The 1982 book "The Puzzle Palace" from James Bamford covered NSA capabilities (and was sanctioned, nonetheless), etc..

There were also FOIA requests revealing much capability.

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

:)

I've long held that a useful counterintelligence strategy is to weave real operations into fictional films, such that if someone catches on and tries to tell people about it, the response is simply "you schizophrenic - that's the plot of Die Hard 4!"

Slightly less conspiratorial version is that agents and clerks with knowledge of operations get drunk at the same bars as Hollywood script writers

I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.

I think what you mean is that an uncritical reading of Snowden's smuggled powerpoints can be compatible with Grand Unified Conspiracy thinking that was promoted and advanced by 90s media like Enemy of the State and The X-Files. But compatibility is not truth. These things are all pretty unhinged and with little basis in reality.

The Soviets planted listening devices in American embassy typewriters between October 1976 and January 1984 - by intercepting them in the mail!

Really sophisticated devices: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/

We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.

What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.

Probably, that he did the right thing at the right time.

Why isn't Russia torturing him to get all the secrets out of him?

There were plenty of somethings found at the time.

Ha, right on target. The scariest thing in there was that they managed to tap an undersea cable and find a protobuf that they didn't know how to parse. Profound mismatch between the reputation of the NSA, their willingness to undertake daring physical intrusions, and their total inability to profit from that.

> Surely, this time we'll find something!

You won"t.