"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI."
It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
> Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world).
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
It's easy for others to say, "oy, you coward, you should have blown the whistle" from the comfort their web browsers. For what it's worth, I had a security clearance in a previous job (not as high as yours, I'm sure) and I understand where you are coming from. I would have likely done the same as you. Especially with my career and the ability to provide for my family on the line.
It's probably different if you have a family, but I have quit jobs over moral implications no problem. Most people have pretty flimsy morals and will do anything to keep the money rolling in.
Quitting would just be the first step in "I do not want to participate in this". Whistle blowing is much more complicated in that you are hoping to not just not be participating but maybe stopping it altogether. Being young and single compared to being older with dependents would absolutely make that decision harder. Violating secrecy laws to disclose illegal activity seems like something that should have a caveat to allow, but of course they don't.
This is a moral psychological quandary: quit and hope everyone shares your moral compass. (hint: they don’t).
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
Neither work without organizing. You cannot apply any meaningful pressure from the inside as an individual worker. You also do not need to work someplace to organize it.
That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.
My little piece... it seems like we're litigating your past below, which doesn't seem to be helpful. What's done is done; what is each of us going to do, now?
People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well. The technique is used to shield these secret programs by laundering the information they collect through plausible evidentiary chains.
The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.
In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).
The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.
Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".
It is my understanding that the US Government set up a system, long, long ago, where the British would spy on Americans and then the British would supply the information to the NSA, thereby the NSA is not technically spying on American citizens.
Words mean nothing. They can be interpreted how ever they need to be interpreted by those in power.
Don't worry, tptacek will be the first to join the comment thread here and defend the various three letter agencies. There are some really disingenuous thought leaders on HN who like to peddle the idea that putting servers in the US is the safest for privacy because there are domestic check and balances.
Isn't AI both the problem ... AND the solution here?
True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!
Hopefully, this comes as no more of a spoiler than revealing the Titanic sinks at the end of the movie... but, everything Mark Klein revealed in 2006 (and that Snowden revealed in 2014) is still happening daily - along with much, much worse. And just this week congress is acting to further extend the secret extra-expanded FISA powers we don't even know about.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.
There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook.
While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life.
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
There's a reason J. Edgar Hoover held power for 48 years.
Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.
Instances like this is a powerful statement that truly free and democratic governance is not sustainable in the long run with technological advancements.
We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing.
The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.
This is literally old news - contemporaneous with Snowden, Prism, etc. in early 2000s. Go read about the current Section 702 / FISA authorization renewal battle about which Senator Wyden recently said:
“I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
Well, this report to EFF happened in Jan 2006, and the Snowden/Prism leak happened in 2013, so at the time, it was in fact not "old news". I don't think Prism was even in operation until 2007.
It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.
arpwatch running on an edge router of mine tells me that there's a host with a DoD-registered IP address connected to my (major US) ISP network segment, which I know for a fact contains both business and residential subscribers. I port scanned it when I first discovered it just to say 'hello', and I have little doubt that a dragnet surveillance apparatus lives on the other side of that firewall.
Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!
Wowwww I didn't know what Room 641A meant, but when I clicked on the link and saw the image of the door to the server closet it brought it all back. Funny how people remember things.
The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything.
There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically.
> President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans."
"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful."
Everything _is_ political, as the other comment says. The problem is that no one talks about "governance", they just talk about "politics", which is not the same thing. Governance is the question of what good government should look like. Politics is just about accumulating power.
I'm afraid that caring about an issue (instead of caring about whatever stance your favorite political team happens to be taking at this moment) has become much less common.
When both parties threw their weight behind the "nobody is spying on Americans" lie, we went from only the hyperpartisan fans of the right wing making excuses for spying on Americans to the hyperpartisan fans of both parties doing so.
> The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything.
Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political?
The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.
Ironically from the perspective of 2026, the actual "conservative" conservatives were the key opponents. The "total information awareness" and national ID efforts were really killed by the conservatives in congress. The "neocons" and moderate/conservative democrats were mostly fine with both.
One of the few good outcomes: Mark Klein never faced a lawsuit or criminal charges from the government, AT&T or the justice system in general for his disclosure.
Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex.
It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
You spelled world wrong. China has their social credit, EU has their cameras, America has Palantir, Starlink has internet everywhere, 5G can be used as radar, age verification is being deployed globally, ect... Babylon reborn.
Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.
I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.
In many ways the west is copying what the East and the Middle East are doing. It’s quite concerning that democratic governments and their electorate are going with it, but to be “fair” this seems to be a somewhat orchestrated global phenomenon. Of course it’s not good.
