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Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals,

Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible. Until we learned that they were.

XorNot 8mo ago
Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else. I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".
- fao_ 8mo ago
  Why are you asking here, versus going to Google and reading the original article from The Guardian? Or the numerous Wikipedia links that are on this page?
  - bdangubic 8mo ago
    that takes effort :)
  - XorNot 8mo ago
    Because saying "experts said things were impossible and then Snowden" could mean literally anything. Which experts, what things? Like I said: I've read a ton of stuff, and apparently what people are sure they read is very different to what I read.
    - browningstreet 8mo ago
      You can read about PRISM, Upstream, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, NSA Section 215 (PATRIOT Act) in a lot of places. But essentially they collected all call records and tapped the Internet backbone and stored as much traffic as they could. It’s not all automatic but it’s overly streamlined given the promises of court orders. Which were rubber stamped.
      - XorNot 8mo ago
        Again: which experts were saying what was impossible, which was then revealed to be possible by the Snowden documents? Is the claim that there was adequate court oversight of operations under those codenames which then turned out not to be the case? Are they referring to specific excesses of the agencies? Breaking certain cryptographic primitives presumed to be secure? Why is absolutely no one who knows all about Snowden ever able to refer to the files with anything more then a bunch of titles, and when they deign to provide a link also refuses to explain what part of it they are reacting to or what they think it means - you know, normal human communication stuff? (I mean I know why, it's because at the time HN wound itself up on "the NSA has definitely cracked TLS" and the source was an out of context slide about the ability to monitor decrypted traffic after TLS termination - maybe, because actually it was one extremely information sparse internal briefing slide. But boy were people super confident they knew exactly what it meant, in a way which extends to discussion and reference to every other part of the files in my experience).
        matthewdgreen 8mo ago
        I mostly focused on the cryptographic parts of the files. Here's what I wrote after the first details of cryptographic attacks were released: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/ What I learned in that revelation was that the NSA was deliberately tampering with the design of products and standards to make them more vulnerable to NOBUS decryption. This surprised everyone I knew at the time, because we (perhaps naively) thought this was out of bounds. Google "SIGINT Enabling" and "Bullrun". But there were many other revelations demonstrating large scale surveillance. One we saw involved monitoring the Google infra by tapping inter-DC fiber connections after SSL was added. Google MUSCULAR, or "SSL added and removed here". We also saw projects to tap unencrypted messaging services and read every message sent. This was "surprising" because it was indiscriminate and large-scale. No doubt these projects (over a decade old) have accelerated in the meantime.
- sgentle 8mo ago
  You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response is what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY. If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!
heavyset_go 8mo ago
Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc. Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
- jatora 8mo ago
  dont worry lifelog was cancelled in 2004 according to that wiki. Phew!
  - anonym29 8mo ago
    The very same day Mark Zuckerberg's "The Facebook" launched. A total coincidence, with zero evidence that the two are related in any way whatsoever ;)
- kcplate 8mo ago
  > Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it In 2008 I worked with a retired NSA guy who had retired from the agency 5 years prior. He refused to have a cellphone. He refused to have a home ISP. Did not have cable tv, Just OTA. He would only use the internet as needed for the work we were doing and would not use it for anything else (news, etc). He eventually moved to the mountains to live off grid. He left the agency ten years before Snowden disclosed anything. An example like that in my life and here I sit making comments on the internet.
  - bradlys 8mo ago
    Sounds like a guy who doesn’t enjoy the internet or cellphones. Shit, my grandparents never owned a computer, paid for internet, had cable tv, etc. Are they suspicious of the government? No, just poor and uninterested.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 8mo ago
Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.
jjtheblunt 8mo ago
> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace. the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.

XorNot 8mo ago

Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else. I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".

fao_ 8mo ago
Why are you asking here, versus going to Google and reading the original article from The Guardian? Or the numerous Wikipedia links that are on this page?
- bdangubic 8mo ago
  that takes effort :)
- XorNot 8mo ago
  Because saying "experts said things were impossible and then Snowden" could mean literally anything. Which experts, what things? Like I said: I've read a ton of stuff, and apparently what people are sure they read is very different to what I read.
  - browningstreet 8mo ago
    You can read about PRISM, Upstream, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, NSA Section 215 (PATRIOT Act) in a lot of places. But essentially they collected all call records and tapped the Internet backbone and stored as much traffic as they could. It’s not all automatic but it’s overly streamlined given the promises of court orders. Which were rubber stamped.
    - XorNot 8mo ago
      Again: which experts were saying what was impossible, which was then revealed to be possible by the Snowden documents? Is the claim that there was adequate court oversight of operations under those codenames which then turned out not to be the case? Are they referring to specific excesses of the agencies? Breaking certain cryptographic primitives presumed to be secure? Why is absolutely no one who knows all about Snowden ever able to refer to the files with anything more then a bunch of titles, and when they deign to provide a link also refuses to explain what part of it they are reacting to or what they think it means - you know, normal human communication stuff? (I mean I know why, it's because at the time HN wound itself up on "the NSA has definitely cracked TLS" and the source was an out of context slide about the ability to monitor decrypted traffic after TLS termination - maybe, because actually it was one extremely information sparse internal briefing slide. But boy were people super confident they knew exactly what it meant, in a way which extends to discussion and reference to every other part of the files in my experience).
      - matthewdgreen 8mo ago
        I mostly focused on the cryptographic parts of the files. Here's what I wrote after the first details of cryptographic attacks were released: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/06/on-nsa/ What I learned in that revelation was that the NSA was deliberately tampering with the design of products and standards to make them more vulnerable to NOBUS decryption. This surprised everyone I knew at the time, because we (perhaps naively) thought this was out of bounds. Google "SIGINT Enabling" and "Bullrun". But there were many other revelations demonstrating large scale surveillance. One we saw involved monitoring the Google infra by tapping inter-DC fiber connections after SSL was added. Google MUSCULAR, or "SSL added and removed here". We also saw projects to tap unencrypted messaging services and read every message sent. This was "surprising" because it was indiscriminate and large-scale. No doubt these projects (over a decade old) have accelerated in the meantime.
sgentle 8mo ago
You know how it's considered a kind of low-effort disrespect to answer someone's question by pasting back a response from an LLM? I think equivalently if you ask a question where the best response is what you'd get from an LLM, then you're the one showing a disrespectful lack of effort. It's kind of the 2026 version of LMGTFY. If you still want a copy-paste response to your question, just let me know – I'm happy to help!

heavyset_go 8mo ago

Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc. Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

jatora 8mo ago
dont worry lifelog was cancelled in 2004 according to that wiki. Phew!
- anonym29 8mo ago
  The very same day Mark Zuckerberg's "The Facebook" launched. A total coincidence, with zero evidence that the two are related in any way whatsoever ;)
kcplate 8mo ago
> Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it In 2008 I worked with a retired NSA guy who had retired from the agency 5 years prior. He refused to have a cellphone. He refused to have a home ISP. Did not have cable tv, Just OTA. He would only use the internet as needed for the work we were doing and would not use it for anything else (news, etc). He eventually moved to the mountains to live off grid. He left the agency ten years before Snowden disclosed anything. An example like that in my life and here I sit making comments on the internet.
- bradlys 8mo ago
  Sounds like a guy who doesn’t enjoy the internet or cellphones. Shit, my grandparents never owned a computer, paid for internet, had cable tv, etc. Are they suspicious of the government? No, just poor and uninterested.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ocdtrekkie 8mo ago

Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.

jjtheblunt 8mo ago

> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace. the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.