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An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillan

by whack 10y ago

An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have said to such a person. "What you're saying is too improbable. No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling." Turns out organizations like the NSA do actually exist, and they are capable enough to carry out complicated plans in secrecy for many many years. Despite it being a non-partisan government agency staffed by government workers reporting to our elected leaders. One can only wonder what other kinds of scheming and backroom deals are being done by private organizations such as lobbyists, super-PACs and think-tanks.

silverbax88 10y ago
There were a lot of people saying the NSA, or someone similar, would do exactly what they did. It was the main opposition to the Patriot Act. People forget so quickly.
ryandrake 10y ago
Documentaries such as _Enemy of the State_ have been describing the NSA for much longer than 10 years.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- maxerickson 10y ago
  ba dum tss Is there evidence the NSA has even ever conducted an enforcement action, never mind a rogue one on US soil?
  - Avshalom 10y ago
    Enforcement? no. We know they gather intelligence on citizens though and we know they collaborate with other agencies that do enforcement though.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Have you watched Enemy of the State?
      - Avshalom 10y ago
        I mean not since it came out... but the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make it's 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate.
        quirkafleeg 10y ago
        > the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make [the movie Enemy of the State's] 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate I love that movie, but let's not say things we can't take back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY :)
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Because they'd advertise that /s
  - chillwaves 10y ago
    Parallel construction makes this unnecessary. There's no doubt in my mind that the NSA earns their budget.
itcrowd 10y ago
While I agree with the sentiment in your analysis, the mass spying by the NSA was already well-known even in 2004 which is documented in the novel ("based on insider information") of Dan Brown: digital fortress. I know, it's fiction but it is a data point .. https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fortress-Thriller-Dan-Brown/dp/0312944926 https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fortress-Thriller-Dan-Brown/d... (Edit: this is the 2004 edition, original was published in 1998)
- Animats 10y ago
  The first real revelations about the NSA were in Andrew Tully's "The Super Spies" (1969). There's been plenty of publicity about NSA since. The big changes came after the end of the Cold War, and then after 9/11. During the Cold War, NSA was at least 90% focused on the USSR. Everything else was a minor activity. After the downfall of the USSR, NSA downsized, and there were layoffs. After 9/11, there was heavy pressure to detect the next terrorist attack in advance. That's what motivated all the domestic collection.
- closeparen 10y ago
  Looking back, the most unrealistic thing about Digital Fortress was that people actually used email encryption.
shepardrtc 10y ago
Echelon has been known about since 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON I think I first heard about it in 2000.
- dboreham 10y ago
  1987 for me. Oops..
  - baby 10y ago
    did you hack them in 1987?
    - dboreham 10y ago
      Supplier
- plaguuuuuu 10y ago
  Difference is that whenever you brought it up, people thought you were nuts.
EGreg 10y ago
I prefer Mark Twain's phrase: we are all stupid, just on different subjects. Here is your NSA bumbling: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/us/nsa-leak-booz-allen-hamilton.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/us/nsa-leak-booz-allen-ha...
marcosdumay 10y ago
You know, here in my country the police started to investigate a car-wash that had more money than it should, then, one thing lead to another, and 7 years later we have as a proven fact that the in the last 40 years of federal government everything happened in conspiracies. If I had to guess, I'd say they are all around the world, and the author is incredibly naive in believing that conspiratory meetings don't exist just because he wasn't invited to any real one.
- genericacct 10y ago
  What country if i may ask?
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    That's Brazil.
smallnamespace 10y ago
That's not actually a full counter-argument, since scheming requires two parts: that one person or a small group of people had a long term vision and goal, and that result was actually achieved. Blaming the current state of spying just a nefarious spy organization is pure reductive conspiracy theory speculation. The truth is more prosaic and also more frustrating: we all collectively, including voters and and politicians, got ourselves into this mess.
__jal 10y ago
That's less a scheme than a market. Governments can, in fact, create them, if they throw enough of (our) money at the idea. And people were saying that 10 years ago (and properly-scaled versions of the same quite a bit earlier). James Bamford, for one, has made a career out of the history and activities of the place. People didn't laugh at him; they mainly just ignored it.
coldtea 10y ago
