7 ms·

‘A Partial Freedom’: What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives (2019)

75 points by prostoalex 6y ago

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
...not very much, it seems? But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.
jgilias 6y ago
It was a very weird moment when 'the bags' were published. On one hand it had to be done as there were conspiracy theories abound regarding who's in them. Intially pretty much everyone would log in to check if there's someone they know. Journalists would scour the records and then try to get the ones mentioned tell their story. At the end of the day though everyone understands that: 1. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned. 2. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing collaborators. 3. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone. So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the scum amongst us.
- AndyMcConachie 6y ago
  I wish they would do something similar for the FBI.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    You can get similar records for deceased people, which will give you a sense of what's in there. Isaac Asimov's FBI file is a case study [1, 2]. People fabricate stories out of jealousy, a desire for retribution, and generic Karen reasons [3]. Isaac Asimov seems to have had a neighbor or colleague in the latter category. People should study these files to develop robust procedural safeguards. [1] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi-file-on-isaac-asimov-8300/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi... [2] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/nov/07/isaac-asimov-fbi-file-ROBPROF/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/nov/07/isaac-asi... [3] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-how-the-german-public-used-and-abused-the-gestapo-1.2369837 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-h...
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  It was similar in Poland, but fortunately not all interesting records were gone, so in fact a lot of the scum got exposed.
  - jgilias 6y ago
    I think the difference is probably in the fact that Poland was a USSR satellite nation, much like DDR, while in Latvia after occupation they didn't set up a puppet state, but directly integrated us into the USSR. The implication here is that the regime secret services in Latvia not just collaborated extensively with Moscow, but were in fact part of the same organization. Meaning, that it is very likely that there existed instructions for emergency situations in which the most sensitive documentation needs to be shipped to Moscow.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I wonder how in a situation like that you can check the authenticity of archives. It must have been tempting for the KGB to plant incriminating material once they realised they were going to lose control of an archive - though they probably didn't have a huge amount of time to do that.
    - burntoutfire 6y ago
      In Poland the transition happened quite quickly (the authorities barely had time to burn a lot of the documents) so I don't think there was time to do any widespread document planting. Plus, if you plant some documents they'd had to be consistent with all other records or it would be found out upon investigation (there's a special state-run institute in Poland which hires a bunch of historians who analyze those records, so it's a real possibility).
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Yeah, I can't imagine that the KGB or the local security services ever thought they would really lose control of their archives. Though I imagine there would have been some effort to pull the files on anyone they wanted to keep as an intelligence asset in the long term.
lixtra 6y ago
> But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything. We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was going on. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  > "By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60." For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.
  - orbital-decay 6y ago
    I don't know why you're being downvoted, the comparison seems completely appropriate. Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of. An non-targeted informant network of that scale would be simply redundant and hard to maintain for their lookalikes these days.
    - aktenlage 6y ago
      It is a quantitative comparison of alternatives with a very different quality. Apples and oranges, if you will. The fact that both spy on private information does not mean that the information is roughly equivalent, nor the level of betrayal. Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        I did say 'contrast', not 'compare'. I agree the information is not roughly equivalent (the smartphone gathers much more data) and agree the level of betrayal is not there (as with the line about the advantages of making the landlord and the tenant the same person, there are also advantages to making the informer and the informee the same person). For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2] Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all? As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones. [1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage [2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on https://eos.com https://eos.com due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets. Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824 [3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..." https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-002-Public-Docs-Vol-II-2019-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and-Munitions-List-Dec-19.pdf https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-... [4] "What you mean we, kemo sabe?"
jdk2020 6y ago
May be employees of FAANG should read these archives. This will give them insight into how to design humane tech and avoid surveillance.
- jacobush 6y ago
  How the Devil reads the Bible...
- simonh 6y ago
  There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure if there's any truth to it.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Seems unlikely to me, but Trotsky does provide useful background for Goldstein's analysis of IngSoc. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.htm#ch06-4 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.ht... Fun fact: only about 13% of the world of 1984 lives under constant observation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900 Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.
dmix 6y ago
(2019) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366
leptoniscool 6y ago
Facebook and Google literally has over 300 GB of data on me
- tempsolution 6y ago
  Yeah, careful that they don't shoot you, frame you or make you disappear into a work camp in Siberia. If anything you should worry what the NSA has on you.
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  Not doubting that they have a comprehensive dossier, but that seems like an exaggeration to me. How did you come up with that figure?
  - ljf 6y ago
    No idea where that figure is from, but Google photos must have about 100 to 200 gb of photos and videos I've taken, plus the meta data - and I am not an avid photographer. Fb will then have another chunk, in the UK they used to also have an auto photo backup service at one point but I don't think I used it for long. Assuming the meta data they have on me won't be that big, but who knows - all my search and other data in the last 13 years will come to a fair size - but would guess that would be more 10s of gb - total finger in the air.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Yeah I get a full Google data dump every 3 months and it's about 350GB at the moment. Most of it is photos, but still.
    - thih9 6y ago
      With advances in AI and digital image analysis, I'd guess that long term these photos could provide lots of information too. Especially if google attempted to extract information from aggregated media of all users. Very offtopic, there's a sci-fi novella, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague , where one of the plot elements is a search for information through old photos and movies.
neilv 6y ago
> From then on, most of them have been kept under lock and key, first in a secure room in the Latvian parliament, and then in the Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism. In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?
- donw 6y ago
  I love the name. For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated. For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions. Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth. Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different." Not sure what the answers are here, though.
  - vtkacenko 6y ago
    Tolerance and a sense of shared responsibility, perhaps? If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Goldstein explicitly states the mission of Minitru is to enable (c) without the observed disincentive. I've found a number of correspondences between Oceania and Plato's Republic, but am unsure if there was any direct correspondence intended, or if Orwell's tragic satire of society at his boarding school[1] only indirectly implies them, due to ancient greek influence on edwardian mores. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys Being a second rate boarding school, they never read greek or latin works whole (and thus presumably were spared the most cynical, least copybook, bits about power, e.g. δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν?) but were merely "taught to the test."
reinis_zambergs 6y ago
Now Latvija gain freedom from Russia and become one of best counterey in the Europe Union and the World!
motohagiography 6y ago
What's different about these files and those of tech platforms is that the information itself didn't matter. It was the system of government itself to maintain the impression that there were secret informants everywhere and there was no way of knowing who was or wasn't. The point was to instill terror for its own sake, and to politically paralyze individuals, or "atomize," people into inaction. The randomness and absurdity of the system was by design, as the arbitrary nature of it had the effect of creating uncertainty and paranoia in every individual relationship. This secured the power of the party and the regime. The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror. Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," (http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readings/Hannah%20Arendt%20-%20Ideology%20and%20Terror.pdf http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...) Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.
fallingfrog 6y ago
I wonder whether the files stored in nsa and dhs databases on all of us will come out someday? We do get leaks and hints from time to time: https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1290384673789673472?s=21 https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/12903846737896734...

