If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.
Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.
Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.
Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).
I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.
To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.
Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.
GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.
That's doubtful. http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/stevens.asp
And you ignored the other half of my comment, about how the NSA story is not news. It is merely new to excitable young people who mistake unfamiliarity for exposé. If I can convice them to take the red pill, they will learn that parts of signals intelligence are profoundly more important than even the astroturf claims, and at the same time more mundane.
About the other stuff, I only recently realized that the IRS scandal, the US spy who was caught in Russia, and Benghazi have basically disappeared from the news, while the one thing that the White House has the least control over and is the most distanced from is the one that is now most talked about.
Another thing to think about is that when the IRS story broke, a lot of new agencies were calling it a "controlled or planned leak" meaning that the white house and IRS had coordinated on how and when to break the story, timing it with new info on Benghazi for information-overload, and finally Snowden was just a freebie, while I'm sure they're not happy about the facts coming to light, nothing internally will really change, they'll continue spying on us, they'll just be more careful who they allow to access the information.
With politics, there seems to be no such restraint.
Now it is just about too late. For the next 10-20 years, national infosec policy will be driven by the radicals' memory of their principled stand against the NSA "revelations". "Abuses" will be "curtailed" without regard for legitimate security needs.
The is no elsewhere to reserve this discussion for. If HN is credulous enough to believe staged CNN sound bites, there is no hope for other venues.