The US adopted credit cards before the rest of the world, so we ended up with a worse network (essentially ossified at v1 when later adopters got v2 or v3).
Corona paranoia incentivized upgraded to tap-to-pay, but it was already prevalent in other parts of the world. It was more ubiquitous in Singapore in 2019 than it is in the US even now.
I'm as concerned about the surveillance state as anyone but let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too and it was still true that for many, many places cash was fine. Cash discounts are super common in various parts of the city and this was still true during COVID.
> let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too
This is hilarious. Toronto has no respect for facts, it has shown it will just fabricate histories out of whole cloth.
Nevertheless I'm tired of people citing anecdata and personal experience when upthread I have linked to a CBC article discussing a Bank of Canada report "arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021."
>you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]
maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo.
i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live in BC, AB, and ON.
cash is my primary form of payment and not once have i been turned down using cash on any of my visits. not once has family complained about being unable to use cash (several of the older of them, like me, primarily use cash).
Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata.
> Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.
> That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
Why don't you just misgender me next while you're making assumptions?
I don't give a shit about this point actually. This thread was supposed to be about digital privacy until people derailed it into gerrymandering what "the west" means and me trying to illustrate one possible difference between cultures before offroading into a tangent about cash.
The purpose was to illustrate how even basic commerce is going to be monitored to a much greater degree in highly electronic socities like those in North America. Go ask the fucking corner store in the deep Philippine provinces, where the power goes out twice a month, to bring out the credit card machine - no, almost all transactions will be done in cash, whereas only 10% will be in Canada. Let's just assume one nine, even - 90% of your business conducted in private overseas in a cash-based society, vs. 90% of your business being surveilled by the government and private industry in North America.
The claim is not false. Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats and numbers in aggregate, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
>Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
you said that i cannot use cash in canada. full stop.
if you wanted to talk about the proportion of cash use, which is a point i wholly agree with, you should have said that in your first comment instead of saying that you cant use cash at all (and linking it to covid?).
That wisdom will not be much comfort to babies born last week. The first news they get in this world will be News subjected to Military Censorship. That is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information." That is routine behavior in Wartime -- for all countries and all combatants -- and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.
So much of surveillance should be blatantly illegal/unconstitutional, but I really don't understand how there can be such a thing as documents that are illegal to possess.
To think a group of people are not going to expend effort in learning about their adversaries is just naive at best. At some point, those adversaries are going to infiltrate your people. The only way to attempt to monitor them would mean you now have the means to monitor your own people.
I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.
So, this is an uncomfortable read and comes from my personal experience. I'm posting this here as I haven't yet found great outlets and support for what I experienced, and this thread seems like a good spot. Open to outreach and support and ideas from people.
In 2021-2022 I was vocal about the CIA being a terrorist organization (I bet many people adjacently believe similar things and are silent) and this got me attention from them. I posted several things I learned from documentaries and on the web, and from my personal background I think it was enough to trigger something in their system. From that time onwards, people I could best describe as Agents w/behavior that matches what professional interrogators would do kept showing up at public events I was a part of and in the most terrifying scenario also infiltrated my public commune.
There's an odd history with the FBI and possibly CIA and communes such as Osho the Bagawan (see, Netflix documentary) and I witnessed firsthand how deceptive, harmful and insidious this was. In some cases I believe substances were put in my food and drink, and in the cases matching that my body would later have adverse reactions with the agent's closely observing my behavior and consistently trying to elicit Black Web conversations. I had to flee and colocate to the familiarity of family and friends since, and only recently 3-years later have I been socializing my experience and writing to my congress and house representatives. That said, that was a month ago and they have yet to provide any substantive relief or support - I asked for assistance and guidance with investigating the intelligence community for misconduct as when they're doing this to Americans without any accountability, it undermines the integrity of our Country and I believe our national security. It brings into question who they are really serving. I'm no terrorist, even if I call you one and my skin color is brown and matches what the media-funded-by-the-CIA tells you to believe. I want this story documented and heard, believe what you will, though I leave you with the story that "We know our intelligence community does unethical things, its part of what we've given them the responsibility to do so we ourselves don't have to, and now when that unethical thing has happened to you or someone you know what do you do? What do you do when everyone you turn to for help gaslights you and tells you that surely did not happen? Find proof that the organization whose job it is to go undetected, did indeed do that thing to you." I ask for some empathy and understanding, please.
Woah. First of all I hope you are aware there are multiple mental illnesses that can manifest with feelings of paranoia etc. like text book.
