9 ms·

How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

710 points by the-mitr 6mo ago

mannanj 6mo ago
So, this is an uncomfortable read and comes from my personal experience. I'm posting this here as I haven't yet found great outlets and support for what I experienced, and this thread seems like a good spot. Open to outreach and support and ideas from people. In 2021-2022 I was vocal about the CIA being a terrorist organization (I bet many people adjacently believe similar things and are silent) and this got me attention from them. I posted several things I learned from documentaries and on the web, and from my personal background I think it was enough to trigger something in their system. From that time onwards, people I could best describe as Agents w/behavior that matches what professional interrogators would do kept showing up at public events I was a part of and in the most terrifying scenario also infiltrated my public commune. There's an odd history with the FBI and possibly CIA and communes such as Osho the Bagawan (see, Netflix documentary) and I witnessed firsthand how deceptive, harmful and insidious this was. In some cases I believe substances were put in my food and drink, and in the cases matching that my body would later have adverse reactions with the agent's closely observing my behavior and consistently trying to elicit Black Web conversations. I had to flee and colocate to the familiarity of family and friends since, and only recently 3-years later have I been socializing my experience and writing to my congress and house representatives. That said, that was a month ago and they have yet to provide any substantive relief or support - I asked for assistance and guidance with investigating the intelligence community for misconduct as when they're doing this to Americans without any accountability, it undermines the integrity of our Country and I believe our national security. It brings into question who they are really serving. I'm no terrorist, even if I call you one and my skin color is brown and matches what the media-funded-by-the-CIA tells you to believe. I want this story documented and heard, believe what you will, though I leave you with the story that "We know our intelligence community does unethical things, its part of what we've given them the responsibility to do so we ourselves don't have to, and now when that unethical thing has happened to you or someone you know what do you do? What do you do when everyone you turn to for help gaslights you and tells you that surely did not happen? Find proof that the organization whose job it is to go undetected, did indeed do that thing to you." I ask for some empathy and understanding, please.
- mannanj 6mo ago
  2nd post here. When I share posts matching particular phrases and labels, on HN, I've noticed them get downvoted as though by an algorithm. Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
  - rkomorn 6mo ago
    > as though by an algorithm How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though? > Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these? On HN specifically? Yeah. On actually popular platforms? No.
    - direwolf20 6mo ago
      I run a HN voting algorithm and opinion manipulation system across a few hundred accounts - only a few on any individual post. I use residential proxies to prevent correlation. The account I'm using right now to confess this to you is one that's already been burned. Downvoting this comment is funny, because it's a burned account anyway, so not hurting me, and you want less people to know this fact about HN?
      - rkomorn 6mo ago
        Not sure what your point is?
      - alwa 6mo ago
        Do you represent an agency?
        Karrot_Kream 6mo ago
        Try it, it's really not that hard. I feel bad saying this and I don't do anything like this anymore but I did make a few accounts behind residential IPs that posted HN popular sentiments on topics that were actually factually incorrect and got a lot of upvotes pretty quickly. I stopped because I felt icky with how corrosive the whole thing could end up being. This was a while ago so not sure if new user sign up has become more difficult. It turns out that open web forums are mostly emotional places and often the most inflammatory or in group opinions rise to the top. With that knowledge, manipulation isn't that tough.
throwworhtthrow 6mo ago
Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.
- onei 6mo ago
  There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
  - autoexec 6mo ago
    While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life. That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes? At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly. Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable. Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
tedd4u 6mo ago
This is literally old news - contemporaneous with Snowden, Prism, etc. in early 2000s. Go read about the current Section 702 / FISA authorization renewal battle about which Senator Wyden recently said: “I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.” Some articles: https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveillance-fisa-court-congress-wyden/ https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveill... https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-fisa-spy-court-fbi-bill/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-...
- Calebp 6mo ago
  Well, this report to EFF happened in Jan 2006, and the Snowden/Prism leak happened in 2013, so at the time, it was in fact not "old news". I don't think Prism was even in operation until 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
  - dylan604 6mo ago
    ECHELON pre-dates Prism by several decades
- Barbing 6mo ago
