Top 12 Most Fascinating Takeaways from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald’s Reddit AMA

Q: Don’t you find it kind of depressing how little the world was actually moved by the revelations? I do. For a few days at a time it was the biggest news story ever but barely anything has changed and people are still using Google, Apple et al. in the same ways. The news in general is just so transient, watching the documentary just brought it all back. It felt like it might actually amount to something but as far as I can tell, even with the courts recently ruling that GCHQ’s actions were illegal for many years and NSA’s whole program amounting to nothing, no significant legislation has passed and for all we know they are still rapidly expanding their programs.

Greenwald: I think much has changed. The US Government hasn’t restricted its own power, but it’s unrealistic to expect them to do so.

There are now court cases possible challenging the legality of this surveillance – one federal court in the US and a British court just recently found this spying illegal.

Social media companies like Facebook and Apple are being forced by their users to install encryption and other technological means to prevent surveillance, which is a significant barrier.

Nations around the world (such as Brazil and Germany) are working together in unison to prevent US hegemony over the internet and to protect the privacy of their own citizens.

And, most of all, because people now realize the extent to which their privacy is being compromised, they can – and increasingly are – using encryption and anonymizers to protect their own privacy and physically prevent mass surveillance (see here: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/sandvine-report/).

All of these changes are very significant. And that’s to say nothing of the change in consciousness around the world about how hundreds of millions of people think about these issues. The story has been, and continues to be, huge in many countries outside the US.

Snowden: To dog-pile on to this, many of the changes that are happening are invisible because they’re happening at the engineering level. Google encrypted the back-haul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!). Grad students around the world are trying to come up with ways to solve the metadata problem (the opportunity to monitor everyone’s associations—who you talk to, who you sleep with, who you vote for—even in encrypted communications).

The biggest change has been in awareness. Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody’s phone calls and the GCHQ was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist.

Those days are over. Facts allow us to stop speculating and start building, and that’s the foundation we need to fix the internet. We just happened to be the generation stuck with fighting these fires.