Secondly. I doubt any agency is going to hurt or drug you over that. Investigate you? Maybe. But its not worth the money.
Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff. Although I'm sure these groups do take threats seriously, I don't think you are a threat.
I'm worried about your mental health is all. I'm not saying that in a way like "you sound suicidal" because you don't at all. You just sound paranoid. Wishing you the best brother
Yep, my thoughts as well. And I say this as someone who not only has a chronic mental health disorder that sometimes manifests as paranoia, but someone who used to work in the IC for 10 years (it has been a while since then).
Is it possible? Sure. But it is very unlikely that much resources and effort would be devoted to someone that made a few critical comments.
Yea I mean there are hundreds of thousands of ex punk rockers with "F [insert 3 letter agency here]" on their leather jackets and whatever. I don't think these types of people are that soft skinned they'd chase down everyone who said screw them.
I post on here all the time reminding people that tech companies are defense companies. Because I think it's important people remember what that implies.
No one is chasing me around or anything. At least I don't think so. I'm not saying put yourself in danger for your views. But I am saying, the world isn't as scary as anyone's brain can make it be.
These are tough times. Managing stress and mental health is hard.
Pretty cool of you to share your experiences bladegash. I always thought they wouldn't let people with mental health conditions into those environments. Shows what I know.
> Pretty cool of you to share your experiences bladegash. I always thought they wouldn't let people with mental health conditions into those environments. Shows what I know.
Some mental health conditions, like mine, don’t really show up until later in life and it is at least part of the reason I no longer work in that field :).
However, things are well managed now and I have a good career in the private sector!
I would caution outright categorizing this as paranoia stemming from a mental illness. The problem with delusional paranoia and justifiable paranoia is that clinically they can present the same.
> Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff.
There are numerous people that America's intelligence agencies have intimidated, harassed and yes drugged for similar reasons.
OP, I hope you have been seen by a mental healthcare professional. They can help you determine the nature of these experiences. I hope you have extensively documented these experiences. Sharing that documentation with your family or others who you know to be sober in judgement is probably the only mechanism you have to distinguish if your experiences are based in reality.
That's fair. I like the way you phrased this. It's a roadmap to staying and feeling safe but also possibly getting some help if it makes sense. Everyone needs a little help once in a while, and society right now is very isolating.
Based on the stories of actual whistleblowers, what really happens is that they either get arrested or nothing happens. Unless OP has real firsthand knowledge of crimes and isn't just repeating information spread by other mentally ill people, I very much doubt something that was aired in a Netflix documentary is going to make the CIA follow him targeted-individual-style. If everything you are talking about can already be found online, you're not special. It's narcissistic.
There are plenty of laws on the books that can be used against people sharing classified information (whether or not they are effective is another question) so why would they need to follow you around and poison your food?
That's not to say that whistleblowers don't get followed, they certainly do but in an inconspicuous manner. Real intimidation comes in the form of two guys knocking on your door explicitly telling you to knock it off or else they'll arrest you, beat you, kill your dog, etc.
2nd post here. When I share posts matching particular phrases and labels, on HN, I've noticed them get downvoted as though by an algorithm. Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
That could be, but you should also be aware that many people will have the knee jerk reaction to reject statements like yours as being paranoid and delusional. Assuredly sometimes that is an appropriate response, but the drive to immediately reject narratives like yours is to protect ourselves from the doubt that validating your story would elicit. We do not want to believe those things are happening to those around us (even if we accept that they might be in general), and that is a fact that these organizations take advantage of. I wish you luck either way. Stay calm and suspend belief. We are human, and not only do we not know most things, the most important things we cannot know. You can build a composure that allows for many things to be true and not fully know which and still proceed. Otherwise you might be racked with doubt about who and how things appear and have trouble moving forward from this.
How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though?
> Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
I run a HN voting algorithm and opinion manipulation system across a few hundred accounts - only a few on any individual post. I use residential proxies to prevent correlation. The account I'm using right now to confess this to you is one that's already been burned.
Downvoting this comment is funny, because it's a burned account anyway, so not hurting me, and you want less people to know this fact about HN?
Try it, it's really not that hard. I feel bad saying this and I don't do anything like this anymore but I did make a few accounts behind residential IPs that posted HN popular sentiments on topics that were actually factually incorrect and got a lot of upvotes pretty quickly. I stopped because I felt icky with how corrosive the whole thing could end up being. This was a while ago so not sure if new user sign up has become more difficult.
