Slightly OT but why do people point to Snowden as the guy who discovered the NSA surveillance in 2013 when the NY Times discovered the much worse surveillance they were doing in 2005?
Snowden was far from the first to publicise NSA surveillance.
Snowden documented that surveillance in vastly more detail than had been done before, and deserves the thanks of citizens of the US and world for doing so.
> the intelligence agency has monitored [...] hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people [...] over the last three years
That doesn't strike me as worse than what Snowden revealed. PRISM and the rest of those programs intercepted communications of hundreds of millions of people each year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy...