Hacker News Reader

Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

If there's one thing we've learned from post-Snowden world, it's that most people don't care enough to dodge the surveillance because most people didn't respond by voluntarily throwing out all their computing devices, smartphones, ISP service plans, etc.

View on HN

Another thing we've learned from the post-Snowden world is that people invoke the post-Snowden world as an excuse to abandon critical thinking and skepticism and assume all conspiracies are valid, and often don't actually understand what, specifically, Snowden did and didn't demonstrate. People still believe the PRISM program was about companies giving the NSA direct and unlimited backdoor access to their databases, and that every logo on a single slide is more or less an NSA front.

It's a similar phenomenon to the "post-Hilary" world of the Wikileaks email docs. People assume there was hard evidence proving a criminal conspiracy by the DNC to rig the election somewhere in there... mostly because that's what other people told them. Not because they've bothered to look.

People's cynicism has led them to put more trust in the metafictional reality of leaks than actual reality. Which, ironically, makes them easier to manipulate even as they believe themselves to be somehow above indoctrination and control having reached enlightenment through the "Snowden revelations."

> People still believe the PRISM program was about companies giving the NSA direct and unlimited backdoor access to their databases,

I agree that the sentence exactly as you've written it describes a possible conspiracy theory that some people may hold.

I also believe you're hedging a bit-- it's possible for people who didn't follow the leaks to infer from your exact wording that a) NSA did not access those databases at scale using the PRISM program, or even b) NSA did not access those databases using PRISM, or maybe even c) NSA did not access those databases using PRISM or any other NSA program. None of those are true.

Here's something relevant from Wikipedia about PRISM:

> Documents indicate that PRISM is "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports", and it accounts for 91% of the NSA's internet traffic acquired under FISA section 702 authority."

Can you speak to the veracity of that sentence?

My take away from the Snowden leaks was basically non-technical and simply an appreciation for how public-private partnerships have assembled a new sort of surveillance industrial complex. One which resembles the military industrial complex and may in the future even replace it? It felt like a warning along the lines of Eisenhower and even Snowden’s role as a whistle blowing contractor felt symbolic of our government’s diminished role in it all.

Would you consider that as misguided? It certainly encourages a general distrust of all those company logos in the slides.

I would consider it misguided to assume that one can determine whom to trust and whom not to trust based on whether or not their logo appeared on a slide leaked onto the internet, yes. I would also consider it misguided to implicitly believe stories that conform to any particular ideological bias, because misinformation, manipulation and deception can take place everywhere.

It leads to things like people implicitly trusting DDG because they weren't on the PRISM slide, or implicitly trusting Facebook and Reddit because they aren't the "mainstream media."

Not all conspiracies are valid, however, the particular conspiracy of "NSA covertly uses devices and implants to conduct mass surveillance both in the US and elsewhere, and has special relationships with the largest internet companies including Alphabet" is now quite valid and confirmed. Which means that in cases like that, it should necessarily be considered as a valid concern.

You're saying not all conspiracies are valid, while asserting that all conspiracies involving the NSA implanting bugs in hardware in collusion with tech companies should be considered valid.

You're supporting my point rather than refuting it, in that you appear to have drawn an arbitrary line in the sand and decided to doubt everything on one side and believe everything on the other. That's not a rational point of view, it's religious dogmatism.

No, I am saying that there _was_ at least one valid conspiracy by NSA. It doesn't makes any particular conspiracy case like this one automatically valid, but it gives some Bayesian evidence for it, in my opinion, enough to at least consider it, not dismiss automatically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com