NSA's existence and its activities aboard were well-known. What wasn't well-known was that NSA was spying on American citizens, not just a few suspicious ones but ALL of them. That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks.
That seems a bit naive considering how fast technology improves.
Another pet peeve of mine: how can people possibly not be more worried about the kind of data collection happening at the tech behemoths? I can imagine about a 100 different ways they can by themselves, or by collusion with other powerful companies, completely suppress and eliminate serious competition. (And if all else fails, of course eventually buy them off plus their principles - such as what happened with WhatsApp).
Nominally at least, organizations such as the NSA will probably have a few people who are conflicted about stated purpose of the organization vs actual behavior (e.g. Snowden). There are no such checks and balances for corporate entities, except for this notion of competition, which is now acknowledged to be ineffective in the winner take all high tech ecosystem. The absence of any input from employees in these forums around, for e.g. Windows 10's heavy handed updates, or Facebook's extraordinary chutzpah in attempting to triangulate every piece of information they can to a person in their database, is quite telling.
Think of the FB experiment which was trying to manipulate people's emotions. Why aren't Mark Z and co being investigated for crime? [1] No legal precedents? - perhaps it is time to create some. At the very least, it will expose their data collection practices to the world and make similar companies more wary of taking people for granted.
[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-ques...
Even we, who knew what was possible chose not to entertain the probability of it actually happening. Who was naive?
It's becoming harder and harder to write off conspiracy theories as nonsense, especially with the amount of hard evidence to the contrary.
phone: I am waiting for https://neo900.org