With the second anniversary of the Snowden leaks coming up, how has the way we used Internet changed in that time? According to research from Pew Research Center, around 1/3 of adults in the United States who learned about the NSA’s surveillance programs have taken at least one step to protect their information from the government.
It has been nearly two years since the first disclosures of government surveillance programs by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Americans are still coming to terms with how they feel about the programs and how to live in light of them. The documents leaked by Snowden revealed an array of activities in dozens of intelligence programs that collected data from large American technology companies, as well as the bulk collection of phone “metadata” from telecommunications companies that officials say are important to protecting national security. The metadata includes information about who phone users call, when they call, and for how long. The documents further detail the collection of Web traffic around the globe, and efforts to break the security of mobile phones and Web infrastructure.
