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Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

The primary science fiction quality of the show is that something like that could have been done as early as it was said to have been. At the time, that part of it seemed almost completely impossible. With subsequent developments, it now only seems implausible. Wild.

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To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence doing the analysis) was actually true. And heck, if it is not 100% true today, it probably will be very soon. I'd be very surprised if the NSA isn't tapping into the secret in-house research models at OpenAI that are still a long way from public release.

The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.

This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.

I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.

Cryptome… haven’t thought of that site in ages. At the time it was hard to know how real it was, but years later we learned it was on point.

> the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden

Yeah, but keep in mind there was growing awareness of mass surveillance in the years leading up to the Snowden revelations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Similar to how the show 24 manufactured consent for torture, imperialism, etc post-9/11, part of me wonders how much of a role POI played in doing the same for mass surveillance.

A flamboyant billionaire hoarding all communications and digital events while claiming to be the good guy. Sure sounds familiar.

POI had full-take surveillance of domestic data, which Snowden's docs showed wasn't true, despite many people believing it before the dump. It's more similar to Flock.

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