It's important to remember/realize that no one, outside a handful of folks, understood what the NSA was up to until the last 12 months.
There were loads of people - members of the general public, security researchers, government watchdog types, privacy advocates, crazy conspiracy nuts, etc. - who very strongly suspected, for good reason, exactly what turned out to be going on.
ECHELON started in the 1960s. Rumors about it were everywhere by the early 1990s. It became so famous it was featured in pop-culture movies, TV shows, and video games.
There was at least one good book (note 2005 publication) that showed how it was possible to piece together some pretty good guesses about what was happening from unclassified information:
In short, that book argues the NSA was expanding its eavesdropping capabilities so enormously, so quickly, that the only reasonable target for it was "everything." There simply weren't enough top-secret, diplomatic, or encrypted messages to justify the infrastructure devoted to the task; the NSA had to be developing the ability to listen to absolutely anything it wanted to.
Not to forget Dan Brown's novel "Digital Fortress" which is entirely based on NSA and its cryptographic efforts! I coincidentally saw it just after Snowden's revelations and was surprised that such a topic was the subject of a popular novel. (I couldn't finish reading the book; not sure if the focus changes later)
Frankly, if somebody started talking about ECHELON about 1 year ago, I immediately put him into "9/11 truthers and other conspiracy theorist" category.
Instead of revealing your ignorance, you could read up on ECHELON, which was becoming a bigger issue in Europe already in the 90's, there was an investigation by the European Parliament in 2000/2001, and coincidentally 9/11 is probably the reason why the US&Britain didn't get to bear the cost at the time. Now they are (Boeing, CISCO, IBM, ...) and will probably continue to for some time to come.
Given the lack of mass outrage, I think people are still in some sort of denial. Or perhaps its seen as being too huge to really do anything meaningful about. In the UK, politicians are still mostly trying to sort of shrug it off. Even across Europe, there is not real outrage at the fact that the UK, as a sort of internet EU to US hub, is selling out the EU to the US. Its all too muted for my liking. Cant help thinking that behind the scenes the US is trying to broker some sort of deal. I dunno, intelligence sharing or whatever.
There were loads of people - members of the general public, security researchers, government watchdog types, privacy advocates, crazy conspiracy nuts, etc. - who very strongly suspected, for good reason, exactly what turned out to be going on.
ECHELON started in the 1960s. Rumors about it were everywhere by the early 1990s. It became so famous it was featured in pop-culture movies, TV shows, and video games.
There was at least one good book (note 2005 publication) that showed how it was possible to piece together some pretty good guesses about what was happening from unclassified information:
http://www.amazon.com/Chatter-Dispatches-Secret-Global-Eaves...
In short, that book argues the NSA was expanding its eavesdropping capabilities so enormously, so quickly, that the only reasonable target for it was "everything." There simply weren't enough top-secret, diplomatic, or encrypted messages to justify the infrastructure devoted to the task; the NSA had to be developing the ability to listen to absolutely anything it wanted to.