  Thank you for the links! It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.
flordiaman2026 6mo ago
Same stuff different day. The United State's laws do not allow for direct domestic spying or something to that effect so they use Five Eyes anglosphere intelligence alliance marketplace as a loop hole. Since Reed Elsevier plc aka "RELX" has purchased LexisNexis who had purchased Seisint, Inc and the technology for Flordia's Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program "MATRIX", which was shut down due to privacy concerns by congress, it is only logical that the data aggregation technology is being used in full force now. There seems to be no other way but to allow 100% technology and communication introspection by the government to stop terrorism.
firebot 6mo ago
Kevin Mitnick also discovered this.. ages ago.
- esafak 6mo ago
  Source?
  - firebot 6mo ago
    Hackers 2: operation takedown is based on a true story. https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin-mitnick-part-2 https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin... > his brother introduced him to a hacker named Eric Heinz, who told him about a mysterious piece of equipment he came across while breaking into Pacific Bell: SAS, a testing system that allowed its user to listen in on all the calls going through the telephone network. SAS proved to be too great of a temptation for Mitnick, who desperately wanted to wield the power that the testing system could afford him. Then of course other people started finding similar black boxes at other telecoms and data centers. Ghosts in the wire (his book) mainly focuses on the FBI using the system for wiretaps. And if they can, I'm sure the NSA could just as easily.
    - esafak 6mo ago
      Thanks. SAS = Switched Access Services
    - razakel 6mo ago
      Even an office PBX has listen, whisper and barge. Why wouldn't a telco-grade switch have it?
      - firebot 6mo ago
        Sure. Nothing surprising in and of itself. But allowing law enforcement to access that system without a warrant is a clear 4th amendment violation.
GeekyBear 6mo ago
The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything. There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically. > President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans." "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380/obama-to-leno-there-is-no-spying-on-americans https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
- krunck 6mo ago
  That's the what's required to make propaganda and manipulation work the best.
- Spooky23 6mo ago
  Ironically from the perspective of 2026, the actual "conservative" conservatives were the key opponents. The "total information awareness" and national ID efforts were really killed by the conservatives in congress. The "neocons" and moderate/conservative democrats were mostly fine with both.
  - Silamoth 6mo ago
    What does national ID have to do with government surveillance?
    - Spooky23 6mo ago
      Why do you think people are having a bird over age verification? Or LinkedIn profiling browsers? Tying chain of custody of online actions to identity makes data incredibly valuable information.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  > The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything. Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political? The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.
rsingel 6mo ago
This is a great behind-the-scenes look at the NSA-Hepting case. Can't wait to read Cohn's book. Also RIP Mark Klein. A true American hero who never tried to turn his whistle-blowing into becoming a celebrity.
- bsimpson 6mo ago
  Sounds like he lived to be 80 and died recently of cancer. That's a better outcome than I'd feared.
jperoutek 6mo ago
Didn't see it in the actual text of the article, but as a caption of one of the images. The actual book this is excerpted from is Privacy's Defender by Cindy Cohn https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/
- evan_a_a 6mo ago
  Aka the Executive Director of the EFF.
  - rsingel 6mo ago
    Former. She stepped down
    - evan_a_a 6mo ago
      She has not yet left her role, and they haven't named a successor. >The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer https://www.eff.org/press/releases/executive-director-cindy-cohn-will-step-down-after-25-years-eff https://www.eff.org/press/releases/executive-director-cindy-...
rdevilla 6mo ago
Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex. It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
- railgunmerlin 6mo ago
  Are we pretending this isn't a global phenomenon?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rdevilla 6mo ago
    Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-answered-1.5609691 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
    - mcsniff 6mo ago
      If a shop won't accept cash, I just leave.
      - rdevilla 6mo ago
        You weren't transacting at all in Toronto during COVID then. This is the endgame of surveillance capitalism: submission, or opting out. Few can, or care enough to, do the latter.
        lolstarz 6mo ago
        I'm as concerned about the surveillance state as anyone but let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too and it was still true that for many, many places cash was fine. Cash discounts are super common in various parts of the city and this was still true during COVID.
brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
Who runs this backbone now? CloudFlare?
- uncircle 6mo ago
  Downvoted for mentioning the most likely candidate for MITM at scale tells you all you need to know about HN’s understanding of government surveillance.
Vaslo 6mo ago
