As a rule of thumb, I don't take any article that refers to Snowden's leaks as "revelations" seriously. The only new information Snowden revealed is that their programs are called PRISM, upstream and xKeyscore; and if a journalist learned the details behind those programs from Snowden -- when they've been going on for at least a decade -- they clearly don't know much about the subject.
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
No, he really didn't. We knew that the USA intercepted any Internet traffic they could get their hands on, and we knew that big data companies were in bed with the NSA. If the talking point is that Snowden got these facts on mainstream news, that isn't a revelation, that's marketing. "Relevation" implies the idea didn't exist beforehand.
Not if that information is already publicly and easily accessible to that group. If I was to post a link to an existing but obscure Wikipedia article on Hacker News, it would be as much of a "revelation" as Snowden's "revelations."
Comments
As a rule of thumb, I don't take any article that refers to Snowden's leaks as "revelations" seriously. The only new information Snowden revealed is that their programs are called PRISM, upstream and xKeyscore; and if a journalist learned the details behind those programs from Snowden -- when they've been going on for at least a decade -- they clearly don't know much about the subject.
What a ridiculous rule of thumb: Snowden got a lot of closely held information in front of the general public. If that doesn't count as a revelation, your standards are too high.
No, he really didn't. We knew that the USA intercepted any Internet traffic they could get their hands on, and we knew that big data companies were in bed with the NSA. If the talking point is that Snowden got these facts on mainstream news, that isn't a revelation, that's marketing. "Relevation" implies the idea didn't exist beforehand.
So a revelation isn't the revealing of a secret to people who don't know the secret?
(or to put it another way: revealing a secret to a population where the vast majority do not know it)
Snowden revealed the scale of the operation too, and the depth of the rabbit hole.
Not if that information is already publicly and easily accessible to that group. If I was to post a link to an existing but obscure Wikipedia article on Hacker News, it would be as much of a "revelation" as Snowden's "revelations."