>An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have said to such a person. And even 10 years ago I (and many) would call those people (laughing) naive, and Ezra Klein if not naive, then in bed with those in power. For someone from a place that experienced actual history (wars, civil wars, dictatorships, all kinds of governments and ups and downs, etc.), and has a working knowledge of US history (from Hoover and McCarthy to Project Nightingale and Watergate and so) it's obvious that this agencies not only do that today, but have been doing it, to the extend possible, for ages. And that people that look too much into those things are also put "out of the way", or are intimidated, blackmailed, etc. And some are just discredited in an organized paid-for way (with 'useful idiots' in the media joining in to also help discredit them for free, e.g. Gary Webb). It's not that different that in all kinds of places. No country has powerful agencies and government, or trillion dollar interests without also having those things.
- slg 10y ago
  I think both you and the grandfather comment are focusing on the wrong part. To quote the quote from the article: >This is the most pervasive of of all Washington legends: that politicians in Washington are ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming. That everything that happens fits into somebody's plan. It doesn't. You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme. This line of thinking isn't meant to counter the idea of the NSA mass spying. It is meant to counter the idea that politicians are playing "4d chess" and every one of their moves are part of a larger scheme. It is arguing that maybe Trump's legally indefensible executive orders were just written by a inexperienced staff aren't trial balloons for an eventual dismantling of The Republic.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme. I agree that there's a lot of BS schemes, unfocused schemes, wishful thinking schemes, and power players with no clear idea of what they're doing. But I wanted to point out that it's not just it, and that it can also be laser focused on some things (if only at the operational level).
elastic_church 10y ago
> conspiracy theorist the irony being that by definition a theory about a clandestine plan by a group is a conspiracy .... theory .... :|
- dilemma 10y ago
  NSA are the worst conspiracy theorists. They have it so bad they try to surveil the entire world.
kurthr 10y ago
I think many people knew what was happening (Cypherpunks and EFF even before 2000) and the scale was pretty publicly clear when the massive tapping of ATT was revealed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A The ultimate threat to the privacy and security of US Citizens living in Country is that our Surveillance State can't keep its own secrets. I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that the China and Russia don't need to spy on the US government, it's citizens, or businesses, because we pay for the NSA to do it for them. Don't develop any tool that you don't want used against you!
sien 10y ago
What the NSA is probably capable of has been know about for 30+ years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets People just didn't care that much. The threat of nuclear annihilation made it all seem different.
obastani 10y ago
I'm not convinced that the NSA counts as a counterexample. From my very limited knowledge, it appears that the NSA's programs are known an approved by a reasonably large swath of government. I think the response of the article would be that, rather than being the result of scheming by a small group of people, the NSA programs arise from a combination of initial government consensus and subsequent expansion of powers. For example, Obama could have stopped programs like PRISM when he became president, but chose to continue them. The point I got from the article isn't so much that secret and far-reaching programs can't exist. It's that these programs do not come into being based on the will of a small group of people, but rather based on a complex bureaucratic process in which many parties partake.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  NSA's existence and its activities aboard were well-known. What wasn't well-known was that NSA was spying on American citizens, not just a few suspicious ones but ALL of them. That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks.
  - thr0waway1239 10y ago
    >> That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks. That seems a bit naive considering how fast technology improves. Another pet peeve of mine: how can people possibly not be more worried about the kind of data collection happening at the tech behemoths? I can imagine about a 100 different ways they can by themselves, or by collusion with other powerful companies, completely suppress and eliminate serious competition. (And if all else fails, of course eventually buy them off plus their principles - such as what happened with WhatsApp). Nominally at least, organizations such as the NSA will probably have a few people who are conflicted about stated purpose of the organization vs actual behavior (e.g. Snowden). There are no such checks and balances for corporate entities, except for this notion of competition, which is now acknowledged to be ineffective in the winner take all high tech ecosystem. The absence of any input from employees in these forums around, for e.g. Windows 10's heavy handed updates, or Facebook's extraordinary chutzpah in attempting to triangulate every piece of information they can to a person in their database, is quite telling. Think of the FB experiment which was trying to manipulate people's emotions. Why aren't Mark Z and co being investigated for crime? [1] No legal precedents? - perhaps it is time to create some. At the very least, it will expose their data collection practices to the world and make similar companies more wary of taking people for granted. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-questions-could-lawsuit-follow-mood-manipulation-research-1615970 http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-ques...
