Most people haven't "known about it for years", they just had suspicions about it. Snowden came forward, declared that what the government was doing was immoral and unconstitutional, and gave us hard evidence to support any previously held assumptions. I don't know if he's a hero, but I certainly respect him for trying to do the right thing.
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I talked to a guy last year that has worked for several gov't agencies, he told me that he could walk into a crowd with a device, lock onto who ever's phone that he wanted to, look at all of their phone history and even listen to their current conversations. He told me this in a room of people and i doubt he would have told us if it was classified. If something is a secret, people probably don't know about it anyways for a good reason. I'm sure if the general public knew all of our secrets then they would act like a bunch of drunk monkeys with pitch forks.
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Was he playing Watch Dogs?