Hacker News Reader

Comment by just_steve_h | Hacker News Reader

It certainly does make one wonder who else in the worlds of high technology (and journalism!) May be – wittingly or unwittingly – working for Uncle Sam.

I've seen some deep integrations that have made me despair of any organization being free from the overweening influence of the "security services." I'm talking about groups as large as multi-billion dollar public US technology infrastructure companies and as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention.

Sometimes it seems that internal turf battles, budget disputes, careerism, and rank incompetence are our only protections against the machinations of the National Security State.

View on HN

> as small as anarchist cells planning to attend a political convention

For what it's worth I fully expect a great percentage of any anarchist cell to actually be double agents/"agents provocateurs", in the end I think that's why the Okhrana [1] was so good at its job (relatively speaking, of course).

As a matter of fact I think that the "Western" three-letter agencies are at a disadvantage because they're focusing too much on data collection and interception, they're too technical, so to speak, this is still a "humans-heavy industry" (for lack of a better phrase) and without controlling and understanding said humans all the information in the world will do almost nothing to further said secret agencies' goals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana

US Telcos have been jointed at the hip w/ the USIC for generations. AT&T's history of proactively helping the US spy on US Citizens+Everyone hints at the company's deep desire to be a spy entity in it's own right.

Even though the knowledge of that is/was public, it wasn't widely know until the Edward Snowden revelations - largely due to the relative disinterest of US news orgs (even when faced with clear evidence of US's ethical lapses -- eg: Mark Klein whistleblows AT&T's NSA taps on the internet backbone).

Most of the US Press still behaves as if USIC's primary goal was safeguarding the public instead of furthering the interests of US Gov & political financiers.

Worth pointing out that the rules around telco accounting are pretty much designed to give Interested Parties a single point to siphon off call metadata.

Look up Operation Mockingbird on wikipedia.

The same is still going on in spades.

I don't think an operation like that is necessary. Most journalists seem to be eager to prove themselves as patriots by under-reporting Gov malfeasance, especially in IC matters where understanding a complex issue gets trumped by deadlines.

Thank-you editors for our chronically uninformed electorate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com