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31 May 2026 - 30 min read

The Mystery of the Snowden Saga - Finally Solved

Solving the Snowden mystery brings everything into focus. The Government agencies, Google and the NGOs mesh together as a team, and the entire progression of the World Wide Web makes sense.

It's reasonable to say that if you accept the offical media tale of Edward Snowden as a rogue whistleblower who stole 1.7 million top secret files, leaked the highest number of classified US intelligence documents in history, and yet is somehow still alive, free, and working as a digital marketer for US Gov-affiliated tech products, from Russia, you don't do much thinking.

This is not a wild, conspiracist assembly of far-fetched fantasies. As I've said before, if we're going to be suspicious of the official narrative, we should treat the conspiracist retort with equal scepticism.

But even without deep-dive evidence, it's fairly obvious that when someone apparently sacrifices a huge salary, destroys his life and risks death to "leak" a stash of "classified" Government files which don't tell the public anything they didn't already believe... Then hauls in prime CIA/NSA bedfellow Google to broker the story to the media, then inexplicably doxes himself... Well, let's just say that the tale stands quite significantly short of passing a reality check.

In this post we'll start by establishing the obvious conclusion that Snowden was not a real whistleblower. Then we'll take a realistic look at what he was actually there to achieve. This will unveil a sobering new vision of the World Wide Web. Not the familiar, well-intentioned utopia that somehow fell victim to evil corporations; but a dark, techno-fascist plot, with a primary purpose of mass surveillance, from the start.

By the close of the article, you'll have what I believe to be a cast-iron, incontrovertible explanation for the Snowden saga.

GIVING THE GAME AWAY

Perhaps the cleanest contradiction to the idea that Snowden was a whistleblower, is the incredible level of control that was exercised over his "leaks". Only a tiny and very select group of "usual suspect" corporate media outlets were ever given access to the "stolen body of info".

The legacy? Six hundred and odd redacted-in-places documents, handpicked by corporate media outlets. And of course, the state-obedient journalists entrusted with Snowden's supposed knock-offs would be as jailable as the whistleblower himself if they'd published top secret information related to national security. Based on that unavoidable truth, we can safely denote that the number of genuinely classified documents which made it into the public domain, via Snowden, was nil. Forum thread titles like: "Where are all of the files that Snowden released?" encapsulate the reality of the Snowden saga.

Meanwhile, the tale of what happened to the unpublished files is wrapped in a bizarre predication that computerised files are irreplicable entities, like paper documents before the advent of the printing press. It's like:

So who has them now? Is it The Times, or is it The Guardian? Or have the police now caught up with them and snatched them back?

They are DIGITAL FILES you lobotomose hacks! Passing them into new hands does not remove an existing source's access. And there is NO LIMIT to the number of copies you can make. IF THEY CANNOT BE SEEN, THEY HAVE NOT BEEN LEAKED.

Other headscratches in the affair are endless. Stealing 1.7 million files in order to evidence mass surveillance ran so deep into the territory of overkill that it would look far-fetched in an episode of Mr. Bean. Have you ever tried downloading 1.7 million files? Just legitimately, from any Big Tech silo - let alone undetectably, from a maximum security intelligence system? And after all that effort and financial sacrifice, he fenced out 626 not-so-secret pieces of publicity-bait through state-obedient corporations, and broke the "news" in his own words. Why steal a ship if you're going to swim?

Given the Gov's evident disinterest in bringing Snowden "to justice", or even in unplugging his amplifier for five minutes, the logical assumption is that this supposed whistleblower remains a high-flying US intelligence employee. I mean, unlike Snowden, real whistleblowers don't respond to selected interview questions with:

"I can't talk about that."

Translation:

"Hang on, that really is classified information".

SO WHAT WAS SNOWDEN'S PURPOSE?

But if Snowden was not a real whistleblower, then what was, and is, the purpose of his ongoing chant about government surveillance?

Does it fall into the category of deterrent? Is he the human equivalent of the red-bordered "Security Cameras in Use!" sign at your local shopping centre? Not there to "whistleblow" a privacy invasion to a minority of potentially outraged NOYBs, but to warn off the vandals and thieves. Or in Snowden's case, to inform terrorists and criminal gangs:

"Big Brother is watching; don't try your luck."

