4 ms·

I wish teens today could experience the glory of the Internet in the 90s. It was an anarchist’s wasteland of data and possibility, and the idea of there even b

I wish teens today could experience the glory of the Internet in the 90s. It was an anarchist’s wasteland of data and possibility, and the idea of there even being consequences for anything you might do online seemed absurd.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Looking back it's clear to me that 9/11 changed everything in North American culture.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  It was definitely a watershed moment, but the Internet truly died with the Snowden revelations. Those who know, stopped trusting everything.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    We all knew about ECHELON by the mid-late 90s. 9/11 changed the tone of the culture. Not just on the Internet. Underground raves, for example, pretty much died out on account of the more serious powers and tone given to law enforcement. Air travel will never be the same. Traveling in general -- we Canadians used to be able to cross the border to the U.S. with just a driver's license. Awful Anti-Islamic hate speech is practically mainstream. An authoritarian streak has entrenched itself in the continent's politics, starting in the Bush era and radically deepening now. What's happened on the Internet is only one symptom of this.
    - mod 7y ago
      I was a kid in the mid-late 90s, and I didn’t know a thing about echelon.
      - parasubvert 7y ago
        I was a (Canadian) kid in the blue boxing and codes scene in the early 90s. I lived through Operation Sundevil, the persecution of Phil Zimmerman and PGP users, the Clipper chip fiasco, and the V-chip with the 1996 communications act (which led to vast media consolidation). By then it was clear the government were going to surveil everything and try to censor as much as they could, and that this was completely bipartisan initiative that was driven by the unelected career senior public servants and private corporations in law enforcement, intelligence, and the security establishment. Individual politicians fought these efforts to bring some of them down (in the case of Clipper, a surprising mix from John Kerry , our 2004 US democratic Presidential candidate, to John Ashcroft (!) who later became GWB’s attorney general and completely changed positions , supporting STELLAR WIND which was revealed by Snowden). The EFF (formed after Sundevil and funded by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3’a fortunes), Wired magazine (much more iconoclastic in the 90s), 2600 magazine, Phrack, and the ACLU all did much to educate people about the risks. For a time, we listened. STELLAR WIND was when the 1960s-era Military SIGINT programs like ECHELON melded with broad domestic surveillance. The populace was too angry and fearful to stop it in the mid aughts. Similar to how the military industrial complex grew regardless of who was politically in charge, the security establishment has become an end onto itself that accelerated once terrorism scored a major blow on 9/11. Or maybe it was a glimpse of today’s cynicism of wanting unlimited power/deficits/surveillance/Executive orders/military options for your own party when it controls the presidency, but not the other party. There probably was a window in the 90s to mid aughts where things weren’t well under control, but funding after 9/11 fixed that. It will require an educated electorate and major mandate given to a future congress and president to undo this situation, and it likely will require sustainment over 3 or 4 terms to stick. Which is to say: The realm of remote possibility, but not likely. Adapt accordingly.
      - superkuh 7y ago
        I was a kid in the mid-late 90s and even wrote my senator about Echelon for a civics class project. It wasn't 'proven' but it was known. That senator, a few years later, was the only one to vote against the PATRIOT Act (Russ Feingold, WI).
      - harshreality 7y ago
        The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2]) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos [2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
        fossuser 7y ago
        You should read eyes in the sky: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/0544972007/ https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449... For some background about gorgon stare and WAMI (wide area motion imagery): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare Bizarrely enemy of the state directly provided the inspiration.
    - fit2rule 7y ago
      We knew about Echelon. We didn't know how bad the infiltration and implant stuff was, though. I mean, you just can't trust your computer any more. Even if its bought "brand new". NSA can put monitoring chips in it, mid-shipment. That killed computing - and the Internet - for a lot of people, in my sphere.
      - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
        I think we were all a bit naive in the 90s thinking that the sheer amount of data made each of us somewhat anonymous. The consequences of extremely cheap mass storage and very fast big data analytics didn't really sink in.
      - ghostpepper 7y ago
        I've spent my holiday break this year learning about open firmware, coreboot, and the secret computer that lives in every computer known as the intel management engine. I hope we can get to a place where we can trust our hardware again, but Intel needs to allow ME to be completely disabled or we need to find a replacement for Intel chips (from what I gather AMD is not much better). My next computer will likely be from Purism (or even a Chromebook, they run open firmware)
- harshreality 7y ago
  Was it all 9/11, or was it the tech bubble popping as well? I don't know how to disentangle those two things, culturally.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    Many things happened all in a couple years then -- Bush election, .com bubble pop, 9/11, the Seattle WTO protests, the turn of the milennium. To me it was kind of like the closing of a somewhat utopian-perspective era that started in the mid-90s.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Looking back it's clear to me that 9/11 changed everything in North American culture.