It turns out that open web forums are mostly emotional places and often the most inflammatory or in group opinions rise to the top. With that knowledge, manipulation isn't that tough.
Your experience makes sense to me, and it feels like just the sort of hacker-ethos tinkering that brings a smile to a lot of faces around here, mine included. Complete with the thrill of discovering that kind of power, then the “ick” factor catching up with you, and you deciding to stop.
Reminds me of rougher-and-readier days, when everything about online discourse felt more self-evidently… what’s the word… contingent? Provisional? Local? Playful, game-like, made-up? Afforded the seriousness of pub banter, rather than any kind of indicator of some broader Truth.
I think my point—which I apologize for putting a little snidely—echoed @rkomorn’s: I completely accept that you or “agencies” can manipulate HN’s proudly old-school mechanics. I just feel like our hangout here is less important in the scheme of things than we’d like to imagine it to be. At least to the sort of agencies who do that kind of work. They could, but why?
Oh yes I agree. I doubt the big agencies are doing much here just because I don't think this forum is that "useful", it's not really an input into any big state or corporate actor's decision making that's worth paying attention to. I just think it's fairly easy to game this forum and I suspect it is absolutely being gamed by interest groups of individuals who want certain opinions to be more prominent.
I've been on Discords that have told their users to go and brigade HN threads to express their opinions. But these have been petty things like politics and programming language flamewars (two examples I've witnessed.)
Same stuff different day. The United State's laws do not allow for direct domestic spying or something to that effect so they use Five Eyes anglosphere intelligence alliance marketplace as a loop hole. Since Reed Elsevier plc aka "RELX" has purchased LexisNexis who had purchased Seisint, Inc and the technology for Flordia's Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program "MATRIX", which was shut down due to privacy concerns by congress, it is only logical that the data aggregation technology is being used in full force now. There seems to be no other way but to allow 100% technology and communication introspection by the government to stop terrorism.
If the documents are classified. And you dont know the levels of it.
I would never hand them over. As i dont know who is cleared.
And wait for the court to decide what should i do with them.
Or meet the president and hand them personally.
By the good semeriton, should protect the lawyes, as they did their best to hold the secret.
"One big change impacting surveillance was clear: Prior to September 11, the U.S. had what could reasonably be called a “wall” separating foreign surveillance for national security purposes done by the NSA from domestic surveillance for law enforcement purposes done by the FBI."
It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
> Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world).
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
It's easy for others to say, "oy, you coward, you should have blown the whistle" from the comfort their web browsers. For what it's worth, I had a security clearance in a previous job (not as high as yours, I'm sure) and I understand where you are coming from. I would have likely done the same as you. Especially with my career and the ability to provide for my family on the line.
It's probably different if you have a family, but I have quit jobs over moral implications no problem. Most people have pretty flimsy morals and will do anything to keep the money rolling in.
Quitting would just be the first step in "I do not want to participate in this". Whistle blowing is much more complicated in that you are hoping to not just not be participating but maybe stopping it altogether. Being young and single compared to being older with dependents would absolutely make that decision harder. Violating secrecy laws to disclose illegal activity seems like something that should have a caveat to allow, but of course they don't.
This is a moral psychological quandary: quit and hope everyone shares your moral compass. (hint: they don’t).
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
Neither work without organizing. You cannot apply any meaningful pressure from the inside as an individual worker. You also do not need to work someplace to organize it.
The "ends justify the means" mentality in various government security agencies is very, very real.
That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.
My little piece... it seems like we're litigating your past below, which doesn't seem to be helpful. What's done is done; what is each of us going to do, now?
People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well. The technique is used to shield these secret programs by laundering the information they collect through plausible evidentiary chains.
> People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well.
The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.
In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).
The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.
Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".
It is my understanding that the US Government set up a system, long, long ago, where the British would spy on Americans and then the British would supply the information to the NSA, thereby the NSA is not technically spying on American citizens.
Words mean nothing. They can be interpreted how ever they need to be interpreted by those in power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Snowden had also signed many NDAs with the government
Don't worry, tptacek will be the first to join the comment thread here and defend the various three letter agencies. There are some really disingenuous thought leaders on HN who like to peddle the idea that putting servers in the US is the safest for privacy because there are domestic check and balances.
This is a great behind-the-scenes look at the NSA-Hepting case.
Can't wait to read Cohn's book.
Also RIP Mark Klein. A true American hero who never tried to turn his whistle-blowing into becoming a celebrity.
Isn't AI both the problem ... AND the solution here?
True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!
