The Snowden stuff was the event that shook me to my core. I was a happy technologist till then, thinking that such was the nature of life and progress simply was unfolding in front of me.
However, the way the event was covered by the media - told a different story. The media focussed on the man rather than the info he provided, so the conversation was 'where was he?', 'where was his girlfriend?', etc - that told me everything. They hardly touched on what was provided and what that meant (that we were being spied on 24/7). And what was provided took years to come out...... So, the media are complicit - just another arm of the governance structure we find. The intercept, the MSM, all are just playing a role in mis-informing the people.
Since then, I have even come to change my views on the Snowden event itself. I think this was an intentional release of data, an orchestrated event. Snowden is probably a character created by some agency. He may not be a real person - things like bits of his glasses disappearing indicate that he could be CGI. Perhaps this sounds crazy - but if you are in the business of governance, you want to manage everything, even the opposition. (Think 1984 and the way that the opposition is created and controlled in that book).
Why would "they" create Snowden and the release of apparently top secret files?
Well, if you know what is coming you do not respond with shock, you do not reject it out of hand. You acclimatise to the new reality. There was little we could do with the Snowden event, except watch it play out. We were put on notice and informed of what was/is coming. And what's coming is a technocratic system with very fine grained control in the hands of the technocrats.