[aio2]

Damn.

I don't know if this started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy and the general public knowing about it, but it helped a lot. Before him releasing info about room 641A and whatever else, there really wasn't definitive evidence of any government spying and tampering, and either with the intention of starting this movement or simply letting people know, he was a big push in the right direction.

tldr: he's a w

[DoingIsLearning]

> started the whole movement or whatever you'd call it for this push towards privacy

I don't really like this framing because it makes it sound like if you care for privacy you are some form of fringe advocate.

We should always try to reframe:

Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening your letters? Ask any senior and the answer is a clear no.

So why are we discussing this as if privacy is entirely optional as soon as you change medium from written letters to emails, sms, instant message?

[pjc50]

You can make this work in the other direction:

"Would you be ok with government employees or law enforcement indiscriminately opening the letters of illegal immigrants?"

You'd immediately get the answer yes. Of course, in order to find the illegal immigrant letters they have to open _all_ of the letters.

People will give law enforcement huge amounts of power because they think it will be used against groups they don't like.

[cj]

I wonder what percent of Americans would trade their privacy to bring their monthly cell phone bill from $100/mo to $0/mo in exchange for sharing texts and emails with a telecom company.

I suspect the percentage would be surprisingly high.

Unfortunately normal people don’t really care that much about privacy (even if we all think everyone should).

[shadowgovt]

It's also interesting to float the thought experiment of what Gen Z would say about this question because the online norms are so different.

"Hey, sometimes people try to send bombs through the mail. Would you be okay with the government opening 1% of packages, inspecting them, and re-sealing them to make sure they're safe?

... what if they threw in a coupon so the next package mailed is free?"

(... and suddenly I've discovered of my own psyche that if those "The TSA inspected this bag" slips included a coupon for a free coffee, the visceral response to their presence would do a 180. "Oh, sweet! Free coffee!").

[genewitch]

not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.

[rcxdude]

That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).

[philipkglass]

I'm sure it depended on the audience, but I and others [0] guessed at broad electronic surveillance well before the 641A revelations. I was never called a conspiracy theorist for it either. In the 1990s if you had read Bamford's The Puzzle Palace [1] (published in 1982) and observed the government's legal fight against Zimmermann's PGP encryption software [2], you could make an educated guess close to the truth. If you phrased it as "I'm sure that the government is spying on everything," that went beyond the realm of what could be proved then, but airing suspicions about broad government snooping never elicited strong denials in my experience.

[0] Like the people on the Cypherpunks mailing list

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Arms_Export_Co...

[nvarsj]

It's pretty depressing how society went from "that would never happen" to general apathy.

[potato3732842]

That's a really charitable way of framing the fact that a 15% minority screeching about "the government would never" and "but there's no proof" was able to control the narrative despite people generally having doubt or believing otherwise privately right up until the point that the proof was public record and so ironclad that even mainstream media had to report on it.

(I assume the 85% number is made up, but for whatever the number is the point stands)

[lern_too_spel]

The really odd thing is that 85% of the general public will say "well of course they spy on email" even today, after Snowden's leaks showed that the Obama administration had shut that down.

[mulmen]

The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting point. Most people call the “privacy movement” “the American revolution“.