ouid 10y ago
There are two mechanisms by which conspiracies were described to be impossible in the past. Hanlon's razor, and the impossibility of shared secrets. Hanlon's razor has been going obsolete since the industrial revolution. The probability of you interacting with someone is correlated with their influence. Influence is correlated with net-worth, which is correlated with competence, and anti-correlated with benevolence. Furthermore, competence is not a conserved quantity. You can now hire people to extend your competence by paying them to write algorithms, copying a piece of their competence and giving it to you. It turns out that it's neither as hard nor as necessary to keep shared secrets as it was originally thought. Encryption, Need to know protocols, and the extension of our competence and influence with computers and networking has reduced the number of people who are required to know the full secret to very nearly one, despite wide distribution of the contents. And while inference is still possible on the secret fragments, it is very difficult to communicate that inference to other people in a way which they find believable. This is partly because of the non-uniqueness of inferences, which should be irrelevant, since this is how all science works. The other part is that people are largely not equipped to understand those inferences. That sounds like a polite way of calling them stupid, but it's really just that even, extremely detailed schemes with nigh unobservable effects can be distributed on a global scale, with extraordinary benefit to the perpetrator. It's computationally infeasible to have any proportion of the population be aware of society to this level of detail. As a glimmer of hope, something that we are capable of, however, is determining the trustworthiness of people. We don't seem to elect leaders based on their trustworthiness anymore, but it would not require a fundamental shift in human competency or nature to move to that system. It would require a more complete understanding of what trust means, though.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
You're confusing politics with operational excellence. If NSA leadership sets out to do a thing and has the money it's a project execution problem. Nobody gets their own agenda. They're on the payroll. I haven't done much policy work but if it's anything like non-profit work I'm sure it's infuriating. Nobody is on the payroll (except maybe a few oversubscribed staffers) and they can and will do whatever the hell they want, or nothing, that happens a lot too.
drjesusphd 10y ago
> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. No need to imagine. They did, and they were.
loblollyboy 10y ago
Or NRA - the ultimate single interest group
Spooky23 10y ago
NSA is part of the bureaucracy, not the political machinery. Despite the common patter, well funded government agencies are incredibly powerful engines to deliver whatever services they are empowered to do. This is true at the state and local level as well. Private organizations do all sorts of scheming, but they usually lean on the government to do heavy research, and like anything else, in most cases their conclusions are directly correlated to whatever the guy who writes the checks thinks.
Cybiote 10y ago
I don't think that a counter-argument. If we rephrase it as: no entity thus far has a good grasp on the current state of the world at any given moment and furthermore, no one or group can really predict the effect of their actions on the world state, to speak of predicting the future more generally, it becomes clearer that neither the NSA nor think tanks are specially advantaged. The more correlated the world becomes (the more quickly information propagates) the harder this becomes to do. What the spying and surveillance does is to allow Just In Time flagging at best, spying on a specific target, or as an investigative tool once an event has already occurred. But to use the information to predict what might occur (which is important for effective scheming) has not proven to be possible. Knowing which is signal amongst the noise is extremely difficult. If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project is to be believed, access to classified information does not make one anymore capable than someone with an intuitive grasp of base rates, properly updates to new information and an Internet connection.
- alexandercrohde 10y ago
  No. It is a counter argument. When the US can destroy Uranium centrifuges in Iran [1] with a virus that got distributed through several 0 days in thumbdrives, that is extreme coordination that means the organization has extreme power. The type of power that, if it got into the wrong hands, could hack and undermine faith in the stock market (or banks). When the NIST proposes an encryption algorithm, but it turns out there's reason to believe [2] that they designed an algorithm with a complicated mathematical backdoor, that is coordinated. When Jason Bourne came out we thought it was a dystopian thriller. Turned out to be a playbook. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
grigjd3 10y ago
Ten years ago was 2007 and plenty of people were aware of the NSA. There was a movie from the 90's with WILL SMITH that featured NSA overreach.
- bcook 10y ago
  ...fictionally. Snowden's revelations made those fictions a reality.
  - sametmax 10y ago
