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by bediger4000 3474 days ago
Are you at all certain of this? Our current surveillance state seems to me to be a result of the compartmentization around nuclear weapons in the Manhattan Project. Small expansions from Los Alamos Labs to every thing in the DoD eventually add up to a surveillance state. Every step along the way was logical and consistent and made sense to almost everyone involved.
1 comments
tanderson92 3474 days ago
Los Alamos Labs and the rest of the DOE is not considered by most to be part of the surveillance state. It's not in their mission statement at all. The most overlap there could be the cyberdefense program for energy grids and the NSA facility at ORNL.

I'm actually not sure I understand your point though (honestly!). Even if the surveillance state was justified by those involved along the way, they do have a legitimate purpose that they can be constrained back to and not surveill the american people generally, right? Or is that not what you were saying.

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bediger4000 3474 days ago
Yes, I understand that DoE and the national labs aren't really part of the surveillance state.

The whole confidential/secret/top secret thing, with compartments pretty much started with Manhattan Project as I understand it. That was in the 1940s, so small changes piling up over time led us to a surveillance state. Each change was justifiable, due to things like exposures of classified info, spying, 9/11, etc, and welcomed due to using classification and surveillance to fix the problems but also to cover up a multitude of sins, from budget overruns to dopey, failed designs to outright fraud. That is, once you've got a thing that you're protecting, then the surveillance state follows, complete with spy services. If semi-appropriate agencies existed before (FBI, OSS, Naval Intelligence) they get re-purposed as surveillance agencies, (OSS -> CIA) and new ones get created (NSA, DIA, NGSIA).

It looks to me like there's a sort of inescapable logic, or emergent behavior that starts with protecting the Manhattan Project, and grows incrementally until you've got a surveillance state.

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