Knowing of UKUSA and Five Eyes, knowing that they share intelligence on parties OUTSIDE the member states, and knowing that they are providing one another with intelligence on each other's citizens and residents are different things.
Your Wikipedia article link doesn't directly address this. It points to several other documents though:
"Under a secret agreement signed in 1947, called UKUSA, the English-speaking countries agreed to share responsibility for overseeing surveillance in different parts of the world."
That doesn't tell much. But this does:
"On 6 September 1960, two NSA defectors held a press conference and revealed the worldwide scope of NSA's activities:"
"'We know from working at NSA [that] the United States reads the secret communications of more than forty nations, including its own allies... Both enciphered and plain text communications are monitored from almost every nation in the world, including the nations on whose soil the intercept bases are located.'"
It also discusses the Church Commission hearings (1975).
I'm not sure how I'd classify this, but I see general awareness as being vastly greater. And as someone who's been paying attention to this story for a long time (15+ years), it's news to me.
This article linked from Wikipedia has a Canadian stating that the Brits asked them to monitor British citizens and US lawmakers worrying that it was being used to spy on US citizens:
I guess widespread speculation that avoiding domestic surveillance laws is one of the things done with the system isn't the same as knowing that it is going on, but my point was that the widespread speculation had proceeded Snowden by quite some time.
Fair point. And I do appreciate the additional information and links.
From your NY Times article (published May 27, 1999):
Until last Sunday, no government or intelligence agency from the member states had openly admitted to the existence of the UKUSA Agreement or Echelon.
The mutual surveillance / legal evasion possibility appears to be suspected but not demonstrated. Again as with much else, what Snowden's done is to specifically document such activity. Which is of and by itself a material distinction.
European Parliament officials have also expressed concern about the use of Echelon to gather economic intelligence for participating nations.
And:
While few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists, many are concerned that the system COULD be abused to collect economic and political information.
(All-caps emphasis added -- minimal HN formatting options have their drawbacks.)
So, I'll maintain that the documentation of such abuse is a New Thing.
Indeed. Most of NSA news are only confirming what everyone could reasonaly already assume - i.e. that yes, they can hit you everywhere. Don't get me wrong, I love NSA stories, but the Superfish one is rightfully more covered because:
- it's an immediate and very serious threat to a lot of people (every script kiddie with room-temperature IQ level can use it to clear someone's bank account)
- it's a very clear example of how customers are literally being fucked over by businesses, and how a big and trusted company turned out to be represented by flat-out lying assholes (one rarely gets to see a case without any room for doubt)
- it's a case that you can (and should) do something about
Maybe it's not just you, however I think a potential factor to give one more attention is that you can do something about the first, at least in the short term.
Besides cleaning your box, you can blame Lenovo, stop buying their products, promote the boycott, etc. All things that regular people can do and serves as an anger/stress/steam release valve.
The NSA news, even though it is/should be a much more important or pressing issue, it's something you "can't do anything about". I mean, ostensibly you can do a lot as a citizen, however most of those actions have long term effects and thus are not as useful as a release valve. It involves commitment and even sacrifice, whereas blaming a corporation (however righ you might be) is much more immediate and serves the purpose of having someone to blame for that and lots of other stuff, i.e. you can then blame the general state of IT security, then how the govt does nothing about it, how privay is nowadays non-existent, think of the children, etc.
I also believe another factor is the way news have found a way to tap into this need for the audience to have a release valve. Something or someone to be angry at and so all your problems can be channeled to that. Where I live I've seen a growing amount of newspapers and news media that just basically do a certain journalism that does not bring anything to the table but things to be raging about.
I guess it's easier to sell stuff when you can easily get people "on your side", and since there's always a lot of people angry at something, it becomes easy to have an audience.
So what's the point then (from the POV of the media) of bringing "important" (for different values of important) news to the front page when that would require their audience to commit to actions that would last several years (change your country's politics for example) and thus not as easily enticed to "get on your side" (and thus buy your media), if on the other hand you could bring, I guess you could call them "anger-bait" (like click-bait) news, and have everyone talk about it by virtue of functioning as an escape valve where people relieve their stress, fear, anger, etc?
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I've seen more and more evidence that points in this direction, and I guess that would be my answer as to why one has much more attention than the other.
Edit:
As an analogy, I read somewhere about the recent Charlie Hebdo (sp?) attack and how it got disproportionate attention vs the two thousand killed by ISIS (I believe it was ISIS... or Borok Haram?). Maybe it's a similar thing. You believe you are able to do "more" when it's close to home (Western nation) vs far (somewhere in Africa, far away from me).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076351