Essential Guide: Security Expert Bruce Schneier ‘guarantees’ Governments Are Bulk...

From PRISM to AI, mass surveillance has only grown more powerful. Bruce Schneier warns the post-Snowden world may be entering an even darker phase.

In June 2013, the lens through which US citizens looked at their government was dramatically changed; it was now a PRISM.

PRISM was the program that enabled the National Security Agency (NSA), with some help from the FBI, to obtain unthinkable quantities of data from tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, among others.

Despite previous statements that the NSA did not collect data “directly” from tech companies, American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that they did, and that it was just one portion of a larger picture showing that the US was in the mass surveillance game.

Practically speaking, though, what has really changed?

“Everything has changed, and nothing has changed,” renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier told Cointelegraph’s Not Dead Yet show. “Certainly, the surveillance is still happening.”

Schneier, a New York Times bestselling author and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, didn’t stop there with his warnings.

The scale of the data problem is seldom understood, Schneider says. Not only is there exponentially more data collected than in the lead-up to the Snowden leaks in 2013, but it is also markedly more granular.

In December 2025, investigative journalists at French newspaper Le Monde managed to track spies, special forces and those close to the French president with mobile phone ad data purchased from a major broker.

“In the case of our policeman, we can follow him to a famous sports store, to the recycling center, to the gas station… And all the way home,” the journalists wrote.

Source: CoinTelegraph