The HN headline really should use the title of the article. Almost no one knows what room 641F means.
HocusLocus 6mo ago
I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.
zuzululu 6mo ago
Instances like this is a powerful statement that truly free and democratic governance is not sustainable in the long run with technological advancements. We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing. The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
- blurbleblurble 6mo ago
  They're sustainable but require major cultural revolution to keep up.
  - moron4hire 6mo ago
    That's what Jefferson meant by "blood of Patriots."
bsimpson 6mo ago
So much of surveillance should be blatantly illegal/unconstitutional, but I really don't understand how there can be such a thing as documents that are illegal to possess.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  To think a group of people are not going to expend effort in learning about their adversaries is just naive at best. At some point, those adversaries are going to infiltrate your people. The only way to attempt to monitor them would mean you now have the means to monitor your own people. I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.
wawaWiWa2 6mo ago
If the documents are classified. And you dont know the levels of it. I would never hand them over. As i dont know who is cleared. And wait for the court to decide what should i do with them. Or meet the president and hand them personally. By the good semeriton, should protect the lawyes, as they did their best to hold the secret. I am no lawyer .
anonymousiam 6mo ago
"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI." It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
- dylan604 6mo ago
  > Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government. You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
  - anonymousiam 6mo ago
    I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world). Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer. Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got. (Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.) Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing. Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
throw0101c 6mo ago
See also perhaps: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
lysace 6mo ago
One of the few good outcomes: Mark Klein never faced a lawsuit or criminal charges from the government, AT&T or the justice system in general for his disclosure.
nickburns 6mo ago
arpwatch running on an edge router of mine tells me that there's a host with a DoD-registered IP address connected to my (major US) ISP network segment, which I know for a fact contains both business and residential subscribers. I port scanned it when I first discovered it just to say 'hello', and I have little doubt that a dragnet surveillance apparatus lives on the other side of that firewall. Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  The DoD also just does an incredible amount of stuff. It is entirely possible that there's just a satellite office for this or that nearby.
  - nickburns 6mo ago
    Long tentacles indeed.
- ZephyrP 6mo ago
  A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dummy host; I imagine that arpwatch takes a view of network security focused on classifying frames and less on connection behavior.
- bigfatkitten 6mo ago
  This post makes no sense whatsoever, for a whole lot of reasons. 1. If this were some covertly installed device, would it have a government attributable IP address? 2. If it were being used for surveillance, why would it be visible at all, instead of being on the other side of a passive optical tap? 3. If it’s really on the same broadcast domain as you, and on some other IP subnet, how can you talk to it? 4. You can configure a device on a network to use any IP address. Why do you think that means it belongs to the government?
troyvit 6mo ago
Wowwww I didn't know what Room 641A meant, but when I clicked on the link and saw the image of the door to the server closet it brought it all back. Funny how people remember things.
aanet 6mo ago
Gripping! Adding this to my tsundoku
hungryhobbit 6mo ago
Isn't AI both the problem ... AND the solution here? True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!
- trinsic2 6mo ago
  What about the chat conversation from you asking it to write it?
  - hungryhobbit 6mo ago
    Local LLM.
- autoexec 6mo ago
  AI doesn't seem like it'd be much help at all. Unless the AI is 100% offline and locally hosted there's a record there. Also generating text isn't really the hard part of being anonymous. You also have publish it somewhere, and somewhere it will be seen, and that also means a trail back to you. Most of the time the information you have to share, especially anything verifiable, will be traceable back to you. That's the problem with knowing something very few people have the access to know. Anyone who does know will be one of a very small number of people. If what you're telling the public isn't at least somewhat verifiable you're just another anonymous/random person spewing unconfirmable conspiracies and you should expect to be treated that way. No respectable publisher is going to print crazy unsourced manuscripts filled with unverifiable claims. The internet is already filled with people doing that who rightly get ignored making that a very crowded space. The ability for AI to push out massive amounts of unconfirmable conspiracies at rates that were previously difficult to achieve is only going to make the problem worse.
  - Barbing 6mo ago
    I maintain top secrecy by following a modified Osama playbook. Compose in air gap, pass flash drive to courier, but have the cousins skip the vaccination program.
ihaveanNDA 6mo ago
[dead]
ghostly_s 6mo ago
