Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all.
Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.
It's not about language, it's about culture. If you saw someone running through a crowd with a knife you'd expect them to be thrown in prison. But someone speeding through a neighborhood? Or dangerously overtaking a cyclist? No bother.
If the person running with the knife hurt someone they'd be a murderer. But the car? Oh, it was just an accident.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.
I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
"
In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq.
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier.
Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
Covered many times before.
How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] (https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc...) 710 points | the-mitr | 4 months ago | 254 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 333 points | hourislate | 6 years ago | 70 comments
Room 641A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 248 points | llambda | 13 years ago | 44 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 207 points | mimsee | 10 years ago | 75 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 51 points | jihadjihad | 2 years ago | 5 comments
Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
Only about 2500 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what automobile safety was like in 1941, but I’m sure it wasn’t great, then, either.
I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.
Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.
We have a whole licensing apparatus and traffic policing as well as safety regulations for vehicles driven on public roads. It's not cheap.
They died from car crashes.
Not accidents.
Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all.
Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.
It's not about language, it's about culture. If you saw someone running through a crowd with a knife you'd expect them to be thrown in prison. But someone speeding through a neighborhood? Or dangerously overtaking a cyclist? No bother.
If the person running with the knife hurt someone they'd be a murderer. But the car? Oh, it was just an accident.
hello, is this thing on?
bye, bye, miss american pie. drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. and good old' boys were drinking whisky and rye
singin, this'll be the day that I...
it's report card time fellas, the department of homeostasis is feeding marijuana users to the prison system when the incumbent promised to reschedule.
edit: spelling.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
>then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris
Not that it really matters to your point, but this happened in 2015. Seems kind of odd to include that in this list.
Oh maybe I misremembered, for some reason I thought it was much earlier
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
I didn’t say it was justified, I said it had little to do with the absolute body count.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
I mean, given recent voting patterns, people currently in their 30’s probably won’t be elected until like 2060, right?
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
AI psychosis ^
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.
So much vitriol here today, jeez.
I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
Okay now you are just being demeaning to victims of drunk driving
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
" In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...
> 9/11 was the starting point
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
Hey now. We turn against each other, too.
Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier.
Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
Hi NSA.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
> A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
The problem is that the NSA violates everyone's privacy without a care in the world.
This makes it pretty easy for them. Stockpile a bunch of vulnerabilities and go to town.
When you cannot even know what their budget is (since it's classified), can you even know what their capabilities are?
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol
Enter the .ca registrar: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/
I wonder if the NSA had done a "everyone, get behind this firewall" type of campaign if it would have been more successful/less leaky