it. It was in the news.

Snowden did his leak way later in 2013.