Hacker News Reader

Comment by generalizations | Hacker News Reader

> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

I remember hearing that argument made back in the 00's about government surveilance. The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.

View on HN

Has government surveillance not been an open secret for decades for example you can dig up EU reports on Echelon from the early 00's which talks about a 1997 study that said that ECHELON routinely intercepts all e-mail, telephone and Fax. The issue is more that most did not believe in it until hard evidence was presented by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

The official 9/11 story being a farce has been an open secret almost since the event. There are hundreds of verifiable facts that don't fit the official narrative.

eg?

Not a 9/11 truther, but there are some incongruities around official accounts of 9/11, for example the accounts of why CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijackers, as discussed in the documentary "Who is Rich Blee".

There's a morass of conflicting stories, but if you're interested you could start with a close look at [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky

Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.

What happened to WTC 7? There is a 45k+ bounty for any credible refutation of the University of Alaska Fairbanks study:

https://ine.uaf.edu/projects/wtc7/

http://westviewnews.org/2020/01/09/engineers-pledge-45000-re...

It's interesting how the Surfside condo collapse looked like a controlled demolition too. It wasn't, though. I think it's just how buildings are built to collapse, and they down that way regardless of cause.

You can tell the condo thing had no BS surrounding it because, well, the television showed footage of it from every angle and actually analyzed, as opposed to the piss poor confusing coverage and engineering analysis on, say, the Vegas shooting.

WTC7

that's not an answer.

what specifically about that building? in what way do you disagree with the "official" narrative and what is your proof of your counter-narrative and what is your evidence that was suppressed?

I remember laughing at the presented passport from one of the alleged culprits shortly after.(Like a day, or even hours? Can't recall exactly anymore) Found blocks away, only slightly burned at some parts of the corners. Seemed surreal and staged to me.

edit: Also, in hindsight, after having been sensitized to the topic in general, the fact that there were exercise/drill/training/simulation operations running at the same time and place where terror attacks hit.

No. Everyone believed the stories about Echelon and the mandated at&t "wiretap room" and so on and so forth. The situation is pretty similar as of today, in fact. People just put that into the back of their heads where they can ignore it and continue writing their HN post.

And the most sensitive personal and business emails continue to be sent in clear text. Without the sender usually even thinking twice about it.

Most normal people, whom you will not find on hacker news, will think you a tinfoil hat wearing lunatic to suggest anything remotely like mass surveillance being real in ky experience.

why the downvotes?

I didn't downvote you, but, to me, your claim very much does not match up with my experiences. Regardless of political affiliation or age or location - even before Snowden - most people probably wouldn't find it very crazy or implausible, and a lot would say it's quite possible or likely. Post-Snowden, I think you'd be seen as the crazy one if you thought it wasn't happening.

At least if we're talking about surveillance in the sense of "when you call someone or are called by someone, the phone numbers and length of the call are automatically recorded in a database, and everyone's unencrypted internet traffic is collected and/or automatically and manually analyzed by the National Security Agency". If someone says the government put microscopic hidden cameras in everyone's home ceilings, then, yeah, they'll probably be seen as pretty crazy. (A bit less so if they say they're just tapping the cameras in phones / laptops / smart TVs.)

The problem in my experience (with say a typical < 25 year old) is that they just don't care. Really. Like: "So what?" "Watch all they want, they can see me on TikTok."

It has become normalized and it doesn't connect with something undesirable.

Unfortunately this seems all too plausible, and it really is too late to have a society that allows privacy imho.

The level of coordination required to fake 9/11 seems on a very different level than the level required to wiretap some central points on the internet. And that's not even considering usa basically had a dept of wiretapping (the NSA) already set up or that the nsa's activities actually did leak.

Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years

Does it really require all that much coordination?

Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack.

I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.

Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...

AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story).

I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

> I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

You can see this with every time that the COVID lab leak discussion gets equated with lab creation.

And also creation for research/treatment development purposes vs. bioweapon purposes.

That is indeed a well known tactic. In the same way as critics of mass vaccinating a global population with an experimental vaccine are lumped together with anti-vaxxers who believe in a nanobot spiked mRNA vaccine by Bill Gates.

Right — why isn't it cool to distinguish, and rank, various adjacent conspiracy theory likelihoods anymore?

I tend to call that tactic "Joe Greening", from the guy in the original Deus Ex who mixed the (in-universe true) conspiracy theories with alien nonsense to discredit people who knew about the conspiracies.

https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Greene

This comes up in The X-Files, too.

Agreed; I spend probably too much of my time debating conspiracy theories online, and I find these tactics incredibly common and incredibly disingenuous. It's very easy to reduce any conspiracy theory to the most absurd of its claims and claimants. One has to break down the different possibilities and the conditional probabilities that follow.

Was Epstein murdered, or did he kill himself? If he killed himself, was he told to, permitted to, or not permitted to and did it anyway? Did the towers fall due to plane collisions and fires, or explosives, or both, or something else? Were al Qaeda responsible? If so, did they collaborate with the US government? If they were responsible and didn't collaborate, did the US government have specific forewarning and let it happen for geopolitical purposes?

