“If you ask the government – if you caught them in a room, and they were talking off the record – they would say the biggest impact for us from the Snowden disclosures is that it made big tech companies less cooperative.”
Ten years on, the wins are the 2015 USA Freedom Act and Section 215 lapsing in March 2020. James Clapper himself said the leaks pulled commercial encryption forward by seven years. Section 702 still lets the FBI, CIA and NSA search Americans’ communications without a warrant, and Amazon still hands Ring videos to police without one. The government lost one dragnet and kept the bigger one.