"Privacy's Defender" eh? Rather grandiose title considering that defense has been an abject historical failure.
(Not to suggest the EFF has not waged a valiant effort regardless.)
Beware, this is a book excerpt rather than a standalone blog post, so it ends on a cliffhanger. Still a fun read.
Hopefully, this comes as no more of a spoiler than revealing the Titanic sinks at the end of the movie... but, everything Mark Klein revealed in 2006 (and that Snowden revealed in 2014) is still happening daily - along with much, much worse. And just this week congress is acting to further extend the secret extra-expanded FISA powers we don't even know about.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.
Cliffhanger! Did it end with millions of Americans being freed forever from government surveillance?!?
j/k It's a good excerpt, and makes me want to read the book.
There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life.
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
There's a reason J. Edgar Hoover held power for 48 years.
Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.
1: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-0...
2: https://www.newsweek.com/new-documents-shed-light-cias-conne...
I've put that detail in the title above - perhaps it will help nudge the thread ontopicward.
Instances like this is a powerful statement that truly free and democratic governance is not sustainable in the long run with technological advancements.
We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing.
The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
They're sustainable but require major cultural revolution to keep up.
Didn't see it in the actual text of the article, but as a caption of one of the images. The actual book this is excerpted from is Privacy's Defender by Cindy Cohn https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262051248/privacys-defender/
Aka the Executive Director of the EFF.
I think Perfect Forward Secrecy has a great deal to do with how things have turned out. In the days of Room 641A, copying and diverting fiber traffic to somewhere like Utah even before it could be read, would have conferred an advantage if it was encrypted (and important enough for other attacks like black bag jobs on servers). PFS has turned ephemeral encryption into the garbage it deserves to be.
This is literally old news - contemporaneous with Snowden, Prism, etc. in early 2000s. Go read about the current Section 702 / FISA authorization renewal battle about which Senator Wyden recently said:
Some articles:https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveill...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-...
Well, this report to EFF happened in Jan 2006, and the Snowden/Prism leak happened in 2013, so at the time, it was in fact not "old news". I don't think Prism was even in operation until 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
ECHELON pre-dates Prism by several decades
Thank you for the links!
It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.
arpwatch running on an edge router of mine tells me that there's a host with a DoD-registered IP address connected to my (major US) ISP network segment, which I know for a fact contains both business and residential subscribers. I port scanned it when I first discovered it just to say 'hello', and I have little doubt that a dragnet surveillance apparatus lives on the other side of that firewall.
Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!
The DoD also just does an incredible amount of stuff. It is entirely possible that there's just a satellite office for this or that nearby.
Wowwww I didn't know what Room 641A meant, but when I clicked on the link and saw the image of the door to the server closet it brought it all back. Funny how people remember things.
The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything.
There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically.
> President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans."
"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
Everything _is_ political, as the other comment says. The problem is that no one talks about "governance", they just talk about "politics", which is not the same thing. Governance is the question of what good government should look like. Politics is just about accumulating power.
I'm afraid that caring about an issue (instead of caring about whatever stance your favorite political team happens to be taking at this moment) has become much less common.
When both parties threw their weight behind the "nobody is spying on Americans" lie, we went from only the hyperpartisan fans of the right wing making excuses for spying on Americans to the hyperpartisan fans of both parties doing so.
> The problem is that modern Americans politicize everything.
Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political?
The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.
That's the what's required to make propaganda and manipulation work the best.
Ironically from the perspective of 2026, the actual "conservative" conservatives were the key opponents. The "total information awareness" and national ID efforts were really killed by the conservatives in congress. The "neocons" and moderate/conservative democrats were mostly fine with both.
What does national ID have to do with government surveillance?
Gripping!
Adding this to my tsundoku
One of the few good outcomes: Mark Klein never faced a lawsuit or criminal charges from the government, AT&T or the justice system in general for his disclosure.
See also perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Entire generations of people who were never alive to remember a world where their every movement and utterance was not being tracked by the advertising/surveillance industrial complex.
It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
You spelled world wrong. China has their social credit, EU has their cameras, America has Palantir, Starlink has internet everywhere, 5G can be used as radar, age verification is being deployed globally, ect... Babylon reborn.
Edit: UK not EU
UK: hold my beer...
I think GP meant to s/EU/UK/, as in "UK has their cameras", because "EU has their cameras" doesn't make much sense to me as EU citizen...
Yep, got my wires crossed, thanks for the correction.
Are we pretending this isn't a global phenomenon?
Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.
I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.
> Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.
Are you implying that all governments are autocracies? Rather pessimistic view, in my opinion.
