This article is asking how the NSA managed a hacking empire leaving practically no evidence. Many people correctly assumed it was happening, they just couldn't prove much.
"Why did we never see it coming?" Is a poor way of phrasing their premise, but it's not false.
> If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them?
It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misrepresentation of that.
>The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the legality of the NSA's actions or the morality of the leaks, what we are trying to answer is: "Why did we never see it coming?"
They clearly made it the central theme. With enough context what they are saying makes sense, but that phrase is so often used to describe how people predicted something without evidence. I'm sure I've read several articles talking about how some health organization "saw the cornavirus pandemic coming in 200x"
The article then goes on to explain why, even with hundreds of thousands of ppl doing incident response investigations, nobody caught / correctly attributed these attacks.
All of the talk of how some people on HN totally for real knew the NSA was hacking people is irrelevant and a total distraction from the far more interesting question of why we needed a leaker to confirm it.
I think this should rather say "nobody ever came forward". I'm sure there always were enough pieces of evidence even if scattered and nobody had the whole picture. But the ones who were close enough to put together some of it and get an idea had no incentive to open their mouths.
Coming forward with enough evidence was likely close to impossible until a decade or two ago. The ones who have such comprehensive evidence also have some "incentive" to keep quiet. Up to the proverbial "terminated with extreme prejudice" option, which I'm sure must have been employed given the sensitivity of the topic. Or perhaps risking being labelled a terrorist which would likely lead to even worse outcomes. When the efforts were escalated after 9/11 so were the security measures and the "incentives".
And coming forward with just shreds of evidence of something like this will only get you labelled a nut, enemy of the state, shill, etc.
Snowden and a few others did it at great personal cost and I'm sure they now serve as an example for others to not do it. Look around even today, people see the world in black and white and if you're not with them, you're against them, and they will treat you as such.
It reminds me of that "CIA manual" that floats around about how to derail conversations and sew doubt when infuriating an organization (can't find link). About doing things like bringing up irrelevant information, highlighting less meaningful things, revisiting already solved problems, etc. I mean what did the GGP do besides say "_I_ knew about this, but you all called me a conspiracy theorist! Who's laughing now?" What good does such a statement do? Clearly they are following the CIA handbook and derailing the conversation! (I'm joking)
But I think it comes down to not wanting to read the entire article _AND_ process the information contained within. I think a lot of people read things for the words written and not for the meaning, and I find this odd.
Most of what's listed as "disinfo agent" tactics there are the general fallacious and bad faith tactics that go on in almost any forum under heated discourse.
But yeah, I fully agree that this is essentially about bad faith tactics. My new strategy to dealing with this is to call these people out on their bad faith rather than engaging in the misdirection that they are creating. At least in my experience it seems to push these conversations down from the top spot (but that may be a selection bias).