Room 641A

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.

" 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...

Hey now. We turn against each other, too.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

They died from car crashes.

Not accidents.

Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.

The terrorists keep winning each day the 4th Amendment is not restored.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.

You'll be happy to know that Cloudflare's headquarters is about three blocks away from the very room that this thread is about.

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