Any and every conspiracy theory absolutely should and must be steelmanned, and every person lobbing allegations must be taken seriously, if we're to have any hope of getting a micrometer closer to a shared sense of reality. Good epistemology requires taking conspiracy theories seriously and in good faith, even if one believes some percentage of conspiracy theorists may be acting in bad faith or may be in a state of psychosis, etc.

Buddy, I don't have time to evaluate all the true information that comes up, let alone all the probably false information.

Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

>Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

This is true. I've lost countless hours exerting 50 times more effort trying to refute conspiracy theorists' claims than the effort they put into it.

But I don't find it a total waste. Do I ever alter or influence anyone's opinions in any way? The person I'm debating: probably almost never or never. But other people reading it? Probably very very rarely, but if even one person reading it has ever had their view slightly shifted, then it's worth it, to me.

I know the efforts don't go totally unappreciated; in online discussions, I've been privately thanked for being one of the only people who'll try to take a conspiracy theorist seriously and have a serious, long debate with them. I get why almost no one wants to do it. But, in my opinion, someone has to. I definitely wouldn't fault someone for not wanting to masochistically subject themselves to that, but I think there still needs to be someone willing to sit down with them, treat them and their views with respect, and present reasonable counter-arguments.

When not a single person will try to seriously engage with them and their arguments, it only deeply reinforces that they're right and everyone else is crazy and/or a liar and/or an idiot. For example, if you Google terms related to Holocaust denial, pretty much two things come up (at least as of some years ago): Holocaust denial websites or websites saying it happened. You almost never find someone actually trying to directly address the claims of Holocaust denialists. You just get things like the current top hit:

>In most cases, a healthy debate promotes understanding. But even in the most liberal societies, certain matters are closed for discussion. For good reason, we choose not to argue about whether the Earth is flat, or whether white people have (as some white supremacists claim) “superior germ-plasm.” Nor should we argue about whether the Holocaust happened. It did. Arguments against this fact reveal little about history and much about the arguer’s wish for the world to replace memories of Jewish victimization with a monolithic image of Jews as powerful and treacherous.

On one hand; sure, I agree with all of this. But try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who's been indoctrinated into truly, earnestly believing it's all made up, and then read that statement. What are you going to think?

>Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

Yes; their strongly-held priors are that there are lots of conspiracies. In my opinion, barring scenarios like antipsychotics for people in psychotic states, the only way to really dislodge any belief a conspiracy theorist has is to attack the entire jenga stack from the root. You need to chip away at the priors in order to move the needle on anything in any direction. This isn't easy and probably takes months or years of time spent with a specific person to have even the slightest chance, but I think it's the only way.

In my opinion, if humanity is to have a chance of surviving in the long term, there need to be at least some people making concerted efforts to try to bridge the gap between people who hold fundamentally different views of reality. I think it'd be bad and a net waste of time and energy if a lot of people were doing this, but I think it'd also be bad if no one were doing it.

Military funding of terrorists is nothing new.

Pakistan as a proxy state of the US created the Taliban in Afghanistan.

US wanted religiously motivated fighters countering the USSR. Pakistan, armed with US weapon, and flush with US money, obliged.

Taliban was actually created at the behest of the US.

It is an open secret.

The US, to counter Al-Assad, armed and funded Al-Noosra front. Much, if not most of the money and weapons went to the ISIS.

In the case of Al-Noosra turned ISIS, the US has plausible deniability. It doesn't even have that much of it in case of the next generation of the Mujahids fighting the USSR being turned into the Taliban.

> 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition

Speaking for an entire group, almost always going to fail.

Pffft...you got it wrong. "Zem planez have been remotely radioed in!"

The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

The personal risk for the top level execs would be massive, maybe even up to and including a death penalty. The payoff is a budget with too many 0s gets more 0s. The plot isn't rational.

> The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

Very trivial to deal with, if one of them starts to speak up you just send the FBI to conduct an "interview" during the course of which they can be assassinated, like they did with Ibragim Todashev.

The bombers are useful idiots. True believers that aren't aware that they're part of an inside job.

Thank you.

Right. You just fine someone else that wants it done and grease the wheels.

That's what you need true believers for: cannon fodder. Unlikely for someone to chicken out if they're already heavily emotionally invested in the idea of achieving spontaneous unity with God by blowing themselves to bits.

I think the hard part is not doing it as a false flag op, but getting away with it after the fact. There was a lot of eyes on the aftermath of 9/11.

Especially after the centralization of the American surveillance and enforcement infrastructure in The Patriot Act.

The TLA organizations in the government are rival siblings. If the FBI caught wind of a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11 perpetrated by the Department of Defense in the newly-authorized data sharing, they'd have run it to ground.

Ha. In fact, you could hardly be more wrong.

https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-ar...

This is not an example of the FBI caught in a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11. If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation... Not terribly surprising, because (for starters) the FBI's job is domestic investigation, not international. The CIA or NSA would be in charge of looking into Saudi connections to 9/11.

After the Patriot Act, these responsibilities became intertwined, but in the timeframe the article's describing, the nature of that entwining was nascent, and it's not surprising the FBI would have continued to act like the traditional FBI.