In many ways the west is copying what the East and the Middle East are doing. It’s quite concerning that democratic governments and their electorate are going with it, but to be “fair” this seems to be a somewhat orchestrated global phenomenon. Of course it’s not good.
Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0].
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
The US adopted credit cards before the rest of the world, so we ended up with a worse network (essentially ossified at v1 when later adopters got v2 or v3).
Corona paranoia incentivized upgraded to tap-to-pay, but it was already prevalent in other parts of the world. It was more ubiquitous in Singapore in 2019 than it is in the US even now.
If a shop won't accept cash, I just leave.
You weren't transacting at all in Toronto during COVID then.
This is the endgame of surveillance capitalism: submission, or opting out. Few can, or care enough to, do the latter.
I'm as concerned about the surveillance state as anyone but let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too and it was still true that for many, many places cash was fine. Cash discounts are super common in various parts of the city and this was still true during COVID.
> let's keep our history constrained by fact. I live in Toronto too
This is hilarious. Toronto has no respect for facts, it has shown it will just fabricate histories out of whole cloth.
Nevertheless I'm tired of people citing anecdata and personal experience when upthread I have linked to a CBC article discussing a Bank of Canada report "arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...
> You weren't transacting at all in Toronto during COVID then.
There's always someone will to take cash. It's still king, despite the naysayers.
>you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0]
maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo.
i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live in BC, AB, and ON.
cash is my primary form of payment and not once have i been turned down using cash on any of my visits. not once has family complained about being unable to use cash (several of the older of them, like me, primarily use cash).
Congratulations, you are the 1 in 10. This is why we don't use anecdata.
> Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.
> That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...
doesn't matter what the proportion is.
the fact is i can still use cash, despite your very bold claim otherwise.
whats your goal with the misinformation, anyways?
Why don't you just misgender me next while you're making assumptions?
I don't give a shit about this point actually. This thread was supposed to be about digital privacy until people derailed it into gerrymandering what "the west" means and me trying to illustrate one possible difference between cultures before offroading into a tangent about cash.
>Why don't you just misgender me next while you're making assumptions?
what...?
>until people derailed it
by people, do you mean you? you are the one that brought up "overseas" vs. canada/san fran and made the false claim that you cant use cash in canada.
The purpose was to illustrate how even basic commerce is going to be monitored to a much greater degree in highly electronic socities like those in North America. Go ask the fucking corner store in the deep Philippine provinces, where the power goes out twice a month, to bring out the credit card machine - no, almost all transactions will be done in cash, whereas only 10% will be in Canada. Let's just assume one nine, even - 90% of your business conducted in private overseas in a cash-based society, vs. 90% of your business being surveilled by the government and private industry in North America.
The claim is not false. Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats and numbers in aggregate, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
>Did you read the Bank of Canada report or the CBC article, with actual stats, or are you going to keep asserting your anecdata and personal experience?
you said that i cannot use cash in canada. full stop.
if you wanted to talk about the proportion of cash use, which is a point i wholly agree with, you should have said that in your first comment instead of saying that you cant use cash at all (and linking it to covid?).
Your type is so easy to read. Just go on and assume my race is Italian or Roman or something next.
Never replying to accounts under 5 years old ever again.
>Just go on and assume my race is Italian or Roman or something next.
every time you can't refute something, you bring in gender or race.
its one of the strangest things ive seen.
> every time you can't refute something, you bring in gender or race.
I learned from the highly effective rhetoric of the 2010s.
Trolls get bored sometimes.
curious which overseas country that doesn't fall under the 'west' has cash as king
Credit cards are more convenient.
1. Double tap power button on a phone you are already holding
2. Tap the reader
Versus
1. Find an ATM
2. Take your wallet out of your pocket
3. Take your card out of your wallet
4. Spend a minute withdrawing cash from the ATM
5. Put the cash in your wallet
6. Put your wallet in your pants
7. Go to the actual place you want to spend money
8. Take your wallet out of your pocket
9. Take cash out of your wallet
10. Hand it over
11. Wait to receive change
12. Put the change in your wallet
13. Put your wallet in your pocket
If you want cash to make a resurgence you need to figure out how we can make a digital version of it.
So much of surveillance should be blatantly illegal/unconstitutional, but I really don't understand how there can be such a thing as documents that are illegal to possess.
To think a group of people are not going to expend effort in learning about their adversaries is just naive at best. At some point, those adversaries are going to infiltrate your people. The only way to attempt to monitor them would mean you now have the means to monitor your own people.
