[wutbrodo]

Leaving aside the meat of the article, I found this quote interesting:

""" Andreessen said he was not surprised that the National Security Agency was spying. "The biggest surprise for me was that people were so shocked, because I thought we've been funding this agency for 50 years that has tens of thousands of employees and spends tens of billions of dollars a year." """

Does anyone else find this to be the case too? I feel like the actions of taxpayer-funded agencies like the CIA/NSA have been despicable for decades, and I'm puzzled as to why this is the first time that people seem to actually care (which, don't get me wrong, is great). For those of us who gave a shit before Snowden, I feel like there was a sense of being resigned to the fact that most people (even in tech circles like HN) simply don't care; similar to something like climate change. I know that these revelations are relatively novel in that they involve surveillance of Americans' data as well as foreign nationals, but that was the case for warrantless wiretapping in the 2000s. That made news, but there DEFINITELY wasn't as much fuss made about it (to my bafflement at the time).

[jgon]

This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying. They've had to switch to this response because their previous response "You're just being paranoid", has been utterly blown apart by the Snowden revelations and thank god for that.

Both replies avoid grappling in a substantive fashion with the question of whether or not these activities are moral and something we should accept in our society, but at least the second reply doesn't actively shut down the conversation. Whereas before they could claim that we are being paranoid and there would be no real comeback to that, and thus our points could be safely dismissed, at least now one can reply "No we shouldn't be surprised, and now let's discuss whether or not it is something that should continue."

I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world were the exact people talking about how not torturing was what separated our good hearted security agents from those savages employed by "evil empires" such as Russia or China.

At the end of day, I am heartened because now at least the cards are on the table and these activities can't just be denied as the figments of paranoid imaginations. The conversation is moving along a bit, however slowly.

[wutbrodo]

> This is now the bog standard reply of the closet fascists who support the NSA and their rampant spying.

Yea man, those "closet fascists and their support of the NSA" and their statements in no uncertain terms that the NSA always been despicable. So let me get this straight: between 1) people who have always been fine with the NSA until a couple mos ago and 2) people who have always been disgusted by them and see this as an (unsurprising) affirmation of that disgust: the LATTER are closet fascists? You realize that even someone like rms fits directly into your characterization of "closet fascist", right? That should help you understand how stupid your conclusion is.

Your core issue is that you're conflating "hey man this has happened for ages and it's just how the world works" with "this has happened for ages, where the fuck have you been, people who are just deciding to get mad now that it's in fashion?". The former is definitely a bog-standard apologist tactic (though I'd argue that it's been around for a lot longer than just Snowden; it's basically the neo-con anthem, and neocons aren't exactly in the "closet"), but the latter couldn't be more different from apologia.

> I'll add finally, that yes apparently we should be surprised because the same closet fascists now adopting this whole grizzled "wise to how the world works" persona have previously spent the last few decades strongly claiming that the NSA would never flagrantly violate the constitution in this manner, that they were stalwart defenders of America and apple pie. You can see the same sort of evolution with torture, where the people proclaiming that it is a "necessary" action in today's ruthless dog-eat-dog world

Again, you're mixing up two different views. "People who actually paid attention before it was fashionable" doesn't consist only of the people defending this bullshit, it also consists of plenty of people that were protesting it. I know it makes you feel better about ignoring this for so long to pretend that the only people paying attention were apologists, but that's just flat-out, 100% wrong.

[jgon]

For what it's worth I entirely agree with you about people who dislike this and are also unsurprised by it. Andreesen makes it very clear he not the latter.

He is claiming both that we should be unsurprised by it, and that because of this lack of surprise it isn't a big deal that we should care about. I am emphatically not coming down on people who are now, and have always been, against this type of surveillance.

[wutbrodo]

My mistake, your comment sounded like a direct rebuttal to what I was expressing, which was that it was unsurprising and still despicable, not unsurprising and thus defensible. It also seemed like you were just assuming that anyone unsurprised must be condoning it. That's my mistake, I misread the subtext of your comment.

[thaumaturgy]

There are a lot of novelties in the Snowden leak for people, like me, who are interested but try to stay on the sane side of paranoid.

First and foremost, it's evidence with details. Echelon was more or less an open secret for a while, but even then there wasn't much information available about how it was being used -- just that communications were being collected and searched. It's the difference between, "There are data centers monitoring internet traffic," and, "here's a slide on an NSA presentation for software that will give you any person's entire browser history."

Second, there's the extent to which communications systems were being compromised. Taps on undersea cables and major backbones? Sure. Direct access to data at Google and Facebook and elsewhere? That was surprising.

Third, there was the scope. The assumption was always that it was impractical for the NSA or other agencies to store a lot of data about every person. But, now we know they don't store it -- they just exploit other databases.

