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NSA Mass Surveillance / PRISM (2013)

Your government was reading your emails, and anyone who said so was called a conspiracy theorist — until it was proved true.

In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, leaked thousands of classified documents revealing that the National Security Agency was conducting mass surveillance of ordinary citizens on a global scale. The programme called PRISM gave the NSA direct access to data from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and other tech giants. Phone metadata for millions of Americans was collected in bulk. The scale was staggering — and it was all authorised by secret courts issuing secret rulings.

Before Snowden, people who suggested the government was monitoring everyone's communications were dismissed as paranoid. After Snowden, it was documented fact. The gap between those two moments should give you pause. The machinery of mass surveillance was built, funded, and operated for years while officials publicly denied it existed. The Director of National Intelligence told Congress, under oath, that the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans. That was a lie.

The Snowden revelations didn't just expose a programme. They exposed how easily the word "security" can be used to justify almost anything, and how institutions will deny what they're doing right up until the evidence becomes undeniable.

Privacy isn't lost in one dramatic moment. It's taken quietly, at scale, by people who insist it's for your own good.

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