75 points by prostoalex 6y ago

...not very much, it seems? But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.

jgilias 6y ago

It was a very weird moment when 'the bags' were published. On one hand it had to be done as there were conspiracy theories abound regarding who's in them. Intially pretty much everyone would log in to check if there's someone they know. Journalists would scour the records and then try to get the ones mentioned tell their story. At the end of the day though everyone understands that: 1. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned. 2. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing collaborators. 3. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone. So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the scum amongst us.

AndyMcConachie 6y ago
I wish they would do something similar for the FBI.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  You can get similar records for deceased people, which will give you a sense of what's in there. Isaac Asimov's FBI file is a case study [1, 2]. People fabricate stories out of jealousy, a desire for retribution, and generic Karen reasons [3]. Isaac Asimov seems to have had a neighbor or colleague in the latter category. People should study these files to develop robust procedural safeguards. [1] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi-file-on-isaac-asimov-8300/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi... [2] https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/nov/07/isaac-asimov-fbi-file-ROBPROF/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/nov/07/isaac-asi... [3] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-how-the-german-public-used-and-abused-the-gestapo-1.2369837 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/careless-whispers-h...
burntoutfire 6y ago
It was similar in Poland, but fortunately not all interesting records were gone, so in fact a lot of the scum got exposed.
- jgilias 6y ago
  I think the difference is probably in the fact that Poland was a USSR satellite nation, much like DDR, while in Latvia after occupation they didn't set up a puppet state, but directly integrated us into the USSR. The implication here is that the regime secret services in Latvia not just collaborated extensively with Moscow, but were in fact part of the same organization. Meaning, that it is very likely that there existed instructions for emergency situations in which the most sensitive documentation needs to be shipped to Moscow.
- arethuza 6y ago
  I wonder how in a situation like that you can check the authenticity of archives. It must have been tempting for the KGB to plant incriminating material once they realised they were going to lose control of an archive - though they probably didn't have a huge amount of time to do that.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    In Poland the transition happened quite quickly (the authorities barely had time to burn a lot of the documents) so I don't think there was time to do any widespread document planting. Plus, if you plant some documents they'd had to be consistent with all other records or it would be found out upon investigation (there's a special state-run institute in Poland which hires a bunch of historians who analyze those records, so it's a real possibility).
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Yeah, I can't imagine that the KGB or the local security services ever thought they would really lose control of their archives. Though I imagine there would have been some effort to pull the files on anyone they wanted to keep as an intelligence asset in the long term.

lixtra 6y ago

> But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything. We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was going on. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

