| Further thinking along this line: most people in the world today are dependent on their phones and internet for information and communication. A lot of people suspected total listening capabilities and now we mostly know that's the case. But what if the NSA had total interference capabilities, as Snowden's quote implies? I suspect it does. I've been finding HN to be a hub for all the facets, ideas, and fallout from this news. And the snowball of issues (privacy, gov't, business, foreign relations, internationl trade, future of the internet) is worrying to me. But what if it were suddenly gone? And just as I had that thought, I started getting errors reloading this thread and the main page. Maybe HN is straining at the traffic, but what if some of that traffic came from somewhere else or some server was remotely hobbled? What if your ISP had "disruptions" of traffic to _your_ IP addres, or your 3G/4G became spotty? Imagine if someone with total knowledge could track the spread of keywords through networks (physical and social) and then enable "slow-downs" to keep the level of spreading below a critical threshhold? If I didn't see all the articles subitted to HN or didn't have time to read them all because the servers crashed, then I might not be so alarmed at the situation. We in the US and other European nations go on happily enjoying freedom to access all this information, unlike many countries, but would we know if or when we couldn't anymore? Coincidence or not: when I tried to submit this, I got a message saying "Oops, our bad. If you see this a lot, shoot us an email at info@ycombinator.com. Be sure to tell us your IP. Sorry, news.ycombinator.com is currently unavailable. Please try again soon." Maybe I need to take some keywords out of the text... |
My grandmother said that this was the most terrifying part of living in the Soviet Union. Since most of my grandparents were high up military (doctors, not soldiers), aerospace research, and medicine in the Soviet Union, they saw the reality of the USSR with a lot less propaganda. When they went back home or visited family in other parts of the country, they would immediately enter into a surreal world where the reality described by propaganda was starkly different from the reality they had experienced.
What's even more terrifying is that by nature of their isolation from international news sources and dependence on TV, most of America already lives in roughly this reality. The world as they see it is shaped by television.