We, the government?
It’s impossible to not talk about important leaks without discussing Edward Snowden, an ex-National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked thousands of documents related to the agency and its practice of spying on, well, pretty much everyone.
Many security experts consider this to be the biggest leak in recent history.
“Folks in computer security always joked about how NSA was spying on people. It wasn’t until the leak that we got a sense as to just how comprehensive it was,” Jason Hong, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, told TechRadar. “Pretty much any kind of surveillance they could do, they were actually doing.”
According to the documents leaked by Snowden, the NSA was collecting data pertaining to phone records. The documents revealed the existence of PRISM, a program in which the NSA demanded information from the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple to gather user data.
Not only that, but the NSA was also spying on foreign leaders around the world in addition to US citizens, and it had multiple efforts to crack encryption methods so that it could keep up its surveillance.
Safe to say, there was significant backlash as a result of the leaks, though any real changes have yet to be seen.
