As someone not from the US, the passages about how easy it was are clear reminders that just because only the NSA got caught, does not mean only the NSA was doing it.
Even if they have by far the biggest budget...
We’ve seen other stories, Stuxnet in particular that implicate other countries like Israel. Anyone that thinks that the USA and Israel are spending money on cyber warfare but China and Russia are not is living in a fantasy world. Maybe some small countries like Andorra don’t have a cyber warfare division, but all the big countries do.
Everyone is being spied on. Perhaps the only distinction worth making is whether you’re being spied on by your own government in addition to foreign governments.
In fact, once the content and data are liberated, there is no reason to assume it is well-protected from criminal access. Personal facts that are not directly incriminating are often just as valuable for extortion. Those facts need not be about you, to affect you. They could be about a federal judge's brother.
As extortion is the central procedure of spycraft, people trained in its use by the government also have access to the "goods". Criminal intent is no bar to employment by Booz Allen, or by NSA or FBI proper, never mind Russian GRU or FSB or their Chinese counterparts.
and not to mention for small time people, there are nefarious people who want to spy on you so they can do identity theft or similar crime to you. So even if you are one of those "I have nothing to hide" people, you still need to hide your personal information due to cyber crime that could be used to exploit you. For some people, it is almost laughable the amount of information they put out openly on social media.
Yeah, there's a severe danger here that only the stories that are worthy of media play are going to be discussed. Snowden has been proven to generate clicks, so we'll probably continue to see a lot of Snowden stories.
We're in a multi-party cyberwar. We have been for years. It involves both governments and NGOs. Most of the players are pushing as hard as they can, short of real warfare, to gain the advantage over the others.
That's a much tougher story to tell, since it doesn't have clear heroes and villains. Also it involves a lot of technical stuff Joe Layman doesn't want to process. Because of this, media outlets are always going to tell the simpler story. The overwhelming danger here is that nobody learns what is going on, which presumably is the point of having a media outlet in the first place.
