Five years after Snowden, and what do we have?

We have more encryption. There wasn't much on IM back then, and most sites were http only.

Whether it's better encryption than five years ago is debatable.

The tin foil hats came off. Five years ago if you were saying that the NSA was bugging laptops and listening to domestic phone calls you could still have plausibly been accused to wearing radio wave resistant headgear. The Snowden stuff blew all that away.

The letter agencies had substantial PR failures but successfully chordoned the narrative off around terrorism. Occasionally things strayed off-message but mostly there was no talk of economic espionage. It was pretty much confined to terrorism.

Public awareness of what letter agencies do increased a little.

Governments passed legislation rubber stamping the illegal practices which the Snowden documents had revealed were going on. It was notable the governments did nothing to reign in their surveillance of their populations, and instead expanded existing programs. In the UK the battle against the snooper's charter was some combination of tragedy and farce.

Snowden himself remains free, sort of, but his personal situation looks dicey long term.