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> remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS? No, not at all. Before Snowden people regularly talked about the government spying
by eterm 5y ago
> remember before snowden how the gov spying on everyone was tinfoil hat BS?
No, not at all. Before Snowden people regularly talked about the government spying on everyone, we just didn't know any details of how it worked.
I remember there was absoultely no shortage of discussion among conspiracy theorists and regular people alike about "echelon" in the nineties for example.
Pretending that everyone thought the government was innocent and not spying on everyone before the Snowden leaks is an attempt to rewrite history and place a false narrative.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoWe were a minority discussing it, and if you brought it at a diner table you would have been the definitly labelled as paranoid. I think you are the one rewritting history here.
- _teyd 5y agoI’m not sure. I also definitely remember everyone thinking that it was very likely the government was spying internally also. The scale was a surprise, but not that spying happened internally. It was quite in the popular culture as well, with shows like X-Files and movies like Hackers and Sneakers and others touching on it. It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoX-files is a good exemple: Mulder is the architype of the odd uncle of the familly. Turns out he is right, but still, the entire world think he is bonker. We always knew about some spying, but if you have said something resembling to xkeyscore, it would have looked like science fiction. Even the patriot act: people believed it was temporary. In fact, they were happy it was voted. Somebody was doing something about 9/11. The voices against it were a minority. Worst, people talking about the mass spying were associated with 9/11 denyiers to remove credibility from them. One has to remember it was still a boomer world, meaning the perception from the public of what computer systems could do was still somewhat limited. Snowden revelations were in 2013. In 2010 my mother was still missing icons when trying to click on them and the last phone books arrived in her mailbox. I remember gently mocking her about it, but for her, it was easier to use.
- teddyh 5y agoThe belief that the government was actually spying on everyone was fringe. It was there, since it was obviously plausible, but basically nobody wanted to believe it, so most people dismissed it out of hand with something like “they would never do that”. No “regular people” knew what ECHELON was.
- asimpletune 5y agoI don't think it was fringe. There was the patriot act and secret courts and all that stuff. There were even people who tried to expose this stuff but failed because of a catch-22: to sue the govt for spying on you, you had to show standing, which you couldn't do, because the govt was secretly spying on you. That being said, I think a lot of people didn't believe in this stuff, which I guess makes it sort of fringe, but I think it was more like there was an attitude of laziness, technical ignorance, and a lot of nationalism to catch the terrorists.
- eldenwrong 5y ago
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoSecret courts were more debated than mass spying, so let's not mix that up.
- xvector 5y agoEven if conspiracists "knew all along," normies were genuinely enlightened by the Snowden revelations. That's why it was such a significant event.
- jl6 5y agoMy recollection was that the majority position was "of course the government can spy on us, that's how they solve crimes", without knowing, and perhaps without wanting to know, any details - and I see little evidence this has changed.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThere is a difference between being able to record your phone on demand, and PRISM.