Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet (1996)

I was a (Canadian) kid in the blue boxing and codes scene in the early 90s. I lived through Operation Sundevil, the persecution of Phil Zimmerman and PGP users, the Clipper chip fiasco, and the V-chip with the 1996 communications act (which led to vast media consolidation). By then it was clear the government were going to surveil everything and try to censor as much as they could, and that this was completely bipartisan initiative that was driven by the unelected career senior public servants and private corporations in law enforcement, intelligence, and the security establishment.

Individual politicians fought these efforts to bring some of them down (in the case of Clipper, a surprising mix from John Kerry , our 2004 US democratic Presidential candidate, to John Ashcroft (!) who later became GWB’s attorney general and completely changed positions , supporting STELLAR WIND which was revealed by Snowden).

The EFF (formed after Sundevil and funded by Mitch Kapor’s Lotus 1-2-3’a fortunes), Wired magazine (much more iconoclastic in the 90s), 2600 magazine, Phrack, and the ACLU all did much to educate people about the risks. For a time, we listened.

STELLAR WIND was when the 1960s-era Military SIGINT programs like ECHELON melded with broad domestic surveillance. The populace was too angry and fearful to stop it in the mid aughts.

Similar to how the military industrial complex grew regardless of who was politically in charge, the security establishment has become an end onto itself that accelerated once terrorism scored a major blow on 9/11. Or maybe it was a glimpse of today’s cynicism of wanting unlimited power/deficits/surveillance/Executive orders/military options for your own party when it controls the presidency, but not the other party.

There probably was a window in the 90s to mid aughts where things weren’t well under control, but funding after 9/11 fixed that.

It will require an educated electorate and major mandate given to a future congress and president to undo this situation, and it likely will require sustainment over 3 or 4 terms to stick. Which is to say: The realm of remote possibility, but not likely. Adapt accordingly.

I was a kid in the mid-late 90s and even wrote my senator about Echelon for a civics class project. It wasn't 'proven' but it was known. That senator, a few years later, was the only one to vote against the PATRIOT Act (Russ Feingold, WI).

The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos

[2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.

I think we were all a bit naive in the 90s thinking that the sheer amount of data made each of us somewhat anonymous. The consequences of extremely cheap mass storage and very fast big data analytics didn't really sink in.

I've spent my holiday break this year learning about open firmware, coreboot, and the secret computer that lives in every computer known as the intel management engine.

I hope we can get to a place where we can trust our hardware again, but Intel needs to allow ME to be completely disabled or we need to find a replacement for Intel chips (from what I gather AMD is not much better).

My next computer will likely be from Purism (or even a Chromebook, they run open firmware)