    Exactly. If you would have said that this fiction was reality, people would have laugh at you. Actually some people still do. And a lot of people don't care anyway. We are kind of screwed when the majority of the public won't even react in fact of a gigantic threat. It's really hard to believe we still have that much freedom given that such little care is given to it.
  - lnx01 10y ago
    James Bamford's been writing non-fiction accounts for decades.
- krick 10y ago
  Which movie are you referring to?
  - dfaarc 10y ago
    Enemy of the state
    - balabaster 10y ago
      Many people will have watched this movie, taken it as an action thriller set in a world that while hinted at wasn't expected to be real. It's quite an eye opener in hindsight that this is indeed real... Bourne Identity, another one that seems too far fetched to have any truth to it... given what's come to light in the last 5 years, truth and fantasy/fiction in this arena has become blurred enough to be scary.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. The NSA has been well known for decades; while it was initially secret (its name and existence, not just its work), its existence has been public knowledge for a long time, and its massive, widespread, and frequenrlt-politically-abused surveillance was revealed in the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and was the key impetus behind the restrictions on domestic surveillance adopted at that time in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (restrictions that were weakened by amendments in the war on terror exactly and publicly so that the NSA could engage freely in widespread, massive surveillance to identify and track auspecred terrorists and their associates several steps removed.) Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance. Now, if you said this about "10 years ago" in 1977 instead of 2017, you'd have a good point.
- discreditable 10y ago
  > Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance. It was even a joke in the Simpson's Movie (2007).
  - danbruc 10y ago
    The knowledge was not widespread, but people in the field certainly had suspicions and started getting an idea in the late 1980s, at the very latest. The EU conducted an investigation in 2000 and certainly knew what was going on pretty well when the final report [1] was presented in mid 2001. Probably not in too much detail but they certainly had an idea of the [possible] scale. [1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
  - irishcoffee 10y ago
    If you didn't live in the DelMarVa area, and stuck your head in a hole, maybe. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress Written in I think 1998. Agree with DoD or not, to be unaware of NSA in the 2000's, that speaks more of ignorance. http://www.aaroads.com/guide.php?page=s0032wamd http://www.aaroads.com/guide.php?page=s0032wamd Page updated 2009. A road sign. The Simpsons creators may have just be living in a bubble.
knorker 10y ago
Room 641A was uncovered 11 years ago. The movie "Enemy of the state" was released 19 years ago this year. Also ECHELON was publicised already 10 years before that. It's more accurate to say that 10 years ago you personally were not interested in these things, and thus were not aware.
rch 10y ago
I used to hang out with an ex-nsa contractor in a coffee shop around 2002. He would talk about all aspects of these activities in plain terms, because most of it was in the news already. Nobody was listening then, that's all.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  your friend must have been, ahem, lacking wisdom about the consequences of discussing classified programs
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
SmokyBorbon 10y ago
I have to laugh and shake my head at all these comments from millenials who say the NSA's activities were well known and then link to wikipedia as if its proof. People who lived through the 80s and 90s remember a time when talk of such conspiracies was put in the same category as Bigfoot and alien abductions. It was inconceivable to most people that the government was capable of listening in on a phone call without a warrant and a FBI agent diguised as a phone company worker climbing a pole outside your house. If you brought the subject up in conversation you were called a "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theorist and treatrd like someone who thought the government was trying to read your brain waves. I wonder, if these children watched Enemy of the State, would they understand that the movie was science fiction and that movie critics in the 90s ridiculed the plot as implausible and laughably unrealistic? Reading this thread as a person over 30 is infuriating. It's like being Charlton Heston at the Statue of Liberty but when you start shouting about the state of the world some hipster rolls by on their two-wheel scooter and snidely tells you to read the Wikipedia articles on Charles Darwin and Koko the Gorilla like you've never heard of them before.
keypusher 10y ago
> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. I present, for your consideration ([1], [2]) some of many articles written about the Echelon program, more than 10 years go. These two were by the BBC and The Guardian, hardly niche publications. They were published in 1999 and 2001. It has been widely known, for decades, that the NSA was conducting large scale surveillance on a global scale. There was even a hollywood movie about NSA surveillance in the 90's (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998 http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperrone https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperr... [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm

by whack 10y ago

silverbax88 10y ago

There were a lot of people saying the NSA, or someone similar, would do exactly what they did. It was the main opposition to the Patriot Act. People forget so quickly.

ryandrake 10y ago

Documentaries such as _Enemy of the State_ have been describing the NSA for much longer than 10 years.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
maxerickson 10y ago
ba dum tss Is there evidence the NSA has even ever conducted an enforcement action, never mind a rogue one on US soil?
- Avshalom 10y ago
  Enforcement? no. We know they gather intelligence on citizens though and we know they collaborate with other agencies that do enforcement though.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Have you watched Enemy of the State?
    - Avshalom 10y ago
      I mean not since it came out... but the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make it's 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate.
      - quirkafleeg 10y ago
        > the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make [the movie Enemy of the State's] 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate I love that movie, but let's not say things we can't take back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY :)
- coldtea 10y ago
  Because they'd advertise that /s
- chillwaves 10y ago
  Parallel construction makes this unnecessary. There's no doubt in my mind that the NSA earns their budget.

itcrowd 10y ago

While I agree with the sentiment in your analysis, the mass spying by the NSA was already well-known even in 2004 which is documented in the novel ("based on insider information") of Dan Brown: digital fortress. I know, it's fiction but it is a data point .. https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fortress-Thriller-Dan-Brown/dp/0312944926 https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fortress-Thriller-Dan-Brown/d... (Edit: this is the 2004 edition, original was published in 1998)

Animats 10y ago
The first real revelations about the NSA were in Andrew Tully's "The Super Spies" (1969). There's been plenty of publicity about NSA since. The big changes came after the end of the Cold War, and then after 9/11. During the Cold War, NSA was at least 90% focused on the USSR. Everything else was a minor activity. After the downfall of the USSR, NSA downsized, and there were layoffs. After 9/11, there was heavy pressure to detect the next terrorist attack in advance. That's what motivated all the domestic collection.
closeparen 10y ago
Looking back, the most unrealistic thing about Digital Fortress was that people actually used email encryption.

shepardrtc 10y ago

Echelon has been known about since 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON I think I first heard about it in 2000.

dboreham 10y ago
1987 for me. Oops..
- baby 10y ago
  did you hack them in 1987?
  - dboreham 10y ago
    Supplier
plaguuuuuu 10y ago
Difference is that whenever you brought it up, people thought you were nuts.

EGreg 10y ago

I prefer Mark Twain's phrase: we are all stupid, just on different subjects. Here is your NSA bumbling: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/us/nsa-leak-booz-allen-hamilton.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/us/nsa-leak-booz-allen-ha...

marcosdumay 10y ago

You know, here in my country the police started to investigate a car-wash that had more money than it should, then, one thing lead to another, and 7 years later we have as a proven fact that the in the last 40 years of federal government everything happened in conspiracies. If I had to guess, I'd say they are all around the world, and the author is incredibly naive in believing that conspiratory meetings don't exist just because he wasn't invited to any real one.

genericacct 10y ago
What country if i may ask?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  That's Brazil.

smallnamespace 10y ago

That's not actually a full counter-argument, since scheming requires two parts: that one person or a small group of people had a long term vision and goal, and that result was actually achieved. Blaming the current state of spying just a nefarious spy organization is pure reductive conspiracy theory speculation. The truth is more prosaic and also more frustrating: we all collectively, including voters and and politicians, got ourselves into this mess.

