There are two competing pro-NSA and anti-whistleblower [1] narratives out there. The most obvious one is that Snowden is a traitorous flake (pole-stripper girlfriend! bad employee review!) who’s just waiting for the highest bidder (China! Russia!) to sell the NSAs secrets, worse than Manning’s data-dump [2].
The second is, secrets?!? What secrets? Everyone knows we were spying on everyone. Everyone does it! It’s the Casablanca defense – I’m shocked, shocked, that gambling is going on here.
The first has turned out to be false in every instance. It’s just throwing shit againt the wall knowing that it’ll keep stinking for a long time. And there are plenty of shills either paid for by the Deep State or useful idiots out there to keep spreading it around everytime it pops up [3].
But the second has been disproved by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-dancing market.
Cisco, and other American equipment and internet companies are losing contracts, and taking market hits as a result.
If “everyone knew,” the market would have priced this prior knowledge into the share price of these companies. The NASDAQ response would be a giant yawn. There would be no change, and no loss of overseas contracts. The all-knowing free-market is telling us everyone didn’t know, and the cost of NSA backdoor spying is now being marked to market. Also the cost of these companies meek acquiescence to the Deep State.
The free market has spoken.
Worse, this is much like the cases we find out about through the Innocence Project. Innocent man imprisoned, released on DNA evidence 20 years later. We all feel good, but truth is, the guilty man walked free for those 20 years, committing other crimes.
Here, the entire intelligence apparatus of the US is focused on finding out what Snowden did, and how to get him and punish him. But what one man did for patriotism, another did for money, and long before. Someone out there had access to the same data as Snowden. He just didn’t make it public, and took a huge cash payoff from the people they’re worried Snowden will sell us out to.
It’s already happened. They just didn’t know it.
They also didn’t know they were going to break the World-Wide Internet, though that is also going to be the end result of their actions.
[1] Not just Snowden, though he has received the lion’s share of attention. Also Binney, Tice, Drake, Klein, Tamm, Fellwock…
[2] Manning, of course, didn’t. The journalists he trusted (some of them with The Guardian) released a passphrase to the encrypted file.
[3] If you doubt this is true, Fox News has had their people doing this for years. Do not think the NSA/CIA/FBI has not been mounting the same sort of propaganda campaign as a cable news channel?