"Privacy's Defender" eh? Rather grandiose title considering that defense has been an abject historical failure. (Not to suggest the EFF has not waged a valiant effort regardless.)
badlibrarian 6mo ago
I suppose this is as good a place as any to dump this. In 2002, I was hosting a 1U server in downtown Los Angeles. No cages, minimal security, pretty sure I just walked in. Crash carts sat unattended, usually a screen filled with porn and a cable running on the floor to the nearest tap. I got the feeling that many of the techs were hosting porn sites as a side gig. On my second visit, in plain sight, was new construction. A corner of the room with what looked like four inch fiber bundles going in and out. One dusty, one fresh. Taped dry-wall, unpainted. If the door wasn't so fancy you'd never look twice. Is that...? Dude grimaced and nodded.
- dr_dshiv 6mo ago
  Is that… what?? Is this technical innuendo?
  - ShroudedNight 6mo ago
    I assume the implication was an intercept facility.
    - badlibrarian 6mo ago
      I think it was 600 W 7 St. A quick Google of NSA tap plus that address turns up serious press reports from 7 or 8 years ago. It was clearly put up in a hurry. But I can't imagine I was the only one who noticed. I was just some dumbass serving a music site and it was totally obvious something was up.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo ago
  >fiber bundles going in and out I worked data centers for my IBEW apprenticeships — during Snowden revelations — and it was definitely "confusing" knowing that all the technology they said didn't exist existed. "Black, LLC" didn't officially exist/make connections among our clientele. Unless you were actively vandalizing our public infrastructure, I never questioned anybody's presence/activities on our datafloors. Probably security is tons better now, but the social entries are still most-commonable.
- 6mo ago
anildash 6mo ago
Shameless plug (as a board member): If you are interested in the book that this is from, a great way to pick it up is on the EFF website, where your purchase helps EFF keep up the fight for privacy. https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender
- contingencies 6mo ago
  Thanks for your work.
- Barbing 6mo ago
  Clicked on your site in your bio “This is a blog about how culture is made, continuously updated since 1999 for free, with no ads or trackers.” Just the definition of cool for a nerd like me, you all are. Anyone who is more employed than me, highly recommend finding a way to support the EFF! They have proven themselves to be a firewall between the way we want to live our lives online and countless antisocial attempts to make like seven people richer, etc..
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    I’ve volunteered with them before and it was great. Really felt like I was rolling up my sleeves and doing something (I went out and did interviews with small business owners about net neutrality years ago).
- Barbing 6mo ago
  “For individuals like you and me, privacy is fundamentally for control—for giving us control over who can know what we do, where we do it, and who we do it with. In that way it is fundamental to our individual safety, dignity, and human rights. But here’s the broader, less talked about thing that privacy is for—one that has animated my work for thirty years: privacy is a check on power. Privacy limits the power of individuals over each other. It limits the power of governments over us. It also limits the power of corporations over us. Privacy allows people to protect themselves while creating a space to think, connect, communicate, share, and most critically, organize for change.” Excerpt From Privacy's Defender, Cindy Cohn - hooked here just a few pages in
throwawayk7h 6mo ago
The article ends with "we were all a little worried." Is this where it's supposed to end? Feels incomplete. I'm hooked anyway.
- mshockwave 6mo ago
  it's a book excerpt
throwawayk7h 6mo ago
Even if you're in favour of surveillance, why does the surveillance also need to be secret?
kstenerud 6mo ago
"With all due respect, Cindy, you don’t know if they are classified since they don’t have to have markings and can still be classified. Only we can tell. And if they are classified, you are likely in trouble." That's awfully convenient. Impossible to check if something's classified, but you can still go to jail over it.
- amelius 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - maqp 6mo ago
    In 2006?
    - pluc 6mo ago
      AI has always been around. America has always been at war with Eurasia.
    - latexr 6mo ago
      If a link is submitted to HN and no one comments that you should use an LLM, is it even a real thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it,_does_it_make_a_sound%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
- torh 6mo ago
  It's like a reverse get out of jail free card. Do the other party have evidence against you? Declare classified documents and they go to jail instead of you.
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    But if you pile the classified documents up in their bathroom, they’ll be fine.
    - 6mo ago
corvad 6mo ago
This was an amazing read for me, so much so I bought the book and am enjoying reading it. It's quite an interesting read and I'm learning quite a bit more than I knew about the mission EFF stands for.
veltas 6mo ago
Back then the EFF cared about privacy, now they care about virtue signalling.
- gpvos 6mo ago
  What do you even mean?
  - veltas 6mo ago
    Re their decision to leave X.
    - gpvos 5mo ago
      Oh, that. Should have done it sooner.
NoSalt 6mo ago
Don't you just LOVE how the powers that be make their own rules as they go along??? > "since they don’t have to have markings and can still be classified"

