Except it wasn't. Carnivore was a thing that people knew about, and the US government backed away from it when it was publicized. Total Information Awareness was a thing that was known and not a conspiracy theory. The Patriot Act was a thing that took a lot of steps towards a surveillance society.

Snowden's information was just a confirmation that the US government was pursuing these things in secret when doing them in the open failed. It's not a lizard people/flat earth/q-anon level thing. There was plenty of "prior art" for the Snowden revelations.

There are conspiracies. I have never seen or heard of one that turns the world upside down. They seem to be all continuations and expansions of bad behavior that is currently accepted as fact.

Yeah, that was the first thought that crossed my mind when Snowden happened: not "oh shit, they are listening!" (I knew that before, for a very loose definition of "to know"), but "oh shit, advocates of crazy conspiracy theories will cite this as precedent for decades".

I strongly disagree. That theory (before Snowden) was never in the same category as flat earth, QAnon, lizard people, faked moon landings and the like.