The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.

PRISM etc. was only born in 2007 from the Protect America Act. Echelon was merely a report that agencies were sharing data (which was never a conspiracy in any world) and them targeting private data. But a secret, global mass surveillance program of basically every individual without court orders was only a plot element of movies before Snowden.

Cryptome… haven’t thought of that site in ages. At the time it was hard to know how real it was, but years later we learned it was on point.

This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.

I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.