[dTal]

>Everybody involved in tech should have already known

Yeah, I knew back in 2008 or so, well pre-Snowden, and it freaked me out. Room 641A was the major giveaway, but there were lots of little things. I told all my friends about it - and got shrugs. They either didn't care, or didn't believe me and wrote it off as conspiracy-theory nonsense. The sad fact is that it takes the media telling people something is a scandal before they'll believe it is one, and for that to happen there has to be an event to report on. Snowden's role was more that, and making the evidence really incontrovertible. Before that, what could we, as tech people, have done?

Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience. Only one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right". It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

[mindslight]

I don't know when I personally could claim to "know". It's more like reading rumors, looking at the motives of the parties, and accepting it as the most prudent understanding. Klein/641A was low level and so the major confirmation to technical people - we can extrapolate general implications from the fundamental setup. Binney addressed a higher level but was too early to be appreciated at large.

> "that can't possibly be happening" ... "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal"

At first glance these appear to be opposed, but they are actually both just cognitive dissonance modulo different unignorable facts.

> one of my friends came to me and was big enough to say "you were right".

This is called taking responsibility. The hurdle wasn't even the admitting you were right, but rather themselves coming to terms with the implications.

[torified]

>It taught me an unpleasant fact of people's psychology: people have such astonishing status-quo bias that they will rewrite the past to match the present.

Very perceptive. What blows me away is that even knowing the past, they still think the future won't be different.

I'm in Australia, and the amount of apathy is astounding.

Scary developments like the AABill which is to literally force citizen sysadmins to secretly spy on other citizens under threat of 10 years jail, with no oversight and no ability for legal representation.

Passed with bipartisan support, except for some amendments that were meant to happen in February which would have made the catastrophic bill just disastrous.

No amendments have happened, there is no media interest, and no concern from the lobotomized public.

[lern_too_spel]

> Oh, and, witnessing the inevitable flip from "that can't possibly be happening" to "of course that's happening, I knew it all along, no big deal" was a frustrating experience.

It certainly was frustrating because "that" still isn't happening. It taught me the unpleasant fact that people will believe any conspiracy theory as long as a newspaper prints it, even if every other newspaper points out everything wrong with the conspiracy theory.