Some of the information that's come out post Snowden supports this theory, suggesting that the "leaked" documents contained exaggerated information intended to inflate the deterrent factor. For example, the Snowden-publicised claim that law enforcement had already scraped everyone's mugshot was contradicted by later news that private companies were doing likewise and selling the image databases to the same police agencies. Why would you be buying image databases if you've already scraped literally everything that passes through the WWW?

Or was the aim to produce a more sophisticated propaganda tool? A Director of the Dark Web, pushing the common criminal towards apparently private communication channels like Tor and Signal, which in truth were, and still are, rigged for covert surveillance? Snowden has certainly done plenty of that.

But I don't believe either of these goals was the true catalyst for the Snowden story. The overriding reason it was choreographed...

WHO GAINED THE MOST FROM SNOWDEN'S PUBLIC PRESENCE?

The greatest detectives have always said that if you want to know who organised something, start with the people who had the most to gain. And the Snowden effect has undoubtedly been a gift to Google and its "associates".

In 2013, when the Snowden story broke, Google and its cohorts were just stepping up a multi-faceted campaign to encrypt the entire WWW with HTTPS.

For anyone who always assumed that HTTPS is just the same as HTTP but with some kind of "extra lock" on it, it's not. It's a completely different protocol. An imposter, with fluid specifications. NetScape's sly, closed replacement for Berners-Lee's original open Web, by order of the US Government.

In fact, the roots of this mass public encryption drive sprang even before Netscape was a thing. The first mouth to shout "Hey plebs, let's encrypt!" was that of the US Government itself. And we'll visit this early chapter of the story later in the post.

Google's role in the encryption drive was nevertheless clear - whether or not you choose to count its brokering of the Snowden story to the media. Under its own brand, Google threatened every website admin who would not unnecessarily switch their public pages to the HTTPS protocol - warning that their sites would disappear from the search results if they didn't comply. Google then followed up with precisely that action, effectively censoring perfectly good websites in best-match queries, solely because they would not ditch the WWW's original HTTP for the offspring of Netscape's Government-behested replacement.

Side-by-side with Google, other Government-linked Silicon Valley propaganda aides such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and Tor Project launched a co-ordinated assault on the open (HTTP) Web.

The EFF "introduced" Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt arrived as a phenomenally expensive, yet free to use, HTTPS certification service. Tor Project - an almost entirely Government-funded surveillance trap - had already introduced HTTPS Everywhere as a browser extension, which automatically diverted Web users away from HTTP connections and over to HTTPS. To coincide with the Snowden affair, the EFF's branding was associated with HTTPS Everywhere and the original Tor repository was ported to a new GitHub repository in EFF's name. HTTPS Everywhere is interesting in that it eventually bore both Tor and EFF's branding, and ultimately, many people came to regard it as an EFF product, even though the EFF demonstrably did not build it. In connection with this...

We should note that the EFF is not a tech manufacturer, and therefore the technology it "introduces" is invariably the work of other parties. If you don't see an actual tech provider credited as author, you can safely assume that Google or another US intelligence agency is behind it.

Let's Encrypt was introduced in May 2013. The same month that the Snowden saga began. The ISRG "public benefit" group to which Let's Encrypt's creation is attributed, was founded on the same day. That's not coincidence. It's choreography.

There have been other irrational insistences on HTTPS where it's not needed, which live in more obscure territory, but can only be attributed to the same corporatocratic collective. For example, the Gemini protocol - clearly intended as an HTTPS-only Gopher-killer - or small webrings which HTTP-connecting website admins are not allowed to join. The people behind all this evidently don't realise how ridiculous these insistences look in such unfitting areas of activity. But the driving down of encryption into every last sub-community is a measure of the campaign's immense importance to the powers that be.

"The American people need to know that we’re collecting a lot of information and we’re spending a great deal of time trying to gather as much intelligence as we possibly can..." George W Bush - October 2001. What did Snowden reveal that the Government itself had not already shouted from the rooftops? There was absolutely nothing classified about the information Snowden provided. It was an advert. Not a leak.

ENCRYPTIONISM IN SUMMARY

Encryptionism is a swindle first attempted, without success, by the American Government. After the Government's own presentation collapsed (more on this in a moment), the ball was passed to private corporations and NGOs - in particular the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose name stands as a constant throughout the story.

The original vision for Encryptionism was:

• You tell the public that their privacy is at stake from unspecified baddies, and push encryption as the solution.
• You design and build the encryption system yourself, which means you have the keys.
• You thus get to spy on the public, whilst they believe they're protected from everyone's prying eyes, including yours.
• Because you have the keys, you can not only let yourself in, but also lock third parties out. Your stash of intelligence data remains unavailable to foreign agencies.

