We Got Used to It

The question of whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor couldn’t get settled in early 2014, and by that point it didn’t matter anymore. The information was already out. Governments had already seen it. The NSA was what it was.

What surprised me wasn’t the mass surveillance itself—you’d have to be naive to think that wasn’t happening. It was how banal it actually was. No drama, no elegant tradecraft, just massive machinery running on millions of data points, most of them worthless, filtered through by people doing their jobs. It was boring surveillance, which somehow made it worse.

Obama did his speech promising reforms, and everyone knew it meant nothing. The machine doesn’t get smaller. It just gets quieter.

The real thing I remember is feeling like we’d turned a corner where you couldn’t claim ignorance anymore. And then immediately everyone moved on, and we all got used to it. That’s the actual story. Not whether Snowden was right or wrong. Just how fast humans can accept something once it stops being shocking.