[55555]

I see your point! I totally do. I also used to hold this belief. But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).

For sure it's true that a secret can be kept by three people if two of them are dead. But there are clear cases where large groups of people have been able to keep secrets as well, or at least keep them from spilling out into public awareness.

I'd bet that for most crimes, the secret isn't kept, and there is someone else out there that knows who did it, who simply doesn't tell law enforcement. And yet most serious crimes aren't solved.

Humans have a real need to tell other people personal things, even to their own detriment. But sometimes things stay secrets even if tons of people know about them.

[GuB-42]

I think that Snowden leaks were more or less an open secret. I mean, it is about spies spying. Sure, the NSA overstepped its borders, but it is not exactly the first time (remember ECHELON), and the way it did that wasn't revolutionary. They didn't have a quantum computer, nanobots or anything like that: just competent computer security specialists and too much money to spend. Not even something significant like breaking commercial-grade crypto or anything like that, they "broke TLS" by inserting wiretaps in datacenters where data wasn't encrypted.

Snowden gave proof and technical details about what was happening. It is like showing proof that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't talk about it, they may or may not have nuclear weapons, most people think they do, and such a revelation won't surprise anyone, but it is still a big deal, because they can't use their "deliberate ambiguity" strategy anymore.

[jefftk]

I was working at Google when it came out, and that they were tapping our private inter-dc links was a huge update. Before I think it was something like "I guess the NSA could do that a bit, but it would be a prohibitively costly to do much" and then suddenly it was "we have to encrypt all of this as quickly as we can". There was a huge internal reprioritization.

(Speaking only for myself; I didn't work on any of this directly)

[zhengyi13]

"Seriously, fuck these guys"

[tdhz77]

Easy to say f regulations, and oddly and most surprisingly nobody ever says good regulations when the building doesn’t come down.

[closewith]

It absolutely wasn't common knowledge before Snowden. Even the suggestion would have put you firmly in the conspiracy theorist camp to most people.

[beering]

Consider that Wired reported on NSA's secret mass-wiretap of AT&T communications in 2006! This was a high-profile lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T), which was dismissed in 2009 after new immunity legislation in 2008. That was followed by Jewel v. NSA in 2008 which seems still unresolved.

Not to mention the whistleblowing on the Trailblazer Project and New York Times reporting on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in 2005/2006.

[abz10]

I became known as a conspiracy theorist amount my friends when I told them about this. A week later the Snowden revelations came out and yet somehow I’m still the conspiracy theorist.

[fragmede]

Room 641A was known in the hacker community and proven to exist via a lawsuit by the EFF in 2006, 7 years before Snowden entered the picture.

[gre]

I went out drinking once in DC with some people who worked at the NSA in 2005 or so and they said they were hiring for people to analyze "all the traffic on the internet".

When the Snowden leaks came out it was not a surprise. Granted most people don't go out drinking with the people doing the spying, but even people who work at the NSA can't keep a secret, if it was even meant to be a secret.

[stickfigure]

An obvious counterpoint is that the conspiracy was exposed, by Snowden.

I think the lesson here is that a "conspiracy" can exist as long as all of its participants believe they are morally in the right. The people involved in the NSA dragnet believed in the cause; when a non-believer (Snowden) got involved, the gig was up.

It's easy to believe that a government agency would overstep its bounds to spy on people it (according to complex laws that well-meaning people misunderstand or disagree with) shouldn't. It's much, much less credible that a large number of US government employees conspired to, say, bomb the world trade center. A conspiracy like that would quickly enlist someone with moral qualms about it, and it just takes one to blow the whistle.

[ALittleLight]

I don't think that's quite right.

Most criminal conspiracies succeed as evidenced by the fact that most crimes aren't solved and most criminals aren't arrested. In fact, the larger your criminal organization, the less likely you are to go to prison. If I shot a passerby on the street, witnesses would be coming out of the woodwork. Friends or family would identify me by surveillance tape or report my strange behavior. Conversely, if a gang in Baltimore kills some guy, nobody will come forward. Let's not even get started on cartels.

Instead, I think it's much more apt to say that whether or not a conspiracy will be betrayed depends a lot on what will happen to the traitor/whistleblower.

If you want to turn in an evil, murderous, criminal organization, you'd better be willing to die or flee somewhere beyond their grasp. That bravery needs to be combined with an ability to get compelling evidence to the people who need to see it.

[kumarvvr]

Eventually, Snowden came out with the truth isn't it.

Also, not all of those 10k people might not be knowing what they are doing or don't care. You can cloak a lot of espionage activity with forms, sheets, memos, brainwashing and what not.

[vmception]

That’s like a call center agent telling you a policy is for “security” and not knowing the actual policy or the legal rationale or the supporting law

A lot of people in the intelligence community were aware but few had all the details or would care to look

[shahar2k]

how many of those 10k people really have the awareness required to put that kind of data invasion in context and perspective? I think the reaction to large issues like climate change, tells you exactly all you need about people's ability to downplay large issues into "someone else's problem"

[SerLava]

Actually we all knew the NSA was doing it, and what Snowden leaked was just the proof.

[jefftk]

Who is "we all"?

(ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27989385)

[beering]

Wired reported on the EFF suing AT&T over NSA wiretapping telecom traffic in bulk in 2006. And there were other assorted news reports on Trailblazer, the "Total Information Awareness program", etc. from that time.

So maybe not in the widespread public awareness, but if you were Googling trying to answer the question, "Is the USA gov't eavesdropping on all communication traffic?" in 2013 pre-Snowden, then the reasonable conclusion would've been, "Yes".

[jefftk]

I don't think that's what people thought at the time; see https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/6/5072924/google-engineers-... for something more external. There really was a lot of surprise.

The 2006 lawsuit was about AT&T cooperating with the NSA to facilitate tapping their customers, quite different from the NSA surreptitiously digging up and tapping private fiber.

[adventured]

> But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).

Illegal domestic electronic espionage/surveillance wasn't a vast secret. It was widely known that the Feds were making every effort they could to push down that road, and the Feds had a very long history of illegal domestic espionage. Frankly, it was obvious that it was going on. A lot of people I know in tech had crossed paths with other people that knew pieces of the puzzle, that some domestic espionage programs were going on (particularly supercharged after 9/11). You'd get snippets of it in discussions. Snowden's revelations were not the first, it was the bombshell that was comprehensive (and only for a small part of what they were doing).

It wasn't yet proven, and the full extent wasn't yet known, there wasn't enough credible public evidence to demonstrate exactly what they were doing. There's a huge difference between something not being secret, and being proven, and that's what Snowden's actions helped to correct.

While it's in the not-yet-proven stage, the malevolent skeptics in particular will all sandbag any attempt to reveal it, by burying discussions under conspiracy tags and swat away any attempts to dig into what's really going on. Some skeptics do that on purpose because they have a vested interest in doing so, some do that because they're cowards (which is what is represented by the common statement: "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" - it's cowardly people hiding from a moment of confrontation).

Ready for another one? They're still performing illegal domestic electronic surveillance. That too isn't some vast secret. Oh I know, but but but they're not supposed to be doing that! Golly.