710 points by the-mitr 6mo ago

So, this is an uncomfortable read and comes from my personal experience. I'm posting this here as I haven't yet found great outlets and support for what I experienced, and this thread seems like a good spot. Open to outreach and support and ideas from people. In 2021-2022 I was vocal about the CIA being a terrorist organization (I bet many people adjacently believe similar things and are silent) and this got me attention from them. I posted several things I learned from documentaries and on the web, and from my personal background I think it was enough to trigger something in their system. From that time onwards, people I could best describe as Agents w/behavior that matches what professional interrogators would do kept showing up at public events I was a part of and in the most terrifying scenario also infiltrated my public commune. There's an odd history with the FBI and possibly CIA and communes such as Osho the Bagawan (see, Netflix documentary) and I witnessed firsthand how deceptive, harmful and insidious this was. In some cases I believe substances were put in my food and drink, and in the cases matching that my body would later have adverse reactions with the agent's closely observing my behavior and consistently trying to elicit Black Web conversations. I had to flee and colocate to the familiarity of family and friends since, and only recently 3-years later have I been socializing my experience and writing to my congress and house representatives. That said, that was a month ago and they have yet to provide any substantive relief or support - I asked for assistance and guidance with investigating the intelligence community for misconduct as when they're doing this to Americans without any accountability, it undermines the integrity of our Country and I believe our national security. It brings into question who they are really serving. I'm no terrorist, even if I call you one and my skin color is brown and matches what the media-funded-by-the-CIA tells you to believe. I want this story documented and heard, believe what you will, though I leave you with the story that "We know our intelligence community does unethical things, its part of what we've given them the responsibility to do so we ourselves don't have to, and now when that unethical thing has happened to you or someone you know what do you do? What do you do when everyone you turn to for help gaslights you and tells you that surely did not happen? Find proof that the organization whose job it is to go undetected, did indeed do that thing to you." I ask for some empathy and understanding, please.

mannanj 6mo ago
2nd post here. When I share posts matching particular phrases and labels, on HN, I've noticed them get downvoted as though by an algorithm. Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
- rkomorn 6mo ago
  > as though by an algorithm How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though? > Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these? On HN specifically? Yeah. On actually popular platforms? No.
  - direwolf20 6mo ago
    I run a HN voting algorithm and opinion manipulation system across a few hundred accounts - only a few on any individual post. I use residential proxies to prevent correlation. The account I'm using right now to confess this to you is one that's already been burned. Downvoting this comment is funny, because it's a burned account anyway, so not hurting me, and you want less people to know this fact about HN?
    - rkomorn 6mo ago
      Not sure what your point is?
    - alwa 6mo ago
      Do you represent an agency?
      - Karrot_Kream 6mo ago
        Try it, it's really not that hard. I feel bad saying this and I don't do anything like this anymore but I did make a few accounts behind residential IPs that posted HN popular sentiments on topics that were actually factually incorrect and got a lot of upvotes pretty quickly. I stopped because I felt icky with how corrosive the whole thing could end up being. This was a while ago so not sure if new user sign up has become more difficult. It turns out that open web forums are mostly emotional places and often the most inflammatory or in group opinions rise to the top. With that knowledge, manipulation isn't that tough.

throwworhtthrow 6mo ago

Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.

onei 6mo ago
There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
- autoexec 6mo ago
  While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life. That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes? At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly. Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable. Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.

tedd4u 6mo ago

This is literally old news - contemporaneous with Snowden, Prism, etc. in early 2000s. Go read about the current Section 702 / FISA authorization renewal battle about which Senator Wyden recently said: “I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.” Some articles: https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveillance-fisa-court-congress-wyden/ https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveill... https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-fisa-spy-court-fbi-bill/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-...

Calebp 6mo ago
Well, this report to EFF happened in Jan 2006, and the Snowden/Prism leak happened in 2013, so at the time, it was in fact not "old news". I don't think Prism was even in operation until 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
- dylan604 6mo ago
  ECHELON pre-dates Prism by several decades
Barbing 6mo ago
Thank you for the links! It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.

flordiaman2026 6mo ago

Same stuff different day. The United State's laws do not allow for direct domestic spying or something to that effect so they use Five Eyes anglosphere intelligence alliance marketplace as a loop hole. Since Reed Elsevier plc aka "RELX" has purchased LexisNexis who had purchased Seisint, Inc and the technology for Flordia's Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program "MATRIX", which was shut down due to privacy concerns by congress, it is only logical that the data aggregation technology is being used in full force now. There seems to be no other way but to allow 100% technology and communication introspection by the government to stop terrorism.