Post Google, the scheme's benefits broadened to include gatekeeping clout, an anti-competitive monopoly on commercially-useful data, and the capacity to make entire generations of technology obsolete simply by changing the encyption standard.

In "public parks" - open information pages and the like - encryption had no value at all to the public, because the very people they thought they were hiding from, had the keys. But encryption was extremely valuable to the corporatocracy. Easily valuable enough to serve as a standalone reason for the Snowden story.

Given the critical role of encryption in the sphere of mass surevillance, it's logical to conclude that the primary intention behind Snowden was to sell encryption to the public.

The World Wide Web has, and always did have, one overriding purpose: surveillance. Everything else is a pretext for that, and not even the £billions in profit subordinate it. Given the choice between profit and surveillance, cybertech brands will choose surveillance, and there are many examples of persistent and breathtaking commercial loss that prove this is true.

ENCRYPTION DRIVE FAILS FOR GOVERNMENT, NGO AND CORPORATE ACCOMPLICES PICK UP THE BALL

If you go back to a time before the WWW took off, you see the US Government itself spinning the encryptionism routine. Let's journey back through the decades to visit the primitive roots of "encryptionism", destination 1993. The true picture of the Web will now begin to fall into place...

Arguably, the most significant non-technical development in the Internet's history was a 51-day standoff between the Branch Davidian religious group and United States forces, which ended on 19th April 1993 with a Biblical-grade mass death by fire. Without this cataclysmic sequence of events, the story of the Internet might have been quite different. The entire episode had been an unmitigated disaster for US intelligence services, who had failed to read the Davidians' intentions from start to finish, despite persistently attempting to bug the Branch Davidian compound...

"we had been inserting microphones under covert concealment devices." - Byron Sage, FBI Negotiator, Waco

"Practically everything they brought us, we found bugging devices in." - Graeme Craddock, Branch Davidian survivor

Some say it was the worst intelligence botch job in US history. It could also be said that the Government adopted a Nazi approach to the Branch Davidian community at Waco, which has since been mirrored, in non-physical form, by the World Wide Web's governing forces - something we now call techno-fascism.

The Branch Davidian seige, just outside Waco, Texas, was the longest and most controversial on American soil. Over a seven-week period, 82 Davidians died, nearly all of whom were known to be innocent, and more than a quarter of whom were children.

The fallout from the seige, which had begun when US forces mounted a baseless raid on the Davidian compound at the end of the February, dramatically worsened the American Government's reputation around the globe, sparking retaliatory terrorist action, and ushering in a new age of anti-American conspiracist narrative. Children, women and men living in the Branch Davidian compound had been blindly shot at by Federal agents, tear-gassed for hours on end, tortured with sleep-deprivation tactics, charged and bulldozed with tanks... The global public shock that resulted was inevitable.

All these years later, it's still impossible to imagine how such a barrage of state-sanctioned torture and catastrophic loss of life could result from a situation in which an alt society that had existed peacefully for half a century, solely wanted to live outside of convention.

WWWACO

Desperate to repair its diabolical intelligence systems, and conscious of the reprisals it was likely to face, the US Gov decided that the solution would be mass public surveillance. And the quest began immediately. Within the short period of the Waco crisis alone, the foundations for a new, global surveillance mechanism were dug:

• A persistent campaign to destroy the privacy-friendly Gopher was set in motion. Gopher was, prior to Waco, the Internet's overwhelmingly front-running protocol, and its long-term success looked like a formality. But it was private by design and incapable of the kind of surveillance that came with the WWW. During the Waco crisis, negative publicity began to hammer away at Gopher's reputation - initially concerning the protocol's licensing. Such an aggressive anti-Gopher chant, out of nowhere, seemed odd, since Gopher's licensing was highly permissive, and certainly no more restrictive than CERN's existing WWW licensing. Over time, one bucket of mud after another was slung at Gopher, and it even appears that at least one fake company was set up to produce negative reports about its security - as an excuse to remove Gopher access from browsers.
• CERN dramatically and unexpectedly de-licensed its World Wide Web code and accompanying tools, effectively making an Internet protocol with enormous surveillance potential available to any authority wishing to harness it for any purpose whatsoever.
• The first consumer-targeted browser for the WWW was released by a US state-backed institution.
• That browser - Mosaic - began implementing surveillance technology from the off. This was the first external hint that the Internet would be used for public surveillance. Prior to Waco, the WWW had not even been a serious opponent to Gopher. Within a year, Mosaic's leader Marc Andreessen had moved on to Netscape, where encryption for the WWW was sculpted.
• The White House and the National Institute for Standards and Technology jointly announced a new Clipper Chip communications encryption initiative, which turned out to be a cloaked attempt to facilitate widespread phone-tapping. More on which in a moment.