__jal 10y ago

That's less a scheme than a market. Governments can, in fact, create them, if they throw enough of (our) money at the idea. And people were saying that 10 years ago (and properly-scaled versions of the same quite a bit earlier). James Bamford, for one, has made a career out of the history and activities of the place. People didn't laugh at him; they mainly just ignored it.

coldtea 10y ago

>An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have said to such a person. And even 10 years ago I (and many) would call those people (laughing) naive, and Ezra Klein if not naive, then in bed with those in power. For someone from a place that experienced actual history (wars, civil wars, dictatorships, all kinds of governments and ups and downs, etc.), and has a working knowledge of US history (from Hoover and McCarthy to Project Nightingale and Watergate and so) it's obvious that this agencies not only do that today, but have been doing it, to the extend possible, for ages. And that people that look too much into those things are also put "out of the way", or are intimidated, blackmailed, etc. And some are just discredited in an organized paid-for way (with 'useful idiots' in the media joining in to also help discredit them for free, e.g. Gary Webb). It's not that different that in all kinds of places. No country has powerful agencies and government, or trillion dollar interests without also having those things.

slg 10y ago
I think both you and the grandfather comment are focusing on the wrong part. To quote the quote from the article: >This is the most pervasive of of all Washington legends: that politicians in Washington are ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming. That everything that happens fits into somebody's plan. It doesn't. You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme. This line of thinking isn't meant to counter the idea of the NSA mass spying. It is meant to counter the idea that politicians are playing "4d chess" and every one of their moves are part of a larger scheme. It is arguing that maybe Trump's legally indefensible executive orders were just written by a inexperienced staff aren't trial balloons for an eventual dismantling of The Republic.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme. I agree that there's a lot of BS schemes, unfocused schemes, wishful thinking schemes, and power players with no clear idea of what they're doing. But I wanted to point out that it's not just it, and that it can also be laser focused on some things (if only at the operational level).

elastic_church 10y ago

> conspiracy theorist the irony being that by definition a theory about a clandestine plan by a group is a conspiracy .... theory .... :|

dilemma 10y ago
NSA are the worst conspiracy theorists. They have it so bad they try to surveil the entire world.

kurthr 10y ago

I think many people knew what was happening (Cypherpunks and EFF even before 2000) and the scale was pretty publicly clear when the massive tapping of ATT was revealed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A The ultimate threat to the privacy and security of US Citizens living in Country is that our Surveillance State can't keep its own secrets. I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that the China and Russia don't need to spy on the US government, it's citizens, or businesses, because we pay for the NSA to do it for them. Don't develop any tool that you don't want used against you!

sien 10y ago

What the NSA is probably capable of has been know about for 30+ years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets People just didn't care that much. The threat of nuclear annihilation made it all seem different.

obastani 10y ago

I'm not convinced that the NSA counts as a counterexample. From my very limited knowledge, it appears that the NSA's programs are known an approved by a reasonably large swath of government. I think the response of the article would be that, rather than being the result of scheming by a small group of people, the NSA programs arise from a combination of initial government consensus and subsequent expansion of powers. For example, Obama could have stopped programs like PRISM when he became president, but chose to continue them. The point I got from the article isn't so much that secret and far-reaching programs can't exist. It's that these programs do not come into being based on the will of a small group of people, but rather based on a complex bureaucratic process in which many parties partake.

enraged_camel 10y ago
NSA's existence and its activities aboard were well-known. What wasn't well-known was that NSA was spying on American citizens, not just a few suspicious ones but ALL of them. That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks.
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  >> That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks. That seems a bit naive considering how fast technology improves. Another pet peeve of mine: how can people possibly not be more worried about the kind of data collection happening at the tech behemoths? I can imagine about a 100 different ways they can by themselves, or by collusion with other powerful companies, completely suppress and eliminate serious competition. (And if all else fails, of course eventually buy them off plus their principles - such as what happened with WhatsApp). Nominally at least, organizations such as the NSA will probably have a few people who are conflicted about stated purpose of the organization vs actual behavior (e.g. Snowden). There are no such checks and balances for corporate entities, except for this notion of competition, which is now acknowledged to be ineffective in the winner take all high tech ecosystem. The absence of any input from employees in these forums around, for e.g. Windows 10's heavy handed updates, or Facebook's extraordinary chutzpah in attempting to triangulate every piece of information they can to a person in their database, is quite telling. Think of the FB experiment which was trying to manipulate people's emotions. Why aren't Mark Z and co being investigated for crime? [1] No legal precedents? - perhaps it is time to create some. At the very least, it will expose their data collection practices to the world and make similar companies more wary of taking people for granted. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-questions-could-lawsuit-follow-mood-manipulation-research-1615970 http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-ques...

