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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

It surprises me just how quickly the major world governments all started violating sovereign laws and spying on/surveilling their own citizens. Effectively, everyone is now monitored all the time by their own governments bereft of suspicion of having committed a crime - or under the blanket suspicion of everyone being capable of committing a crime (AKA "act of terrorism").

Conspiracy theorists might see the War on Terrorism as a premeditated concoction to justify massive state surveillance, since it's about everyone's justification. That's silly though. We all know they just took advantage of an existing situation, right?

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What do you mean "how quickly"? Mass surveillance has been going on for decades. The only new thing is the amount of data the average person has travelling over networks that can be monitored, and the ease of increasing the volume captures.

My favourite example is that in the early 90's, while I was politically active for a period, I met a number of interesting characters, including the ex-editor of a tiny Norwegian communist newspaper. He told me about how he for many years had intelligence agents come up to him on the street to crack jokes about conversations he had with his wife in his own home. While that was outright bugging of his flat, it was part of a many decades long illegal surveillance operation covering pretty much everyone on the political left in Norway (well, to the left of the social democrats who started it) regardless of whether or not they were involved in anything at all.

It was finally rolled up in mid 90's, after the police and parliament had spent several decades ignoring reports from victims of it and insisting that kind of thing didn't happen.

>> "Conspiracy theorists might see the War on Terrorism as a premeditated concoction to justify massive state surveillance"

Conspiracies aside, the term for this is a false flag operation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

Given intelligence agencies like the CIA even do this internally to others within the agency, anything is possible: https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+eyewash

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