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Comment by pheroden | Hacker News Reader

Yea, Snowden is responsible. Because we never knew about phone monitoring before?? Glad the terrorists never watched the wire or any other police procedural going back to the 70's.

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Osama Bin Laden avoided electronic communication well before the NSA's illegal domestic spying activities were revealed. He passed notes and relied on trusted couriers. This is nothing but political opportunism.

Right, but did that rigor go down to the field? Unlikely that his rigor would percolate all the way down, however with it now being common knowledge rather than paranoia most anyone downstream would also observe the same paranoia due to the revelations.

Snowden just provided the proof. It was already common knowledge that the government had massive communications monitoring programs. They were building an enormous data center, and previous programs had been uncovered.

Lots of people talked about it and were dismissed as tin foil hat wearers. Likewise RMS has warned about a lot of stuff that slowly seems to be coming a reality, yet he is still dismissed as a bit of a nutter.

It was not common knowledge and even those who were paranoid typically were sloppy with their implementations, but given they know they are targeted and the tools since developed to counteract this new reality, now rigorous communications security is easy, no special knowledge required.

This isn't true.

The NSA had bin laden's sat-phone line in the 90s. I've seen documentaries on it.

Yes, in the 90s. After 2001, Bin Laden switched to couriers, which is one reason he was so hard to catch.

Snowden confirmed the extent of NSA surveillance in 2013.

So that's 12 years for which the GP's statement was true.

Interferometry on the microwave background allows the U.S. military to track all people, weapons, and aqueous objects bigger than a thimble throughout an entire city such as Paris.

Advanced technologies allow them to know when these things are brewing, but per game theory they allow them to happen to not reveal that capability.

Encryption and Snowden have nothing to do with it. They are limited hangouts to gaslight and decrease the power of the lower echelons of government (you know, the regular people who might actually have stopped this).

>>Advanced technologies allow them to know when these things are brewing, but per game theory they allow them to happen to not reveal that capability.

And you know about them.....how? If you haven't realized, I'm asking you to provide a source for these extraordinary claims.

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