As far as US persons are concerned, jeffbee is correct that the Snowden leaks are not compatible with the conspiratorial worldview represented by Enemy of the State or the X-Files. The Snowden docs showed things like if two people outside the US were discussing US politics and they mentioned Obama, then the name "Obama" would be redacted because he was a US person. The redaction of US personal info was not perfect but the situation was a very, very long way off from unchecked surveillance and assassination of US persons that was depicted in those films.

▲

text0404 2 days ago | parent [-]

That is absolutely not what the Snowden docs showed. Would highly recommend familiarizing yourself at least a little bit with a major part of history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...

> Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who led The Washington Post's coverage of Snowden's disclosures, summarized the leaks as follows:

> Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.

It absolutely proved massive, unchecked surveillance. This has never been in dispute, what's your rationale that it didn't?

▲

apical_dendrite 2 days ago | parent [-]

Please actually read what I wrote. You are responding to something that I did not write.

I did not claim that there wasn't "massive, unchecked surveillance". The specific claim that I made was that the conspiracy-theory films of the 1990s were based on the idea of unchecked surveillance of US citizens that was then used for purposes such as targeting and murder of US citizens in the United States.

There was nothing in the Snowden documents that suggested there were rogue operators going out and murdering Americans. In fact, when it came to Americans specifically, there was minimization, and attempts to abide by FISA, none of which ever featured in 1990s-era conspiracy films. I very specifically spoke about minimization as regards Americans, not globally.

	▲	jasonvorhe 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Rogue agents wouldn't leave much of a paper trail. They don't tend to slap together slide decks advertising their operations. The Snowden docs contain nothing about US black budget funded regime change, drug smuggling, politically motivated assassinations or whatever else countless ex-intelligence whistleblowers have claimed to happen in the shadows. I sure don't think all of them can be believed 100% but I wouldn't have expected anything of this nature to show up in typical S/TS/NOFORN documents that someone like Snowden leaked. Snowden docs don't contain* anything about what happens in DUMBS, secret military facilities like biolabs, propulsion and energy research or anything else* that conspiracy researchers are interested in. to my knowledge/memory * Snowden docs were never published in full so we don't know what Guardian et al decided to not publish because they're all too intertwined with intelligence
	▲	21 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]