fit2rule 7y ago
It was definitely a watershed moment, but the Internet truly died with the Snowden revelations. Those who know, stopped trusting everything.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  We all knew about ECHELON by the mid-late 90s. 9/11 changed the tone of the culture. Not just on the Internet. Underground raves, for example, pretty much died out on account of the more serious powers and tone given to law enforcement. Air travel will never be the same. Traveling in general -- we Canadians used to be able to cross the border to the U.S. with just a driver's license. Awful Anti-Islamic hate speech is practically mainstream. An authoritarian streak has entrenched itself in the continent's politics, starting in the Bush era and radically deepening now. What's happened on the Internet is only one symptom of this.
  - mod 7y ago
    I was a kid in the mid-late 90s, and I didn’t know a thing about echelon.
    - parasubvert 7y ago
      I was a (Canadian) kid in the blue boxing and codes scene in the early 90s. I lived through Operation Sundevil, the persecution of Phil Zimmerman and PGP users, the Clipper chip fiasco, and the V-chip with the 1996 communications act (which led to vast media consolidation). By then it was clear the government were going to surveil everything and try to censor as much as they could, and that this was completely bipartisan initiative that was driven by the unelected career senior public servants and private corporations in law enforcement, intelligence, and the security establishment. Individual politicians fought these efforts to bring some of them down (in the case of Clipper, a surprising mix from John Kerry , our 2004 US democratic Presidential candidate, to John Ashcroft (!) who later became GWB’s attorney general and completely changed positions , supporting STELLAR WIND which was revealed by Snowden). The EFF (formed after Sundevil and funded by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3’a fortunes), Wired magazine (much more iconoclastic in the 90s), 2600 magazine, Phrack, and the ACLU all did much to educate people about the risks. For a time, we listened. STELLAR WIND was when the 1960s-era Military SIGINT programs like ECHELON melded with broad domestic surveillance. The populace was too angry and fearful to stop it in the mid aughts. Similar to how the military industrial complex grew regardless of who was politically in charge, the security establishment has become an end onto itself that accelerated once terrorism scored a major blow on 9/11. Or maybe it was a glimpse of today’s cynicism of wanting unlimited power/deficits/surveillance/Executive orders/military options for your own party when it controls the presidency, but not the other party. There probably was a window in the 90s to mid aughts where things weren’t well under control, but funding after 9/11 fixed that. It will require an educated electorate and major mandate given to a future congress and president to undo this situation, and it likely will require sustainment over 3 or 4 terms to stick. Which is to say: The realm of remote possibility, but not likely. Adapt accordingly.
    - superkuh 7y ago
      I was a kid in the mid-late 90s and even wrote my senator about Echelon for a civics class project. It wasn't 'proven' but it was known. That senator, a few years later, was the only one to vote against the PATRIOT Act (Russ Feingold, WI).
    - harshreality 7y ago
      The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2]) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos [2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
      - fossuser 7y ago
        You should read eyes in the sky: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/0544972007/ https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449... For some background about gorgon stare and WAMI (wide area motion imagery): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare Bizarrely enemy of the state directly provided the inspiration.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    We knew about Echelon. We didn't know how bad the infiltration and implant stuff was, though. I mean, you just can't trust your computer any more. Even if its bought "brand new". NSA can put monitoring chips in it, mid-shipment. That killed computing - and the Internet - for a lot of people, in my sphere.
    - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
      I think we were all a bit naive in the 90s thinking that the sheer amount of data made each of us somewhat anonymous. The consequences of extremely cheap mass storage and very fast big data analytics didn't really sink in.
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      I've spent my holiday break this year learning about open firmware, coreboot, and the secret computer that lives in every computer known as the intel management engine. I hope we can get to a place where we can trust our hardware again, but Intel needs to allow ME to be completely disabled or we need to find a replacement for Intel chips (from what I gather AMD is not much better). My next computer will likely be from Purism (or even a Chromebook, they run open firmware)
harshreality 7y ago
Was it all 9/11, or was it the tech bubble popping as well? I don't know how to disentangle those two things, culturally.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Many things happened all in a couple years then -- Bush election, .com bubble pop, 9/11, the Seattle WTO protests, the turn of the milennium. To me it was kind of like the closing of a somewhat utopian-perspective era that started in the mid-90s.