Yes, I find it VERY hard to believe that this went on and nobody mentioned it at all. Not one disgruntled employee, not anyone mentioning it to a friend at a bar? No way.
Now we have proof. So that's that.
Also, given the strong "disincentivization" for whistleblowing that is going on at intelligence agencies, I am not at all surprised that it took a few years before somebody went public with it.
Hell, it used to take decades before this kind of stuff became public. Just this year we were made aware that the West German spy agencies opened _all_ cross-border inter-German mail. You know, the kind of thing that we in West Germany were told only the East Germans would do. That was kept secret for more than 20 years after it stopped being done, even though thousands of people were involved.
I personally keep to a simple rule. If something is technologically feasible[0], economically viable and someone has an incentive for it, it will happen, period. This rule of thumb successfully filters out weather control crackpottery while correctly identifying surveillance capabilities (and no, it's not hindsight bias; the only thing I was surprised about Snowden revelations was that it was underwhelming).
[0] - and keep in mind that pretty much anything is.
The technological ones. I was expecting (and I still believe) that they're tapping much better into the Internet that it is revealed, and that there are many more hardware backdoors out there.
> Countries now also have the ultimate argument for the balkanization of the Internet.
I agree. This is very bad. I didn't say I was underwhelmed with outcome (though I am with the reaction of public and of Internet companies), just with the revealed capabilities of the NSA.