I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.
The HN headline really should use the title of the article. Almost no one knows what room 641F means.
Kevin Mitnick also discovered this.. ages ago.
Source?
So, this is an uncomfortable read and comes from my personal experience. I'm posting this here as I haven't yet found great outlets and support for what I experienced, and this thread seems like a good spot. Open to outreach and support and ideas from people.
In 2021-2022 I was vocal about the CIA being a terrorist organization (I bet many people adjacently believe similar things and are silent) and this got me attention from them. I posted several things I learned from documentaries and on the web, and from my personal background I think it was enough to trigger something in their system. From that time onwards, people I could best describe as Agents w/behavior that matches what professional interrogators would do kept showing up at public events I was a part of and in the most terrifying scenario also infiltrated my public commune.
There's an odd history with the FBI and possibly CIA and communes such as Osho the Bagawan (see, Netflix documentary) and I witnessed firsthand how deceptive, harmful and insidious this was. In some cases I believe substances were put in my food and drink, and in the cases matching that my body would later have adverse reactions with the agent's closely observing my behavior and consistently trying to elicit Black Web conversations. I had to flee and colocate to the familiarity of family and friends since, and only recently 3-years later have I been socializing my experience and writing to my congress and house representatives. That said, that was a month ago and they have yet to provide any substantive relief or support - I asked for assistance and guidance with investigating the intelligence community for misconduct as when they're doing this to Americans without any accountability, it undermines the integrity of our Country and I believe our national security. It brings into question who they are really serving. I'm no terrorist, even if I call you one and my skin color is brown and matches what the media-funded-by-the-CIA tells you to believe. I want this story documented and heard, believe what you will, though I leave you with the story that "We know our intelligence community does unethical things, its part of what we've given them the responsibility to do so we ourselves don't have to, and now when that unethical thing has happened to you or someone you know what do you do? What do you do when everyone you turn to for help gaslights you and tells you that surely did not happen? Find proof that the organization whose job it is to go undetected, did indeed do that thing to you." I ask for some empathy and understanding, please.
Woah. First of all I hope you are aware there are multiple mental illnesses that can manifest with feelings of paranoia etc. like text book.
Secondly. I doubt any agency is going to hurt or drug you over that. Investigate you? Maybe. But its not worth the money.
Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff. Although I'm sure these groups do take threats seriously, I don't think you are a threat.
I'm worried about your mental health is all. I'm not saying that in a way like "you sound suicidal" because you don't at all. You just sound paranoid. Wishing you the best brother
Yep, my thoughts as well. And I say this as someone who not only has a chronic mental health disorder that sometimes manifests as paranoia, but someone who used to work in the IC for 10 years (it has been a while since then).
Is it possible? Sure. But it is very unlikely that much resources and effort would be devoted to someone that made a few critical comments.
Yea I mean there are hundreds of thousands of ex punk rockers with "F [insert 3 letter agency here]" on their leather jackets and whatever. I don't think these types of people are that soft skinned they'd chase down everyone who said screw them.
I post on here all the time reminding people that tech companies are defense companies. Because I think it's important people remember what that implies.
No one is chasing me around or anything. At least I don't think so. I'm not saying put yourself in danger for your views. But I am saying, the world isn't as scary as anyone's brain can make it be.
These are tough times. Managing stress and mental health is hard.
Pretty cool of you to share your experiences bladegash. I always thought they wouldn't let people with mental health conditions into those environments. Shows what I know.
> Pretty cool of you to share your experiences bladegash. I always thought they wouldn't let people with mental health conditions into those environments. Shows what I know.
Some mental health conditions, like mine, don’t really show up until later in life and it is at least part of the reason I no longer work in that field :).
However, things are well managed now and I have a good career in the private sector!
I would caution outright categorizing this as paranoia stemming from a mental illness. The problem with delusional paranoia and justifiable paranoia is that clinically they can present the same.
> Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff.
There are numerous people that America's intelligence agencies have intimidated, harassed and yes drugged for similar reasons.
OP, I hope you have been seen by a mental healthcare professional. They can help you determine the nature of these experiences. I hope you have extensively documented these experiences. Sharing that documentation with your family or others who you know to be sober in judgement is probably the only mechanism you have to distinguish if your experiences are based in reality.
That's fair. I like the way you phrased this. It's a roadmap to staying and feeling safe but also possibly getting some help if it makes sense. Everyone needs a little help once in a while, and society right now is very isolating.
