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Comment by evilhaskeller | Hacker News Reader

I remember an IRC channel about security in the early 2000s. Somehow we started discussing government surveillance, and someone mentioned ECHELON. People's reactions were interesting: most people immediately dismissed it as being "impossible", or "another conspiracy theory".

It makes me sad.

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How quickly we forget. Long before that, back in the USENET days, it was a common joke to include a .sig line "for the ECHELON line reader" with a list of words that the presumed NSA computer would match against, like "KGB nuclear anthrax bioweapon" etc. The joke being that if everyone would include these, they would end up having to analyze the entire newsgroup feed.

Heh, there's an emacs command for that too. M-x spook

I took that more as a subversive act, rather than as a joke.

Yeah. The worst part, though, is that a lot of the same people now did a 180 and reside firmly in the "I have nothing to hide" camp. They jumped from dismissing global surveillance as too far-fetched and intrusive for reality straight to dismissing it as a triviality not worthy of further though.

These people have no imagination, that's the problem. They could not imagine the possibilities, which were easily guessable at the time if you knew anything about technology. Now, they cannot imagine the consequences, which are easily guessable if you know anything about people and intelligence agencies.

That's what happens when the ones in charge have a deep understanding of the human mind and how trivial it is to shape it and the ideas/values it contains.

As I said in another thread, unrelated, things like propaganda and by association advertising are unethical at best, it's subversion/coercion on a massive scale, it truly shapes people in something they are not.

And they count on the fact that people reject the fact that they are easily manipulated (applies for me too).

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