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The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed fu

The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed funny then, too.

tptacek 13y ago
No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to see a sober, expansive concern about NSA surveillance. And Schneier's writing was far more carefully considered than, say, Usenet. For fuck's sake, the most popular show on television centered on government conspiracies. The millenials did not invent distrust of the government.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - busterarm 13y ago
    > Some deleted comment about tv wags joking about conspiracy people wearing tinfoil hats. If people were relying on television entertainers for informed political opinions in the '90s, they were already hopelessly lost. It's hardly even 'back in the day' as you said. Network was released in theaters in 1976.
- dijit 13y ago
  Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood. Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
  - tptacek 13y ago
    And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
    - stox 13y ago
      Let us not forget another great 70's flick, 3 Days of the Condor.
- mverwijs 13y ago
  > No we did not. The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting. Invent distrust? Of course not. However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world. And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it? Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were. Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    You weren't just naive. You were anomalously naive. It's funny you should mention PGP: the 1990s were the time of the crypto-wars, which were in part sparked by PGP. Remember "this t-shirt is a munition"? You couldn't even sell products with crypto in them without jumping through hoops.
    - mverwijs 13y ago
      > You were anomalously naive. Now that type of thinking I find naive.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        If you had to break the last 20 years into three time periods: (!) "post Snowden", (2) "post-9/11", and (3) "post PGP", sensitivity to government surveillance would rank 1-3-2. The NSA was a bigger deal in the 1990s than it was in the 2000s, even after the AT&T "Room 101" disclosure.
        rsingel 13y ago
        Technically, Room 641a. But, otherwise, spot-on.
busterarm 13y ago
Maybe it makes me a looney but I was educated about things like COINTELPRO and TEMPEST before I was a teenager and the idea that a government wouldn't be doing these things is more surprising to me than the leaks that they are.

The sad sad thing is, though, that in the '90s we made these jokes about surveillance cameras, internet taps, government-written-viruses, etc..etc... Seemed funny then, too.

tptacek 13y ago

No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to see a sober, expansive concern about NSA surveillance. And Schneier's writing was far more carefully considered than, say, Usenet. For fuck's sake, the most popular show on television centered on government conspiracies. The millenials did not invent distrust of the government.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- busterarm 13y ago
  > Some deleted comment about tv wags joking about conspiracy people wearing tinfoil hats. If people were relying on television entertainers for informed political opinions in the '90s, they were already hopelessly lost. It's hardly even 'back in the day' as you said. Network was released in theaters in 1976.
dijit 13y ago
Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood. Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"
- tptacek 13y ago
  And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.
  - stox 13y ago
    Let us not forget another great 70's flick, 3 Days of the Condor.
mverwijs 13y ago
> No we did not. The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting. Invent distrust? Of course not. However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world. And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it? Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were. Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.
- tptacek 13y ago
  You weren't just naive. You were anomalously naive. It's funny you should mention PGP: the 1990s were the time of the crypto-wars, which were in part sparked by PGP. Remember "this t-shirt is a munition"? You couldn't even sell products with crypto in them without jumping through hoops.
  - mverwijs 13y ago
    > You were anomalously naive. Now that type of thinking I find naive.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      If you had to break the last 20 years into three time periods: (!) "post Snowden", (2) "post-9/11", and (3) "post PGP", sensitivity to government surveillance would rank 1-3-2. The NSA was a bigger deal in the 1990s than it was in the 2000s, even after the AT&T "Room 101" disclosure.
      - rsingel 13y ago
        Technically, Room 641a. But, otherwise, spot-on.

busterarm 13y ago

Maybe it makes me a looney but I was educated about things like COINTELPRO and TEMPEST before I was a teenager and the idea that a government wouldn't be doing these things is more surprising to me than the leaks that they are.