[neilv]

I found the Snowden thing funny-odd...

Echelon was something a lot of online techies had heard of by 1989. (I was just a teen, and I'd heard of it.) There was at least one book about it.

It was so well-known, and joked about, for so long, that one time I made a nerdy joke referencing Echelon to an ex-NSA person. When they responded simply, "What's Echelon?", I realized I'd put my foot in my mouth, by rudely putting them in an awkward position. I guess that they still weren't allowed to talk about even long-public information about it.

Before the Snowden disclosures there were all these capabilities and methods that you would've come up with, if you'd taken a smart techie and asked them, "If it was your job to build out surveillance capability, with NSA scale of resources, what kinds of things would be possible with what you know of computer-ish technology today?"

After all the decades of jokes and speculation, it was still funny-odd to see that, yes, it's for real.

Not entirely like Galaxy Quest, but at least the dorky parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF_6OfgbF7c

[michaelcampbell]

Same here; I'm probably MIS-remembering, but I "remember" well before the Snowden leaks reading about the mysterious room at AT&T that was suspected to be where "someone" kept all the equipment for tapping.

IIRC (and I likely don't), what I read was some employee that saw people coming in and out with equipment, some of which he recognized as storage and other data-reading stuff, and a lot he didn't, and he was made VERY aware that he was not to talk about this, or even be in the area any longer or ever again, for any reason.

My recollection was that I did this reading in the mid 90's. But the wikipedia article for that room dates later, so this is the cause of my apprehension of placing the exact time.

[er4hn]

Are you thinking of Room 641A? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[ertian]

There were a few days back in the 90s where all the tech sites would run a campaign where everybody was supposed to send emails full of red flag words: "bomb" and "assassinate" and "terrorism" and what have you. It was specifically to mess with NSA surveillance operations.

[neilv]

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I think the issue is that while even techies, who were not part of IC instinctively knew that the story as presented to the general population simply did not add up and explanations like 'we are only grabbing x out of y' are unlikely, the general population either did not understand or did not want to understand what it meant.

It took the more salacious variants of those stories like nsa people spying on exes[1] to get public mildly interested.

The sad thing is you are not wrong; as little as I knew back then in an irc channel. I remember after a particularly questionable comment I made a follow up with comment basically telling nsa its a joke. Then again, today people seem to add 'fbi agent' trope.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98Q14H/

[cpach]

Yeah we knew (or strongly suspected) that long before Snowden, NSA had massive capabilities.

I think one reason that this knowledge faded into the background is that in the 80s/90s it was mostly tech geeks who where concerned. Many people didn’t use computers or Internet at all back then. So to them it all probably felt very abstract. And then people forgot about it. Until Snowden revealed what he had found.

[aksss]

It could be dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory pretty easily until Snowden, imo.