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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

>>>>> Knowing that they could have such a capability is not the same thing as knowing that they are actively exercising it.

I hope you don't give your government that much credit and really are not that naive. Considering the NSA and CIA's history, why would think anything other than they were actively using technologies to eavesdrop on the general population?

Conspiracy nuts have been screaming this from the rooftops for years and suddenly because of Snowden they're finally listening? Sure he deserves credit for the evidence he's released, but this is not something new by any stretch of the imagination.

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Conspiracy nuts have been screaming this from the rooftops for years and suddenly because of Snowden [people are] finally listening?

Yes. For example, they were called "conspiracy nuts" before.

Conspiracy nuts have been screaming this from the rooftops for years and suddenly because of Snowden they're finally listening? ... but this is not something new by any stretch of the imagination.

Those of us paying attention knew something was going on, yes. For my part, I believed that there was much more spying going on than they were letting on. It seemed clear that the FISA court was a rubber stamp, and the refusal to release exact numbers of wiretaps approved pointed to them hiding a surprisingly large number.

However, the revelation that there was, in effect, just the one giant umbrella wiretap authorization, came as a big surprise to me. I never dreamed that the extent could be that great.

Before Snowden, it went something like this:

"we are only spying on terrorists and military targets."

"The postal secret will never be violated. Mail and emails by extension are safe forms of communication."

"A warrant is needed to listen in on a telephone call. Telephone call is a safe form of communication."

"Building a database on the citizens political affiliation is illegal, and ground for political dismissal of officials."

"The ISP, email provider and telephone company is only a common carrier. They are not allowed to watch."

"Warrants and subpenas are directed at individual. Collective punishment is wrong, illegal, and something only other countries do."

"The government job is to protect people. If the government know of a serious vulnerability in society, they will inform people in order to protect them."

"Only criminals breaks into computer systems."

knowing that the US government could lie on all those points is not the same as knowing that they are. Tinfoil hat was define as such because they thought the government lied on those points, based on the fact that the government could do it.

conspiracy nuts have been screaming all sorts of stuff from the rooftops for years.

if i say 'twenty' every time, eventually i'll correctly predict the outcome of a d20. this doesn't make me good at doing so, nor does it mean that you should have listened.

Yeah, but it's been well documented for many, many years:

http://www.mega.nu/cm/cm1.html

This site lists articles going back to 1982 about the NSA domestic spying programs. A whois lookup on the site puts the information on the site around 1997. It's fascinating to me people seemed to have no idea, yet the information had been out there for years and years.

I liken it to Jose Canseco. For so many years he was telling people guys in the MLB were all juicing. He got blacklisted and people hazed the crap out of him for the mere suggestion. A few years after his book came out, every player he named was confirmed as a steroid user.

Pretty much the same thing in my mind. . .

... but really it's always been more than just conspiracy nuts saying this.

It's essentially been common opinion in the tech community for decades that the NSA looked like they were building the capability for mass surveillance, and that in all likelihood was probably doing it.

Snowden provided a greater degree of proof, but anybody that was really surprised by what was going on wasn't really paying attention...

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