To double-clarify, these were not subsequent outcomes. All of this occurred during the Waco crisis itself.

Waco definitely appeared to be a catalyst for mass surveillance and what we now call techno-fascism. Indeed, the public face of 1993's Mosaic browser was one Marc Andreessen - now widely recognised as a warp-level techno-fascist and best known as the Facebook board member who admitted the corporation was trying to colonise India. The WWW was a Nazi tool by intention, from the start. And Snowden would be just another of the many con artists who helped sculpt it into the dystopian hellscape it's become.

A TEMPLATE FOR THE ENCRYPTION SCAM

The aforementioned Clipper Chip is hugely relevant to the Snowden story, because it was a pre-Snowden, pre-Google attempt by the US Government itself to accomplish Snowden's biggest achievement: public acceptance of needless encryption, which was in truth an erosion of freedom and an American intelligence land-grab.

In April 1993, the Clipper Chip was marketed as:

Protection against illegal eavesdropping [read phone-tapping] for private citizens.

However, after independent researchers discovered that the technology was in fact developed by the NSA, with source code not just closed, but classified, the Government was bombarded with Freedom of Information requests. This blew the lid off the operation, and the initiative died a rapid death. The public concluded that the Clipper Chip was not a guard against phone-tapping, but in fact a facilitator of phone-tapping. This theme of presenting privacy violation as privacy protection has been relentless ever since. But not from the Government's own mouth...

Because the Clipper Chip was pitched directly by the Government, it was relatively easy for the public to smell the rat. Further, it was dead easy for the public to probe the affair with bog-standard FOI requests - a tactic they would not be able to use against the vastly more opaque refuge of private corporations and NGOs.

So the obvious solution was to move the intelligence services' "encryption" initiatives into the hands of private businesses, which were not only immune to FOI deluges, but also much less likely to be interpreted as Government intelligence agents in the first place. Especially if they publicly voiced retrospective opposition to initiatives like the Clipper Chip.

By spring '96 - three years later - covert US intelligence mouthpiece the Electronic Frontier Foundation (yes, the same Electronic Frontier Foundation that later fireside-hosted Snowden and fronted the encryption drive timed to coincide with his grand entrance) were busy championing exactly that solution. Their 1996 campaign, entitled Golden Key, pushed for legal changes which would allow private US corporations to lever "encryption" into globally-distributed tech products.

Their pitch? Same old. "Protect the public from unspecified privacy-violating baddies by pumping cryptography into places where no one asked for it". So, what's the difference between the Gov playing that card with the Clipper Chip, and the EFF playing it with Golden Key?

You tell me. It's exactly the same ploy. Is it really that difficult to visualise the EFF as a bridge between the Government's failed encryption-as-a-violation mission and a second-wave corporate/NGO attempt which Snowden and Google united to make wildly successful?

Encryption has destroyed the freedom of the original World Wide Web.

With HTTP, anyone could visit any website, and Big Tech could not do a thing to prevent it. But HTTPS inserts a "certificate authority" (note the word "authority") between the visitor and the site owner. "Certificate authorities" are invariably surveillance lords or friends of.

But even beyond that, there are knock-on implications. A restriction on the use of independent access tools. Google's hand on the planned obsolescence lever. Mandatory identification of every HTTPS site owner - not just to a small hosting company, but to an authority. And of course, whilst Google still gets its vault of visitor data, its competitors in the data market are locked out. As are non-American gatherers of intelligence.

For Snowden, becoming a "fugitive" was apparently an act of masochism. This was a bloke who wouldn't even leak juice to a publisher unless they agreed to additionally publish proof that he was the source. The picture on the jigsaw box shows a whistleblower. But the pieces, when assembled, reveal nothing but an authoritarian puppet show.

DOES, OR DID, SNOWDEN WORK FOR GOOGLE?