ouid 10y ago

There are two mechanisms by which conspiracies were described to be impossible in the past. Hanlon's razor, and the impossibility of shared secrets. Hanlon's razor has been going obsolete since the industrial revolution. The probability of you interacting with someone is correlated with their influence. Influence is correlated with net-worth, which is correlated with competence, and anti-correlated with benevolence. Furthermore, competence is not a conserved quantity. You can now hire people to extend your competence by paying them to write algorithms, copying a piece of their competence and giving it to you. It turns out that it's neither as hard nor as necessary to keep shared secrets as it was originally thought. Encryption, Need to know protocols, and the extension of our competence and influence with computers and networking has reduced the number of people who are required to know the full secret to very nearly one, despite wide distribution of the contents. And while inference is still possible on the secret fragments, it is very difficult to communicate that inference to other people in a way which they find believable. This is partly because of the non-uniqueness of inferences, which should be irrelevant, since this is how all science works. The other part is that people are largely not equipped to understand those inferences. That sounds like a polite way of calling them stupid, but it's really just that even, extremely detailed schemes with nigh unobservable effects can be distributed on a global scale, with extraordinary benefit to the perpetrator. It's computationally infeasible to have any proportion of the population be aware of society to this level of detail. As a glimmer of hope, something that we are capable of, however, is determining the trustworthiness of people. We don't seem to elect leaders based on their trustworthiness anymore, but it would not require a fundamental shift in human competency or nature to move to that system. It would require a more complete understanding of what trust means, though.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

You're confusing politics with operational excellence. If NSA leadership sets out to do a thing and has the money it's a project execution problem. Nobody gets their own agenda. They're on the payroll. I haven't done much policy work but if it's anything like non-profit work I'm sure it's infuriating. Nobody is on the payroll (except maybe a few oversubscribed staffers) and they can and will do whatever the hell they want, or nothing, that happens a lot too.

drjesusphd 10y ago

loblollyboy 10y ago

Or NRA - the ultimate single interest group

Spooky23 10y ago

NSA is part of the bureaucracy, not the political machinery. Despite the common patter, well funded government agencies are incredibly powerful engines to deliver whatever services they are empowered to do. This is true at the state and local level as well. Private organizations do all sorts of scheming, but they usually lean on the government to do heavy research, and like anything else, in most cases their conclusions are directly correlated to whatever the guy who writes the checks thinks.

Cybiote 10y ago

I don't think that a counter-argument. If we rephrase it as: no entity thus far has a good grasp on the current state of the world at any given moment and furthermore, no one or group can really predict the effect of their actions on the world state, to speak of predicting the future more generally, it becomes clearer that neither the NSA nor think tanks are specially advantaged. The more correlated the world becomes (the more quickly information propagates) the harder this becomes to do. What the spying and surveillance does is to allow Just In Time flagging at best, spying on a specific target, or as an investigative tool once an event has already occurred. But to use the information to predict what might occur (which is important for effective scheming) has not proven to be possible. Knowing which is signal amongst the noise is extremely difficult. If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project is to be believed, access to classified information does not make one anymore capable than someone with an intuitive grasp of base rates, properly updates to new information and an Internet connection.

alexandercrohde 10y ago
No. It is a counter argument. When the US can destroy Uranium centrifuges in Iran [1] with a virus that got distributed through several 0 days in thumbdrives, that is extreme coordination that means the organization has extreme power. The type of power that, if it got into the wrong hands, could hack and undermine faith in the stock market (or banks). When the NIST proposes an encryption algorithm, but it turns out there's reason to believe [2] that they designed an algorithm with a complicated mathematical backdoor, that is coordinated. When Jason Bourne came out we thought it was a dystopian thriller. Turned out to be a playbook. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

grigjd3 10y ago

Ten years ago was 2007 and plenty of people were aware of the NSA. There was a movie from the 90's with WILL SMITH that featured NSA overreach.

