How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

I'm not proud of it at all. The revelation was startling to me, and I was pretty unhappy about it. It was done in the name of "stopping bad people from doing bad things", but it was still illegal (at least in the white world).

Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.

Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.

(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)

Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.

Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.

That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.

> People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well.

The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.

In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).

The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.

Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".

While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life.

That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?

At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.

Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.

Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.

ECHELON pre-dates Prism by several decades

I'm afraid that caring about an issue (instead of caring about whatever stance your favorite political team happens to be taking at this moment) has become much less common.

When both parties threw their weight behind the "nobody is spying on Americans" lie, we went from only the hyperpartisan fans of the right wing making excuses for spying on Americans to the hyperpartisan fans of both parties doing so.

What does national ID have to do with government surveillance?

UK: hold my beer...

Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.

I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.

Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.

In many ways the west is copying what the East and the Middle East are doing. It’s quite concerning that democratic governments and their electorate are going with it, but to be “fair” this seems to be a somewhat orchestrated global phenomenon. Of course it’s not good.

Overseas, cash is king. In Canada, and also in San Francisco, you can only tap your credit card because cash carries COVID [0].

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...

Yep, my thoughts as well. And I say this as someone who not only has a chronic mental health disorder that sometimes manifests as paranoia, but someone who used to work in the IC for 10 years (it has been a while since then).

Is it possible? Sure. But it is very unlikely that much resources and effort would be devoted to someone that made a few critical comments.

I would caution outright categorizing this as paranoia stemming from a mental illness. The problem with delusional paranoia and justifiable paranoia is that clinically they can present the same.

> Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff.

There are numerous people that America's intelligence agencies have intimidated, harassed and yes drugged for similar reasons.

OP, I hope you have been seen by a mental healthcare professional. They can help you determine the nature of these experiences. I hope you have extensively documented these experiences. Sharing that documentation with your family or others who you know to be sober in judgement is probably the only mechanism you have to distinguish if your experiences are based in reality.

No, it's because you sound like a crazy person and what you talk about is not really constructive to threads about real things.

That could be, but you should also be aware that many people will have the knee jerk reaction to reject statements like yours as being paranoid and delusional. Assuredly sometimes that is an appropriate response, but the drive to immediately reject narratives like yours is to protect ourselves from the doubt that validating your story would elicit. We do not want to believe those things are happening to those around us (even if we accept that they might be in general), and that is a fact that these organizations take advantage of. I wish you luck either way. Stay calm and suspend belief. We are human, and not only do we not know most things, the most important things we cannot know. You can build a composure that allows for many things to be true and not fully know which and still proceed. Otherwise you might be racked with doubt about who and how things appear and have trouble moving forward from this.

> as though by an algorithm

How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though?

> Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?

On HN specifically? Yeah.

On actually popular platforms? No.