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Epilogue | 303 The ugly part of the equation is the rampant growth of the pub- lic’s distrust of the institutions of government in America. Accord- ing to recent polls, 4 out of 5 Americans distrust the government. Snowden did not create this new age of distrust, but his disclosures greatly contributed to it, as well as to the worldwide distrust of the U.S. government. This post-Snowden distrust is especially powerful in the section of the international media that assisted Snowden in his release of NSA documents. In defending Snowden, it questions the truthfulness of any government official or member of Congress who discloses information contradicting Snowden’s claims or show- ing that there was some benefit to the multibillion-dollar intelli- gence system that he compromised. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, who herself fought the secrecy of the CIA for years, was not exempt from such distrust when she asserted in June 2013 that the program that Snowden had compromised had helped avert a bloody carnage on the New York subways in September 2009, as mentioned earlier. ) That she was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee © on Intelligence, and briefed on the program at the time of the attack, did not prevent a distrustful press from attempting to impeach her credibility and that of the fourteen other members of the Senate Select Committee and the twenty members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who had affirmed her assertion. In this culture of distrust, any claim that any of the secrets that Snowden disclosed could have caused any harm is preemptively dis- missed as government propaganda. Snowden’s word also is taken over that of government officials because, as The Nation explained, Snowden speaks “truth to power.” Such a formulation of distrust allows those who accept it to dismiss all assertions of government officials representing power who contradict Snowden’s version of reality. Such is Snowden’s glorified aura that even when his rev- elations expose purported U.S. government actions in foreign lands, including the alleged tapping of friendly government officials’ con- versations, such as Angela Merkel’s, these are implicitly conflated with the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, around which a | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 303 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019791