Before this article began, most people would have dismissed this question as ridiculous. But given Google's cornerstone role in the encryption scam, its part in brokering Snowden's story to the media, and several other links between Google's agenda and Snowden's agenda, it probably looks quite feasible now.

Let's first remember that Google was not just another startup which happened to luck out on a business formula. In the beginning, there was no business formula.

Like Mosaic and Netscape before it, Google materialised from a state-funded establishment as a project in which US intelligence agencies took an obsessive interest. It was not known in the late 1990s how Google would make money. If it would make money. But that wasn't important when the project hatched. The only dream then was to get the global public to throw their very most private information into it. That was its purpose. Originally, it's only purpose.

And the reason Google's public faces expressed no concern at all about the project's future, while 1999's top analysts were writing it off as unsustainable, was that they always knew it would be propped up by intelligence funding no matter what. Just like Mosaic/NetScape, which still survives today under the brand name of Firefox, despite operating at a catastrophic real-terms loss for over three decades.

Indeed, it's the persistence of tech products in the face of relentless financial failure, that shows us who's really behind them. They're not commercial entities by design. They're Government departments by design. Google's rampant success in monopoly advertising has made it self-sufficient. But the story of its old next-door neighbour Mozilla shows that even without that self-sufficiency, it would have survived.

Research by Yasha Levine, as documented in his book Surveillance Valley, leaves no doubt that Google is closely related to the NSA, the CIA and other Government agencies. Indeed, Levine cited a confirmed 1,934 Government contracts in which Google was involved between 2008 and 2017 - and those were only the ones outside of the classified realm.

This doesn't tell us that Snowden worked, or works, for Google. But the nature of what Google really is, versus the nature of what Snowden really is, does put them in very close synergy.

There's a missing link that cements all of this together: The Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF. A lot of people consider them to be a public rights advocacy group - even though their activity invariably benefits Google and other surveillance corporations. But here's what Levine discovered about them:

"In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required all telecommunications companies to build their equipment so that it could be wiretapped by the FBI." - Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley

The EFF later pretended they had nothing to do with this, and after the Clipper Chip's failure, claimed publicly to have opposed it.

"In 1999, EFF worked to support NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo with something called the “Kosovo Privacy Project,” which aimed to keep the region’s Internet access open during military action." - Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley

Doing techno-fascism proud there. This is what they spend your money on when you donate.

"[A] few years before [the EFF] funded Tor, EFF cofounder Perry Barlow casually admitted that he had been consulting for intelligence agencies for a decade. It seemed that the worlds of soldiers, spies, and privacy weren’t as far apart as they appear." - Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley

Edward Snowden has a close relationship with the EFF, and has cited its founder, the proto-techno-fascist John Perry Barlow, as an inspiration. In common with all EFF associates, Snowden is the embodiment of a new breed of noisy yet entirely ineffective self-styled "public rights activist", whose rhetoric precisely serves Google's most pressing hankering at any given moment in time. He is, if you like, the leader of the Inactivists. Whilst claiming to be activists, the Inactivists are, in truth, simply digital marketers for an authoritarian agenda.

The corporatocracy funds and boosts the likes of Ed Snowden and Cory Doctorow. Doctorow even complained that he had to pay to maintain his artificial reach on Twitter after Musk took over the platform from what was clearly a state-controlled and heavily Google-affiliated regime. But that same corporatocracy algo-nuked Craig Murray and put him in jail. Which one do you think is the real activist?

Inactivists are defined by the following collection of traits:

• They specialise in managing public expectations around the world's shift towards a single, global (but based in the USA), unelected corporate government, which they portray as too powerful to challenge.
• They are acolytes of the proto techno-fascist John Perry Barlow and have obvious ties to his legacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 1996, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) founder Barlow famously pitched what's now recognisable as a bid to replace legitimate governments with unelected corporations.
• They claim to represent the public, but their activity invariably leads to an increase in power for techno-fascist actors and corporations. Particularly Google.
• They have a level of reach that could only be achieved through complicity with powerful entities, and they do not suffer the gagging that befalls genuine voices of dissent. Far from it. They are darlings of classic Gov-approved venues and typical Big Tech growth-hacking channels across the paid media circuit.
• Any "solutions" they present, if they even bother, are hopelessly superficial, and do not provide the public with any meaningful way to fight techno-fascist behaviour. Snowden's recommendations for privacy are literal surveillance mechanisms.

