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Oh, everyone assumed the government knows anything anyway, long before Snowden. I remember after the Boston Bombings, people were complaining, saying things li
by amyjess 12y ago
Oh, everyone assumed the government knows anything anyway, long before Snowden.
I remember after the Boston Bombings, people were complaining, saying things like "How could the government be so incompetent as to not stop this before it happened? They monitor everything on the Internet, so they should have known!". This was before Snowden.
Years before that, I remember people were casually talking about Room 641A. This would be about 2005 or so.
Everyone assumed the government snarfs all Internet data long before Snowden, and almost nobody cared.
- jgroszko 12y agoPerhaps I'm conflating indifference with dismissal as conspiracy theory.
- cmdkeen 12y agoHasn't the existence of Echelon been common knowledge for years? The concept was popularised in Enemy of the State in 1998. Before that you had Clinton and the Clipper chip which could easily lead the poorly technically informed to assume all their internet traffic was already capable of being monitored.
- amyjess 12y agoYeah, that too. And I heard about Carnivore in the '90s -- though most people vastly overstated what it was capable of (people tended to ascribe Echelon's capabilities to Carnivore).