firebot 6mo ago

Kevin Mitnick also discovered this.. ages ago.

esafak 6mo ago
Source?
- firebot 6mo ago
  Hackers 2: operation takedown is based on a true story. https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin-mitnick-part-2 https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin... > his brother introduced him to a hacker named Eric Heinz, who told him about a mysterious piece of equipment he came across while breaking into Pacific Bell: SAS, a testing system that allowed its user to listen in on all the calls going through the telephone network. SAS proved to be too great of a temptation for Mitnick, who desperately wanted to wield the power that the testing system could afford him. Then of course other people started finding similar black boxes at other telecoms and data centers. Ghosts in the wire (his book) mainly focuses on the FBI using the system for wiretaps. And if they can, I'm sure the NSA could just as easily.
  - esafak 6mo ago
    Thanks. SAS = Switched Access Services
  - razakel 6mo ago
    Even an office PBX has listen, whisper and barge. Why wouldn't a telco-grade switch have it?
    - firebot 6mo ago
      Sure. Nothing surprising in and of itself. But allowing law enforcement to access that system without a warrant is a clear 4th amendment violation.

GeekyBear 6mo ago

The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything. There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically. > President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans." "We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380/obama-to-leno-there-is-no-spying-on-americans https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...

krunck 6mo ago
That's the what's required to make propaganda and manipulation work the best.
Spooky23 6mo ago
Ironically from the perspective of 2026, the actual "conservative" conservatives were the key opponents. The "total information awareness" and national ID efforts were really killed by the conservatives in congress. The "neocons" and moderate/conservative democrats were mostly fine with both.
- Silamoth 6mo ago
  What does national ID have to do with government surveillance?
  - Spooky23 6mo ago
    Why do you think people are having a bird over age verification? Or LinkedIn profiling browsers? Tying chain of custody of online actions to identity makes data incredibly valuable information.
bigyabai 6mo ago
> The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything. Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political? The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.

rsingel 6mo ago

This is a great behind-the-scenes look at the NSA-Hepting case. Can't wait to read Cohn's book. Also RIP Mark Klein. A true American hero who never tried to turn his whistle-blowing into becoming a celebrity.

bsimpson 6mo ago
Sounds like he lived to be 80 and died recently of cancer. That's a better outcome than I'd feared.

jperoutek 6mo ago

Didn't see it in the actual text of the article, but as a caption of one of the images. The actual book this is excerpted from is Privacy's Defender by Cindy Cohn https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/

evan_a_a 6mo ago
Aka the Executive Director of the EFF.
- rsingel 6mo ago
  Former. She stepped down
  - evan_a_a 6mo ago
    She has not yet left her role, and they haven't named a successor. >The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer https://www.eff.org/press/releases/executive-director-cindy-cohn-will-step-down-after-25-years-eff https://www.eff.org/press/releases/executive-director-cindy-...

rdevilla 6mo ago

Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex. It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.

railgunmerlin 6mo ago
Are we pretending this isn't a global phenomenon?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- rdevilla 6mo ago
  Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]. [0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-answered-1.5609691 https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
  - mcsniff 6mo ago
    If a shop won't accept cash, I just leave.
    - rdevilla 6mo ago
      You weren't transacting at all in Toronto during COVID then. This is the endgame of surveillance capitalism: submission, or opting out. Few can, or care enough to, do the latter.
      - lolstarz 6mo ago
        I'm as concerned about the surveillance state as anyone but let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too and it was still true that for many, many places cash was fine. Cash discounts are super common in various parts of the city and this was still true during COVID.

brcmthrowaway 6mo ago

Who runs this backbone now? CloudFlare?

uncircle 6mo ago
Downvoted for mentioning the most likely candidate for MITM at scale tells you all you need to know about HN’s understanding of government surveillance.

Vaslo 6mo ago

The HN headline really should use the title of the article. Almost no one knows what room 641F means.

HocusLocus 6mo ago

I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.

zuzululu 6mo ago

Instances like this is a powerful statement that truly free and democratic governance is not sustainable in the long run with technological advancements. We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing. The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.

blurbleblurble 6mo ago
They're sustainable but require major cultural revolution to keep up.
- moron4hire 6mo ago
  That's what Jefferson meant by "blood of Patriots."

bsimpson 6mo ago

So much of surveillance should be blatantly illegal/unconstitutional, but I really don't understand how there can be such a thing as documents that are illegal to possess.

dylan604 6mo ago
To think a group of people are not going to expend effort in learning about their adversaries is just naive at best. At some point, those adversaries are going to infiltrate your people. The only way to attempt to monitor them would mean you now have the means to monitor your own people. I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.

wawaWiWa2 6mo ago

If the documents are classified. And you dont know the levels of it. I would never hand them over. As i dont know who is cleared. And wait for the court to decide what should i do with them. Or meet the president and hand them personally. By the good semeriton, should protect the lawyes, as they did their best to hold the secret. I am no lawyer .

anonymousiam 6mo ago

"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI." It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.

dylan604 6mo ago
> Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government. You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
- anonymousiam 6mo ago
  I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world). Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer. Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got. (Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.) Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing. Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.

throw0101c 6mo ago

See also perhaps: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

lysace 6mo ago

One of the few good outcomes: Mark Klein never faced a lawsuit or criminal charges from the government, AT&T or the justice system in general for his disclosure.

nickburns 6mo ago

arpwatch running on an edge router of mine tells me that there's a host with a DoD-registered IP address connected to my (major US) ISP network segment, which I know for a fact contains both business and residential subscribers. I port scanned it when I first discovered it just to say 'hello', and I have little doubt that a dragnet surveillance apparatus lives on the other side of that firewall. Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!

colechristensen 6mo ago
The DoD also just does an incredible amount of stuff. It is entirely possible that there's just a satellite office for this or that nearby.
- nickburns 6mo ago
  Long tentacles indeed.
ZephyrP 6mo ago
A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dummy host; I imagine that arpwatch takes a view of network security focused on classifying frames and less on connection behavior.
bigfatkitten 6mo ago
This post makes no sense whatsoever, for a whole lot of reasons. 1. If this were some covertly installed device, would it have a government attributable IP address? 2. If it were being used for surveillance, why would it be visible at all, instead of being on the other side of a passive optical tap? 3. If it’s really on the same broadcast domain as you, and on some other IP subnet, how can you talk to it? 4. You can configure a device on a network to use any IP address. Why do you think that means it belongs to the government?

troyvit 6mo ago

Wowwww I didn't know what Room 641A meant, but when I clicked on the link and saw the image of the door to the server closet it brought it all back. Funny how people remember things.

aanet 6mo ago

Gripping! Adding this to my tsundoku

hungryhobbit 6mo ago

Isn't AI both the problem ... AND the solution here? True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!

trinsic2 6mo ago
What about the chat conversation from you asking it to write it?
- hungryhobbit 6mo ago
  Local LLM.
autoexec 6mo ago
AI doesn't seem like it'd be much help at all. Unless the AI is 100% offline and locally hosted there's a record there. Also generating text isn't really the hard part of being anonymous. You also have publish it somewhere, and somewhere it will be seen, and that also means a trail back to you. Most of the time the information you have to share, especially anything verifiable, will be traceable back to you. That's the problem with knowing something very few people have the access to know. Anyone who does know will be one of a very small number of people. If what you're telling the public isn't at least somewhat verifiable you're just another anonymous/random person spewing unconfirmable conspiracies and you should expect to be treated that way. No respectable publisher is going to print crazy unsourced manuscripts filled with unverifiable claims. The internet is already filled with people doing that who rightly get ignored making that a very crowded space. The ability for AI to push out massive amounts of unconfirmable conspiracies at rates that were previously difficult to achieve is only going to make the problem worse.
- Barbing 6mo ago
  I maintain top secrecy by following a modified Osama playbook. Compose in air gap, pass flash drive to courier, but have the cousins skip the vaccination program.

ihaveanNDA 6mo ago

[dead]

ghostly_s 6mo ago

"Privacy's Defender" eh? Rather grandiose title considering that defense has been an abject historical failure. (Not to suggest the EFF has not waged a valiant effort regardless.)

badlibrarian 6mo ago

I suppose this is as good a place as any to dump this. In 2002, I was hosting a 1U server in downtown Los Angeles. No cages, minimal security, pretty sure I just walked in. Crash carts sat unattended, usually a screen filled with porn and a cable running on the floor to the nearest tap. I got the feeling that many of the techs were hosting porn sites as a side gig. On my second visit, in plain sight, was new construction. A corner of the room with what looked like four inch fiber bundles going in and out. One dusty, one fresh. Taped dry-wall, unpainted. If the door wasn't so fancy you'd never look twice. Is that...? Dude grimaced and nodded.

