Comment by schoen
20 hours ago
I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively asking smaller sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to the spread of the norm.
It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.
I think it would be a stretch to say that Snowden did nothing to accelerate the uptake; for better and worse he clearly did. But he didn't set it into motion; we were going to have an all-TLS Internet within a decade with or without him.