bcook 10y ago
...fictionally. Snowden's revelations made those fictions a reality.
- sametmax 10y ago
  Exactly. If you would have said that this fiction was reality, people would have laugh at you. Actually some people still do. And a lot of people don't care anyway. We are kind of screwed when the majority of the public won't even react in fact of a gigantic threat. It's really hard to believe we still have that much freedom given that such little care is given to it.
- lnx01 10y ago
  James Bamford's been writing non-fiction accounts for decades.
krick 10y ago
Which movie are you referring to?
- dfaarc 10y ago
  Enemy of the state
  - balabaster 10y ago
    Many people will have watched this movie, taken it as an action thriller set in a world that while hinted at wasn't expected to be real. It's quite an eye opener in hindsight that this is indeed real... Bourne Identity, another one that seems too far fetched to have any truth to it... given what's come to light in the last 5 years, truth and fantasy/fiction in this arena has become blurred enough to be scary.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. The NSA has been well known for decades; while it was initially secret (its name and existence, not just its work), its existence has been public knowledge for a long time, and its massive, widespread, and frequenrlt-politically-abused surveillance was revealed in the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and was the key impetus behind the restrictions on domestic surveillance adopted at that time in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (restrictions that were weakened by amendments in the war on terror exactly and publicly so that the NSA could engage freely in widespread, massive surveillance to identify and track auspecred terrorists and their associates several steps removed.) Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance. Now, if you said this about "10 years ago" in 1977 instead of 2017, you'd have a good point.

discreditable 10y ago
> Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance. It was even a joke in the Simpson's Movie (2007).
- danbruc 10y ago
  The knowledge was not widespread, but people in the field certainly had suspicions and started getting an idea in the late 1980s, at the very latest. The EU conducted an investigation in 2000 and certainly knew what was going on pretty well when the final report [1] was presented in mid 2001. Probably not in too much detail but they certainly had an idea of the [possible] scale. [1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
- irishcoffee 10y ago
  If you didn't live in the DelMarVa area, and stuck your head in a hole, maybe. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress Written in I think 1998. Agree with DoD or not, to be unaware of NSA in the 2000's, that speaks more of ignorance. http://www.aaroads.com/guide.php?page=s0032wamd http://www.aaroads.com/guide.php?page=s0032wamd Page updated 2009. A road sign. The Simpsons creators may have just be living in a bubble.

knorker 10y ago

Room 641A was uncovered 11 years ago. The movie "Enemy of the state" was released 19 years ago this year. Also ECHELON was publicised already 10 years before that. It's more accurate to say that 10 years ago you personally were not interested in these things, and thus were not aware.

rch 10y ago

I used to hang out with an ex-nsa contractor in a coffee shop around 2002. He would talk about all aspects of these activities in plain terms, because most of it was in the news already. Nobody was listening then, that's all.

nyolfen 10y ago
your friend must have been, ahem, lacking wisdom about the consequences of discussing classified programs
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

SmokyBorbon 10y ago

I have to laugh and shake my head at all these comments from millenials who say the NSA's activities were well known and then link to wikipedia as if its proof. People who lived through the 80s and 90s remember a time when talk of such conspiracies was put in the same category as Bigfoot and alien abductions. It was inconceivable to most people that the government was capable of listening in on a phone call without a warrant and a FBI agent diguised as a phone company worker climbing a pole outside your house. If you brought the subject up in conversation you were called a "tinfoil hat" conspiracy theorist and treatrd like someone who thought the government was trying to read your brain waves. I wonder, if these children watched Enemy of the State, would they understand that the movie was science fiction and that movie critics in the 90s ridiculed the plot as implausible and laughably unrealistic? Reading this thread as a person over 30 is infuriating. It's like being Charlton Heston at the Statue of Liberty but when you start shouting about the state of the world some hipster rolls by on their two-wheel scooter and snidely tells you to read the Wikipedia articles on Charles Darwin and Koko the Gorilla like you've never heard of them before.

keypusher 10y ago

> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. I present, for your consideration ([1], [2]) some of many articles written about the Echelon program, more than 10 years go. These two were by the BBC and The Guardian, hardly niche publications. They were published in 1999 and 2001. It has been widely known, for decades, that the NSA was conducting large scale surveillance on a global scale. There was even a hollywood movie about NSA surveillance in the 90's (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998 http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998). [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperrone https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperr... [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm