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>That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the sur

>That's because even if you did follow the NSA, you assumed they spied on foreign government officials, "bad guys," not _everyone_. That's the source of the surprise. I don't know anyone who's surprised that the NSA spies on, or hacks into foreign government agencies. Respectfully, I don't know how you could be surprised they were spying on everyone if you followed NSA news. We've had a consistent stream of leaks for _decades_ indicating that the NSA consistently expanded their capabilities to whatever the technology was capable of. Do you remember ECHELON? William Binney? AT&T fiber taps? Warrantless wiretapping? What else would those massive datacenters be for?

dllthomas 12y ago
"What else would those massive datacenters be for?" Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt. Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.
vidarh 12y ago
Most of the shock over the NSA revelations is not to those of us who kept tabs and trusted the disclosures, but to the huge number of people that refused to accept that they could be true. People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything. But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it. People are blind to it. I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA. Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan. The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised. The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter. And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe. Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.

dllthomas 12y ago

"What else would those massive datacenters be for?" Decryption of legitimately intercepted materials? Any brute-force component there is probably highly parallelizable, so we'd expect a push for more power for faster cracking even with a small amount of data to decrypt. Which doesn't speak to your other points, of course. I think the biggest thing here was the fact that it's evidence not just plain enough that everyone knows it - it's plain enough that everyone knows that everyone knows it.

vidarh 12y ago

Most of the shock over the NSA revelations is not to those of us who kept tabs and trusted the disclosures, but to the huge number of people that refused to accept that they could be true. People were keyword stuffing USENET posts and e-mail in the early 90's for NSA. Mostly as a dark joke. But the expectation in some circles was that the NSA was listening to pretty much everything. But that does not mean most people believe this, or had even heard about it. People are blind to it. I remember discussing CIA with friends at school, and they refused to accept that CIA had carried out operations that the CIA have publicly acknowledged either directly, or indirectly (by declassifying documents, or by allowing past directors to talk about them to interviewers) because they didn't fit with the image they had of the US. The same blindness has existed regarding the NSA. Even now, we see people who doubt every word that comes out from the Snowden documents, yet who blindly accepts responses from government. One of my "favorite" examples is how Norwegian media blindly accepts that the past revelations that Norway provides the NSA with vast metadata about calls in Afghanistan via our military intelligence must be the real explanation - despite these numbers appearing in files that for all other countries shown relate to domestic surveillance. Furthermore, Norwegian media has not re-visited this strange situation, that also made the otherwise very silent military security service reveal supposed operational details, while the domestic Police Sercurity Service just issued a short denial and kept silent afterwards. They have kept ignoring this despite the recent revelation that the NSA is recording every call, not just metadata, in Afghanistan. The supposedly very valuable tens of millions of call records that Norway supposedly supplies the NSA with from Afghanistan suddenly seems rather pointless if the NSA has so complete surveillance that they can record the actual contents. The facts don't fit the explanations, yet no questions are raised. The people who do not question are the ones that get shocked and outraged whenever something manages to sneak past their filter. And there are a lot of them. Most people don't want to believe. Echelon and all that? To most people, that's tinfoil hat material.