• noahm@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden, http:// was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.