082349872349872 6y ago
> "By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60." For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.
- orbital-decay 6y ago
  I don't know why you're being downvoted, the comparison seems completely appropriate. Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of. An non-targeted informant network of that scale would be simply redundant and hard to maintain for their lookalikes these days.
  - aktenlage 6y ago
    It is a quantitative comparison of alternatives with a very different quality. Apples and oranges, if you will. The fact that both spy on private information does not mean that the information is roughly equivalent, nor the level of betrayal. Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      I did say 'contrast', not 'compare'. I agree the information is not roughly equivalent (the smartphone gathers much more data) and agree the level of betrayal is not there (as with the line about the advantages of making the landlord and the tenant the same person, there are also advantages to making the informer and the informee the same person). For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2] Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all? As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones. [1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage [2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on https://eos.com https://eos.com due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets. Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824 [3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..." https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-002-Public-Docs-Vol-II-2019-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and-Munitions-List-Dec-19.pdf https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-... [4] "What you mean we, kemo sabe?"

jdk2020 6y ago

May be employees of FAANG should read these archives. This will give them insight into how to design humane tech and avoid surveillance.

jacobush 6y ago
How the Devil reads the Bible...
simonh 6y ago
There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure if there's any truth to it.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Seems unlikely to me, but Trotsky does provide useful background for Goldstein's analysis of IngSoc. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.htm#ch06-4 https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.ht... Fun fact: only about 13% of the world of 1984 lives under constant observation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900 Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the "working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.

dmix 6y ago

(2019) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366

leptoniscool 6y ago

Facebook and Google literally has over 300 GB of data on me

tempsolution 6y ago
Yeah, careful that they don't shoot you, frame you or make you disappear into a work camp in Siberia. If anything you should worry what the NSA has on you.
stareatgoats 6y ago
Not doubting that they have a comprehensive dossier, but that seems like an exaggeration to me. How did you come up with that figure?
- ljf 6y ago
  No idea where that figure is from, but Google photos must have about 100 to 200 gb of photos and videos I've taken, plus the meta data - and I am not an avid photographer. Fb will then have another chunk, in the UK they used to also have an auto photo backup service at one point but I don't think I used it for long. Assuming the meta data they have on me won't be that big, but who knows - all my search and other data in the last 13 years will come to a fair size - but would guess that would be more 10s of gb - total finger in the air.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Yeah I get a full Google data dump every 3 months and it's about 350GB at the moment. Most of it is photos, but still.
  - thih9 6y ago
    With advances in AI and digital image analysis, I'd guess that long term these photos could provide lots of information too. Especially if google attempted to extract information from aggregated media of all users. Very offtopic, there's a sci-fi novella, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague , where one of the plot elements is a search for information through old photos and movies.

neilv 6y ago

> From then on, most of them have been kept under lock and key, first in a secure room in the Latvian parliament, and then in the Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism. In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance, and against what)?

donw 6y ago
I love the name. For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just flat-out complicated. For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change; and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions. Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the culture can't handle growth. Walking back from poor decisions is super-hard. The harder it is to get a law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity, rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling things back to where they were and trying something different." Not sure what the answers are here, though.
- vtkacenko 6y ago
  Tolerance and a sense of shared responsibility, perhaps? If all the participants feel like they took part of the educated decision regardless of outcome - they might be more tolerant towards walking it back. One could argue that would be part of the culture.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Goldstein explicitly states the mission of Minitru is to enable (c) without the observed disincentive. I've found a number of correspondences between Oceania and Plato's Republic, but am unsure if there was any direct correspondence intended, or if Orwell's tragic satire of society at his boarding school[1] only indirectly implies them, due to ancient greek influence on edwardian mores. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys Being a second rate boarding school, they never read greek or latin works whole (and thus presumably were spared the most cynical, least copybook, bits about power, e.g. δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν?) but were merely "taught to the test."

reinis_zambergs 6y ago

Now Latvija gain freedom from Russia and become one of best counterey in the Europe Union and the World!

motohagiography 6y ago

What's different about these files and those of tech platforms is that the information itself didn't matter. It was the system of government itself to maintain the impression that there were secret informants everywhere and there was no way of knowing who was or wasn't. The point was to instill terror for its own sake, and to politically paralyze individuals, or "atomize," people into inaction. The randomness and absurdity of the system was by design, as the arbitrary nature of it had the effect of creating uncertainty and paranoia in every individual relationship. This secured the power of the party and the regime. The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror. Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," (http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readings/Hannah%20Arendt%20-%20Ideology%20and%20Terror.pdf http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...) Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.

fallingfrog 6y ago

I wonder whether the files stored in nsa and dhs databases on all of us will come out someday? We do get leaks and hints from time to time: https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1290384673789673472?s=21 https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/12903846737896734...