Because the EFF and its inactivists can be seen to promote an agenda aligned with Google, it's logical to believe they work for Google. Or at least, that Google pulls their strings.

But if you wind back the clock to the pre-Google era, you see the network taking shape. The intelligence agencies come first, with the Government itself playing the fake public privacy card. Then the EFF takes over the chant, with Netscape pushing the actual technology. Then Google comes in, and uses a much more powerful profile, coupled with its own technological capacity, to much more forcefully drive exactly the same agenda.

Another strategy - once again a daily obsession for the EFF - simultaneously emerges.

The erosion of intellectual property rights.

It's easy to see this as a commercial strategy, designed to gain Google a free, no-strings supply of ad propellant. But it could also be seen as an intelligence strategy, and that's now become my preferred theory. Allow surveillance giants to build all-engulfing silos around other people's creative work, and ultimately, anyone in search of that creative work must necessarily be surveilled.

Considered in sum, all of this extrapolates into a sobering picture. We don't see the CIA and NSA as the sole baddies, with the EFF as rebel opposition, and Google in the middle as the commercially vulgar corporation just too tempted by cop dollar to say no. We see a unified, purpose-built force, working as one team. Every cybertech project in Silicon Valley colluding to turn the World Wide Web into the inescapable prison it's become.

The information monopolists, like Wikipedia, Internet Archive and now LLM "assistants", relying on copyright weaknesses to monopolise the information highway, ensuring that every seeker of knowledge is necessarily surveilled throughout their journey. The retailers, like Amazon - police stations that sell poison to potential murderers, then plead ignorance when 'intelligence' turns into suicide. The "privacy tools", like Tor, there to trick people into revealing their secrets under the illusion of anonymity. And the Inactivists, like Snowden and the EFF, there to manage public expectations, contrive fake revolutionism, feign public allegiance, cover the exits and promote the only escape tunnel that leads back to the prison yard.

Playing opposition roles, but all, in reality, on the same side.

WHAT SNOWDEN WOULD HAVE REVEALED IF HE'D BEEN A REAL WHISTLEBLOWER

Here's a quick list - non-exhaustive, omissions made for duh too obvious, like "Amazon is the cops", "2FA / MFA is the cops", "Identity checkpoints are the cops", etc. This is not without humour, so no pedantry from the humourless band of unthinkers who believe that online privacy tools exist and that the EFF is an actual public rights advocacy group, thanks... And by the way, none of this is classified. It's in plain sight. People are just too distracted by propaganda to notice it:

• The World Wide Web, as originally conceived by CERN (HTTP), has been replaced by a US Government-serving imposter protocol (HTTPS), and no longer meaningfully exists.
• Encryption is not a saviour but a scam, which protects and feeds Big Brother and the US Government, whilst only depriving the public of freedom.
• Google is the cops, and always was.
• Microsoft wasn't the cops, but it is now.
• Mosaic was the cops, Netscape was the cops, Mozilla is the cops, Tor is the cops, Signal is the cops, Brave is the cops, Startpage is the cops, DuckDuckGo is the cops, Kagi is the cops, Internet Archive is the cops, Wikipedia is the cops, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the cops, [insert any 'privacy tools' previously omitted] are the cops. If it's visible on the Web, and it's badmouthing the cops, it's the cops.
• If it's visible on the Web, and it's badmouthing Google, it's Google - or the cops. If indeed there's any difference. Which there isn't.
• If it's free, the customer is the cops.
• If you're paying, the customer is the cops.
• "AI" is the cops.
• JavaScript, introduced by NetScape and hence a brainchild of the cops, is a security threat - as Google itself will tell you if you try to send some through its email service.
• Websites that don't work without JavaScript are made with tools devised by the cops. Including Mastodon instances.
• ActivityPub is the cops.
• W3C is the cops.
• All opposition is controlled opposition.

*"The cops" refers to any system that knowingly feeds law-enforcement or intelligence agencies, directly or indirectly, or markets anything designed to benefit US intelligence agencies - which should be understood to include Google.

There will be people who - because we were all to a greater or lesser extent fooled by this, and because the network of deceit is so sophisticated, omnipotent and deep-rooted in everyday discovery channels - refuse to accept that a public con on this scale could ever have taken off. But take off it did. The World Wide Web was designed by cops, for cops, and even multi-$billion commerce always came second to the service of intelligence agencies.

And Snowden? Originally, a straightforward salesman, for US Gov-serving encryption. You know I'm right.