The chilling effect: Snowden, the NSA, and IT security
When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.
While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.
While the U.S. government defends the program as court-supervised and a powerful tool that has thwarted terrorist attacks and protected citizens, there's no doubt that the Snowden revelations have had a chilling effect on the technology world.