dr_dshiv 6mo ago
Is that… what?? Is this technical innuendo?
- ShroudedNight 6mo ago
  I assume the implication was an intercept facility.
  - badlibrarian 6mo ago
    I think it was 600 W 7 St. A quick Google of NSA tap plus that address turns up serious press reports from 7 or 8 years ago. It was clearly put up in a hurry. But I can't imagine I was the only one who noticed. I was just some dumbass serving a music site and it was totally obvious something was up.
ProllyInfamous 6mo ago
>fiber bundles going in and out I worked data centers for my IBEW apprenticeships — during Snowden revelations — and it was definitely "confusing" knowing that all the technology they said didn't exist existed. "Black, LLC" didn't officially exist/make connections among our clientele. Unless you were actively vandalizing our public infrastructure, I never questioned anybody's presence/activities on our datafloors. Probably security is tons better now, but the social entries are still most-commonable.
6mo ago

anildash 6mo ago

Shameless plug (as a board member): If you are interested in the book that this is from, a great way to pick it up is on the EFF website, where your purchase helps EFF keep up the fight for privacy. https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender

contingencies 6mo ago
Thanks for your work.
Barbing 6mo ago
Clicked on your site in your bio “This is a blog about how culture is made, continuously updated since 1999 for free, with no ads or trackers.” Just the definition of cool for a nerd like me, you all are. Anyone who is more employed than me, highly recommend finding a way to support the EFF! They have proven themselves to be a firewall between the way we want to live our lives online and countless antisocial attempts to make like seven people richer, etc..
- Forgeties79 6mo ago
  I’ve volunteered with them before and it was great. Really felt like I was rolling up my sleeves and doing something (I went out and did interviews with small business owners about net neutrality years ago).
Barbing 6mo ago
“For individuals like you and me, privacy is fundamentally for control—for giving us control over who can know what we do, where we do it, and who we do it with. In that way it is fundamental to our individual safety, dignity, and human rights. But here’s the broader, less talked about thing that privacy is for—one that has animated my work for thirty years: privacy is a check on power. Privacy limits the power of individuals over each other. It limits the power of governments over us. It also limits the power of corporations over us. Privacy allows people to protect themselves while creating a space to think, connect, communicate, share, and most critically, organize for change.” Excerpt From Privacy's Defender, Cindy Cohn - hooked here just a few pages in

throwawayk7h 6mo ago

The article ends with "we were all a little worried." Is this where it's supposed to end? Feels incomplete. I'm hooked anyway.

mshockwave 6mo ago
it's a book excerpt

throwawayk7h 6mo ago

Even if you're in favour of surveillance, why does the surveillance also need to be secret?

kstenerud 6mo ago

"With all due respect, Cindy, you don’t know if they are classified since they don’t have to have markings and can still be classified. Only we can tell. And if they are classified, you are likely in trouble." That's awfully convenient. Impossible to check if something's classified, but you can still go to jail over it.

amelius 6mo ago
[flagged]
- maqp 6mo ago
  In 2006?
  - pluc 6mo ago
    AI has always been around. America has always been at war with Eurasia.
  - latexr 6mo ago
    If a link is submitted to HN and no one comments that you should use an LLM, is it even a real thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it,_does_it_make_a_sound%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
torh 6mo ago
It's like a reverse get out of jail free card. Do the other party have evidence against you? Declare classified documents and they go to jail instead of you.
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  But if you pile the classified documents up in their bathroom, they’ll be fine.
  - 6mo ago

corvad 6mo ago

This was an amazing read for me, so much so I bought the book and am enjoying reading it. It's quite an interesting read and I'm learning quite a bit more than I knew about the mission EFF stands for.

veltas 6mo ago

Back then the EFF cared about privacy, now they care about virtue signalling.

gpvos 6mo ago
What do you even mean?
- veltas 6mo ago
  Re their decision to leave X.
  - gpvos 5mo ago
    Oh, that. Should have done it sooner.

NoSalt 6mo ago

Don't you just LOVE how the powers that be make their own rules as they go along??? > "since they don’t have to have markings and can still be classified"