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Comment by TFNA | Hacker News Reader

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.

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What Snowden did was prove it being any doubt to the general public. Until that time people were considered tinfoil hats mentioning it, even though the Airbus Boeing incident was well documented. But people really thought they weren't a target unless they were a rich industrialist.

If you brought up the concept that they surveiled everyone just because they can, you'd be laughed out of the room. Nobody would pay for all that, nobody would have time to look at it blabla.

Snowden made it all real. And even then, instead of a serious outrage most people just shrugged and accepted it, strange enough.

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.

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.

>I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia...

From Wikipedia:

>Jimmy Wales launched the site in 2001 and funded its initial servers through his company Bomis.

>Larry Sanger co-founded the project alongside Wales, proposed the name "Wikipedia," and drafted several foundational policies such as the neutral point of view.

>Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

Yes, clearly GP meant wikileaks.

PRISM and XKEYSCORE were born post 2007 from the Protect America Act. Echelon was merely a report that agencies were sharing data (which wasn't much of a conspiracy in the first place) and them targeting private data. But a secret, global mass surveillance program of basically every individual on the planet without court orders or any oversight was only a plot element of movies before Snowden.

The ECHELON report detailed how international telecommunications had been vacuumed up by the NSA for years already, first phone calls, but it was clear that this was already extending to the internet, too. And as the other poster mentions, Room 641A was revealed in 2006, again years before Snowden.

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