Based on the stories of actual whistleblowers, what really happens is that they either get arrested or nothing happens. Unless OP has real firsthand knowledge of crimes and isn't just repeating information spread by other mentally ill people, I very much doubt something that was aired in a Netflix documentary is going to make the CIA follow him targeted-individual-style. If everything you are talking about can already be found online, you're not special. It's narcissistic.
There are plenty of laws on the books that can be used against people sharing classified information (whether or not they are effective is another question) so why would they need to follow you around and poison your food?
That's not to say that whistleblowers don't get followed, they certainly do but in an inconspicuous manner. Real intimidation comes in the form of two guys knocking on your door explicitly telling you to knock it off or else they'll arrest you, beat you, kill your dog, etc.
2nd post here. When I share posts matching particular phrases and labels, on HN, I've noticed them get downvoted as though by an algorithm. Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
No, it's because you sound like a crazy person and what you talk about is not really constructive to threads about real things.
That could be, but you should also be aware that many people will have the knee jerk reaction to reject statements like yours as being paranoid and delusional. Assuredly sometimes that is an appropriate response, but the drive to immediately reject narratives like yours is to protect ourselves from the doubt that validating your story would elicit. We do not want to believe those things are happening to those around us (even if we accept that they might be in general), and that is a fact that these organizations take advantage of. I wish you luck either way. Stay calm and suspend belief. We are human, and not only do we not know most things, the most important things we cannot know. You can build a composure that allows for many things to be true and not fully know which and still proceed. Otherwise you might be racked with doubt about who and how things appear and have trouble moving forward from this.
> as though by an algorithm
How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though?
> Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
On HN specifically? Yeah.
On actually popular platforms? No.
I run a HN voting algorithm and opinion manipulation system across a few hundred accounts - only a few on any individual post. I use residential proxies to prevent correlation. The account I'm using right now to confess this to you is one that's already been burned.
Downvoting this comment is funny, because it's a burned account anyway, so not hurting me, and you want less people to know this fact about HN?
Do you represent an agency?
Try it, it's really not that hard. I feel bad saying this and I don't do anything like this anymore but I did make a few accounts behind residential IPs that posted HN popular sentiments on topics that were actually factually incorrect and got a lot of upvotes pretty quickly. I stopped because I felt icky with how corrosive the whole thing could end up being. This was a while ago so not sure if new user sign up has become more difficult.
It turns out that open web forums are mostly emotional places and often the most inflammatory or in group opinions rise to the top. With that knowledge, manipulation isn't that tough.
Your experience makes sense to me, and it feels like just the sort of hacker-ethos tinkering that brings a smile to a lot of faces around here, mine included. Complete with the thrill of discovering that kind of power, then the “ick” factor catching up with you, and you deciding to stop.
Reminds me of rougher-and-readier days, when everything about online discourse felt more self-evidently… what’s the word… contingent? Provisional? Local? Playful, game-like, made-up? Afforded the seriousness of pub banter, rather than any kind of indicator of some broader Truth.
I think my point—which I apologize for putting a little snidely—echoed @rkomorn’s: I completely accept that you or “agencies” can manipulate HN’s proudly old-school mechanics. I just feel like our hangout here is less important in the scheme of things than we’d like to imagine it to be. At least to the sort of agencies who do that kind of work. They could, but why?
Oh yes I agree. I doubt the big agencies are doing much here just because I don't think this forum is that "useful", it's not really an input into any big state or corporate actor's decision making that's worth paying attention to. I just think it's fairly easy to game this forum and I suspect it is absolutely being gamed by interest groups of individuals who want certain opinions to be more prominent.
I've been on Discords that have told their users to go and brigade HN threads to express their opinions. But these have been petty things like politics and programming language flamewars (two examples I've witnessed.)
Not sure what your point is?
Same stuff different day. The United State's laws do not allow for direct domestic spying or something to that effect so they use Five Eyes anglosphere intelligence alliance marketplace as a loop hole. Since Reed Elsevier plc aka "RELX" has purchased LexisNexis who had purchased Seisint, Inc and the technology for Flordia's Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program "MATRIX", which was shut down due to privacy concerns by congress, it is only logical that the data aggregation technology is being used in full force now. There seems to be no other way but to allow 100% technology and communication introspection by the government to stop terrorism.
Who runs this backbone now? CloudFlare?
If the documents are classified. And you dont know the levels of it.
I would never hand them over. As i dont know who is cleared. And wait for the court to decide what should i do with them. Or meet the president and hand them personally. By the good semeriton, should protect the lawyes, as they did their best to hold the secret.
I am no lawyer .