In 2010 when i was aware of social credit amd facial recognition technology and observed our inescapable wifi and video feed dungeon, i was a "kook" and "blerha blerg CoNsPiRaCy."
Then Snowden. Now instead of "blerha blerg CoNsPiRaCy" it's "everybody knows that, so what?"
All of his running and hiding and headlines and data and all he did was change the normy mind from "they aren't listening" to "ssssshh, they're listening." Objective of the operation.
Contrast w Bradley Manning. He exposed war crimes for which a Durham-style series of indictments would have ended the war and hung th Bush administration.
One they tortured and turned into a girl. The other one is played by J Gordon Levitt in a popular and hyped movie.
I went to a talk by a government official at one of the Oxford colleges, basically debating on whether Snowden was a hero or not. At the end people were invited to put their hands up if they thought positively about him; there were people watching closely to see what would happen. Then came the film about him on Netflix. That was enough for me.
What did he reveal?nothing we didn't know. But he changed the normy narrative from ssshh that's dumb to ssshh that's true.