Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaabe | Hacker News Reader

It often amazes me how little Snowden changed. I mean, surveillance and targeted misinformation campaigns is worse than our worst dystopian fiction ever imagined, but no one really cares.

It’s getting worse too with more and more anti-encryption laws and centralisation.

That being said, since the Snowden information isn’t changing the world, then I can’t really fault anyone for not wanting to pay for hosting it.

View on HN

https://prism-break.org would beg to differ.

Signal was created and enjoys popularity as a high security messenger thats easy for average users to adopt. Google upped their certificate sizes in response to snowdens releases. less trust was placed in NIST/NSA partnerships with technology and several weaker ciphers were outright rejected from the kernel for lack of transparency. Hell, theres an entire laptop manufacturer that sprung up due to it. https://puri.sm/

TLS adoption on websites also increased markedly and the HTTP2 spec made it mandatory. TLS1.3 PFS was also much more voraciously fought for, one could argue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect#Technology_indu...

Laptop and phone manufacturer.

People are more serious about encrypted communications, as well. Matrix.org and Riot are enjoying great growth right now.

Before Snowden, the extent of surveillance was only suspected, there were the occasional whistleblower, but there was nothing definitive enough to tie it all together, there was a lot of uncertainty and it felt very much in the realm of conspiracy theories.

After Snowden, we now know with greater certainty that the surveillance is truly far reaching and more multi-faceted than we could've imagined.

True. Still, I agree with the GP poster: very little has changed as a result. The USA Freedom Act had some improvements but also made some things worse; FISA Section 702 was renewed without significant changes in early 2018.

Before Snowden, civil liberties activists (including me!) used to say "If people knew the extent of mass surveillance, they'd be up in arms - and we'd see some real changes." But no.

I totally agree with this. Personally I think the reason for this is because a lot of people don’t really comprehend what’s going on and can’t visualize the level of surveillance that’s actually already in place (they don’t see physical cameras/microphones everywhere).

I think most of the reason is that many people who post online got Greenwald's misreporting of the NSA documents (OMG, PRISM can access anybody's emails), while the public in general got the less sensational facts about what the NSA was actually doing.

this is a good argument to publish the full bulk unredacted Snowden archive then

> they don’t see physical cameras/microphones everywhere

Rather, they don't understand that cellphones that all of us provides that, along with GPS tracking etc.

They see the cameras, but they do not understand the implication...

Except they don't see cameras. I've started pointing out surveillance cameras to my more normie friends, who are frequently surprised.

I've found this to be the case as well. There's an enormous amount of surveillance technology that over the last ~3 years has sprung up on buildings, streetlights, traffic lights, and highway poles. I try to talk to people about these things, but they've often never seen them. When pressed, they say "it's probably for traffic". When pointed out, they shrug. They might say, chuckling, "they're watching you" as if it's silly and meaningless to consider. Finally, there's "so what are you gonna do about it?"

You should see the horror on the faces of co-workers when I explain how data aggregation works personally against them.

A lot of it is how you explain it in a way that relates to them.

You can get through to none-techies but you have to couch it in a way that resonates.

People are slowly changing as well, ironically Facebook seems to be the one that is making more people slowly question whether putting their entire life out in public is worth it.

That viewpoint seems a little condescending. Maybe people can comprehend exactly what is going on and simply don't care. The type of people who frequent HN will quickly dismiss the "you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide" argument, but it is still the belief held by a wide swath of normal citizens. Many people are perfectly fine with some faceless government entity knowing who they are talking to if that decreases their odds of dying in a terrorist attack by a tiny percentage. I also have yet to see anyone in our tech circles able to clearly establish a link between this surveillance and a negative impact on the day-to-day life of the average American voter. If you want people to make this issue an political priority, you need to do a better job than just appealing to abstract ideals and slippery slope arguments about future dystopias.

It is the same thing with Facebook. It isn't necessarily that people don't know the sacrifices they are making to their own privacy by using Facebook. It is that the utility people get out of Facebook is more valuable to them than any abstract idea of privacy. You need to show people the real world repercussions if you want them to change their behavior or beliefs.

Encryption on the internet is now more or less the norm in the form of https connections and end to end encrypted IM clients.

The problem was not solved in a political way so as as result it is being solved in a technical way instead. Much more progress needs to be made but progress is occurring.

> It often amazes me how little Snowden changed. I mean, surveillance and targeted misinformation campaigns is worse than our worst dystopian fiction ever imagined, but no one really cares.

I think things did change, but for the worse. Every time something like this is exposed, it's a decision point. If nothing is done by the public or those elected by the public, the perpetrators learn a valuable lesson, namely that they can probably increase the intensity of their surveillance without much worry and needing to hide. In a way it's relief for them.

Sure some programs were burned and exposed but they can just go and rename them and continue on.

The only real change I saw, is that people who used to call anyone who suggested the type of mass surveillance Snowden uncovered was going on "tinfoil hatters" changed their deflection to "everyone knew that, I have nothing to hide".

The only domestic "mass surveillance" program in Snowden's dumps was phone metadata collection, which everyone did know about since 2006. https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-n...

The sensational parts of Greenwald's reporting were not supported by Snowden's documents or any other documents. Anybody who parrots those claims will rightfully be called a tinfoil hatter.

What? Really? Can you provide any context on embellishments by Greenwald?

"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants"

His unsubstantiated sensational claims start in the first sentence of his first article and continue from there.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...

Snowden left the US in mid 2013... that was a much different world. There was much less open antagonism between the US and Russia(and China). And it's this great power antagonism that explains why things have gone backwards.

The actions associated with the dystopian fiction are there but not the dystopia ... yet. I don't see the dystopia outcome as inevitable either but that can creep with an impossible weight to counter if the powers want it.

> It often amazes me how little Snowden changed.

I strongly disagree. For one thing, it's changed Silicon Valley's view on advertising based business models. It's also made the public much more aware of how their data is being used, which has changed and will further change the stock price of many companies.

I can also see him indirectly helping bring about the GPRD

People's interests being misrepresented by their allegedly representative government is not the same as no one really caring.

It think it was a great shame that anything was released regarding surveillance outside the US. It made it far to easy to dismiss the leaks as the actions of someone who wants to damage America.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com