This story reminds me of Watch_Dogs. When you are just walking around you see their faces, automatically get facial recognition, and know something big about their lives. Sometimes it's something like "brother runs a grow op", "frequent purchase: porn", or "lives with 5 cats". For those who haven't played, this is the only video on YouTube that shows the facial recognition but the rest of the game just walking down the street you see these things pop up all the time. The other videos seem to have disabled this feature for the most part for their "cool walk through chicago" videos. This also plays in the whole digital panopticon concept that Glenn Greenwald talks about, and why I'm not entirely convinced Snowden wasn't acting under direct orders of the NSA to leak those documents. I think the leaks basically just scared everyone into conforming and not into actually fighting back. https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters And if you think about it, if Snowden is operating under NSA still, he now is basically in the position of being the ultimate spy on whistleblowers. Everyone is going to him/Glenn for advice, Snowden talks to Glenn, Poitras, Assange, Manning, etc. He has a bitcoin donation link set up where they can trace donors from...and expands their power in our collective conscious.
That is very interesting, thank you. I had heard of Watch Dogs, but I hadn't played it or seen it yet. As far as Snowden, he was an easy story to swallow at first in that he confirmed some of the conspiracy crowd's claims and brought awareness to an issue that (I felt like) lacked visibility among the wider public. However, now looking back, it doesn't appear that the NSA was at all weakened, instead it was treated as a media circus for normalizing surveillance. Who cooperated with whom to help the NSA come out smelling like a rose is impossible for me to say from what I've seen, but you do make a good point that Glenn or Snowden as a mole would be an invaluable asset. I think it's important to remember that these are espionage organizations and subterfuge is their specialty; no such revelation would shock me. Assuming Snowden is a limited hangout (or large parts of the Snowden-Op), with their goal to be the normalization of mass-surveillance and to instill helplessness/passivity among people who might otherwise act out, what does revealing this fact achieve? To me, it reaffirms the notion that propaganda is a significant tool they use; to be aware of their tactics, people have to look closely for PR in our everyday lives. As that one great president said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," and I think this is just evidence of them tightening that lid just a little more.