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by genewitch 458 days ago
> [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth.

what percentage of the US population do you reckon could "make an educated guess" about the technological capabilities of the US government in 2002?

please remember this is a technology discussion forum, not a general public forum.

> Zimmermann's PGP encryption software

"PG what? Encryption? like the cryptkeeper? I like hans zimmer music"
1 comments
zmgsabst 458 days ago
People suspected there was funny business going on since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001. By 2003 gangs were aware government spied on phones at scale. NSA regularly came up in my high school tech class in 2004, in connection with War on Terror. By 2005, the program was confirmed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

Lots of people knew that mass surveillance was likely with the advent of the internet, prior to 641A in 2006.

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somenameforme 458 days ago
Lots of people know lots of things. The problem is those things aren't always true. And until there is a defacto public acknowledgement of something many people defer to the 'official position.'

Here's a present time one for you - all US based cloud providers, including Apple, are providing full (and probably indirect) real time access to everything stored on those servers to various organizations including, but not limited to, the NSA. Lawsuits around this issue are motivated solely by an effort to do away with parallel construction [1] and enable the evidence obtained through such means to be able to be directly used.

Lots of people know this, lots of people also think this is crazy talk. And prior to Snowden, and to a lesser degree Klein, the overwhelming majority fell into the latter camp regarding anything even remotely close to the scope and scale of what the NSA was doing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

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floweronthehill 457 days ago
Here's another official position relevant to current events but that is beginning to change.

"Electronic voting machines are 100% safe and as safe as paper ballots if not more".

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genewitch 457 days ago
"My dad owned a 1965 softtop stingray, it was awesome!"
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