There are the methodologies: I might assume that "they" are infiltrating the communications systems of certain foreign states, but to find out that they were doing it in part by hijacking Cisco equipment in transit and chipping them was surprising, mostly because it seems like such a stupid tactic in the event that word ever gets out.

And, there's the not very small matter of the targets involved. Spying for the sake of the War on Terror and against enemy states and all that is one of those things you grudgingly accept as part of the real world. But spying on our allies? What are they trying to accomplish there? What are they trying to gain that's worth the risk of being found out and pissing off your friends?

So, for me, the Snowden leaks moved the NSA from, "spooky, secretive, well-funded spy organization filling a necessary role," to, "totally out-of-control freaks that lost the plot years ago and seem to have set their hooks into the topmost levels of government."

[wutbrodo]

A lot of this makes sense, thanks for the thorough explanation of your perspective. It's a little easier to understand how people could have such a stronger reaction.

> Spying for the sake of the War on Terror and against enemy states and all that is one of those things you grudgingly accept as part of the real world. But spying on our allies?

This has happened always and forever; it's always been a standard tool of statecraft. Again I'm not making any moral judgment, but to me this was the LEAST surprising of all the unsurprising revelations (and in fact this is something that I thought even John Q. Layman knew about).

> So, for me, the Snowden leaks moved the NSA from, "spooky, secretive, well-funded spy organization filling a necessary role," to, "totally out-of-control freaks that lost the plot years ago and seem to have set their hooks into the topmost levels of government."

I guess that's kinda where we differ. As long as I can remember, it was considered an idealistic overreaction to think of the NSA as a bad actor (with perhaps good intentions). I'm still not 100% clear on how even paying limited attention to the historical actions of 3-letter agencies could lead one to have the former view.

[thaumaturgy]

> ...and in fact this is something that I thought even John Q. Layman knew about...

Well, maybe I'm not paying enough attention (or not in the right places). These days, my information on subjects usually comes from some combination of radio, television, magazines (print and online), newspapers, websites, online discussion, and the occasional book.

For the radio that I listen to (NPR/Radio Lab/et al), I'll usually take it pretty much at face value. I haven't caught them at an outrageous lie yet.

Television has zero credibility with me, regardless of the network, and so I don't even have regular access to it anymore. Even channels like Discovery have changed a lot in the past decade. At most, they'll pique my interest in a subject that I'll look at on my own later.

Magazines are pretty dubious. Subject-specific ones, like SciAm or Make, are fine, but political ones like Newsweek, I don't trust.

Newspapers are a joke.

I mistrust most websites, with few exceptions -- both the political "left" and "right" ones. If Greenwald came out and said that he had evidence of all of this stuff about the NSA, and he wrote endlessly about it but never actually released any of the evidence, I would be skeptical. (Which is why I appreciate so much what Snowden did.)

Online discussion gets treated with a dose of salt big enough to gag a horse. Nearly everybody claims to know more about a subject than they actually do, because online, the person with the most conviction wins, so it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction. Even Wikipedia, you have to have a glance at the history page to make sure somebody's not yanking your chain.

So that leaves books, which I just don't have quite enough time for anymore. It takes me around a month now to get through 500 pages. :-/

In short, I haven't felt like I had a trustworthy enough, convenient enough source for political information in quite a long time.

> I'm still not 100% clear on how even paying limited attention to the historical actions of 3-letter agencies could lead one to have the former view.

The FBI, CIA, NSA et al have all been guilty of reprehensible things at some point in the past ... but there's a bit of a jump from there to "corrupt". The NSA now looks to be totally corrupt from the top to the bottom, thanks to the evidence that's been brought to light.

[thinkpad20]

I remember reading years ago about a giant data center being built in Utah for the NSA with the express purpose of collecting electronic data sent in the continental US. It was in Time magazine or something similar, and it wasn't really that big of a deal. Honestly, I think the reason that people cared so much this time was because of the drama of the story: the inside man who revealed thousands of secrets and then bolted to Russia, and the subsequent continuing drama where more information gets periodically released, etc.

Why are people so shocked and upset about the NSA, when they could have expressed the same outrage at the PATRIOT act, which has been around for a decade, and which is responsible for the legality of much of the NSA's recent history? The NSA is a spy agency. That's what they do. They're using every legal avenue they have to collect as much information as possible. To assume that they're doing anything less than everything possible within legal limits is naive.

[Spooky23]

Without corroboration, you couldn't really talk about this too much in a public setting, because you'll sound like a conspiracy nut.

There were enough hints out there to realize that there is mass surveillance, but if you suggested the size and scope of what is actually happening in say 2008, people would think that you are a nut.

[wutbrodo]

Warrantless wiretapping was going on starting in 2002.

> you'll sound like a conspiracy nut

Yea I agree, for periods before 2002 it's a lot harder to explain "this assumption seems entirely consistent with the way they've always acted over decades of history" than it is to say "of course they'd do this, here's proof of the last time they did it".