> If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation

When you regularly use other nations to do your bidding, what the hell is the difference?

NSA mass surveillance was not just a matter of "wiretap some central points on the internet" as a one-and-done operation. It required thousands of people to work on various infrastructure and operations and to maintain it on an indefinite ongoing basis. It actually would have required far more sophistication and coordination to keep quiet in perpetuity than doing 9/11.

However, in point of fact, mass surveillance actually was kept quiet for years after it was spun up. Long after the evidence had leaked from multiple sources and become undeniable, you would still be called a crackpot if you said to someone on the street that all their electronic communications were being collected and stored indefinitely. Then, on a certain day in 2013, a former CIA employee dumped the NSA's files to the Western press, which obligingly flipped the narrative and dedicated weeks of extensive coverage to the government's shiny, new, and by then well entrenched panopticon. A surveillance system is ultimately most useful in its purpose only if the people know they're being watched, and the time had come for it to be unveiled.

As always, a large amount of media coverage in mainstream press outlets was a good indicator of what it was that the state wanted people focused on. The massively lower level of attention drawn to the Vault 7 leaks (which were arguably even more crucial than Snowden's) is stark and instructive, as is the different fate of the whistleblower (obscurity in prison vs international celebrity status) and a good indication of what they don't want you thinking about.

"Use Signal, use Tor."

The Vault 7 page on Wikipedia lists a strange ordering for E2EE messengers. Telegram has the weakest security and has only opt-in E2EE for chats, yet is listed first. WhatsApp's Facebook ownership is obviously problematic, but irrelevant to the specific context. I'd reorder it as “Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram”.

> While the encryption of messengers that offer end-to-end encryption, such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal, wasn't reported to be cracked, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#Messaging_services

It doesn't matter how secure the messengers are if every device they're running on is compromised.

Is there a category of "reduced protective on the ground work to sloppy SIGINT surveillance willingly" to provoke a incident that would ensure future funding?

This is one of the points of the article.

Conflation of adjacent theories is an easy route to defeating them in court of public opinion.

"fake 9/11" isn't even close....

It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.

It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process.

Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge.

When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories.

The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.

> The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.

Better yet, make it a partisan issue. Half of the country will refuse to believe it while the other half will be unable to do anything about it.

Confuse the issue more by flipflopping which party signals to their base to virtue signal giving a shit about the topic every....3-5 years.

The main difference between government surveillance and 9/11 truther conspiracy is that the government surveillance "secret" can be kept in the open because the bulk of the citizenry doesn't care, or actually thinks it's in their best interests for the government to be surveilling everyone.

In contrast, the bulk of the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated a terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands of people.

Evidence: the reaction to the Snowden leaks. Lots of Americans responded to that news with "oh okay; that's a rational thing for the NSA to be doing to combat terrorism."

> the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated

Not so sure about that. Large portion of population does believe that and they are not up in arms.

It's not a wide enough margin. The Scrips 2006 poll suggested around 16% think it's "very likely" someone in the US government either assisted or took no action (as frame of reference, Pew Research suggests between 4 and 7% of respondent input is "bogus"... Not just random, but intentionally biased towards the most unlikely answer to troll the pollsters [https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...]).

2006?!?!?!?!?!?!

That was the generous year. Belief has waned since then.

Statista probed the question in 2019 and found strong belief at 11%. https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-...

Now I want to relearn all the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

One of the weirder ones is that there were over 80 cameras pointed at the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the public has seen none of the videos.

I'm pretty sure that was debunked several years ago. Plus, video was finally released, so there's that.

Per GP there were over 80 cameras but the pentagon, after years of calls for transparency shared a couple stills from one camera, so there’s that.

Those stills have about the same quality as your typical Bigfoot photo though.

Why not just release a damn video?

Sunlight cures all infection.

This phenomenon is a subset of the effect "Too much sunlight denatures complex molecules and kills carbon-based life."

They dont want to reveal the locations of their security cameras?

If they already released a still, they already released the location.

Of one camera. Not 80 of them.

I'm asking for them to release any video that shows what happened. If they already released one still, why not release the entire video?

I feel like you're purposefully being difficult.

I don’t have a lot to go on and so am I basically playing Devils Advocate.

If I’m coming off as difficult, that’s why.

What do you mean debunked? Who debunked it? Do you have a citation? Are you suggesting the HQ of the most powerful military in the world had no security cameras?

This has the statement of the FBI agent saying that they had 85 videos, only one of which was released:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_20...

Another strange one is the speech than Rumsfeld gave about missing trillions at the Pentagon 1 day before 9/11, then completely forgotten in the face of increased military spending the next day.

https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY

https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU

Another thing I haven't seen any reasonable explanation for is how the towers collapsed perfectly in their footprint. It's hard enough to get smaller buildings to collapse perfectly in controlled demolition. Yet 2 towers that were among the tallest in the world both collapsed perfectly. With such tall towers they should have buckled unevenly at least a little bit, especially since the damage was off center.

They're definitely built to collapse inward out of necessity to avoid damaging other buildings/creating dominos.

I commented elsewhere on this oddity, and the Vegas shooting, contrasted to the coverage of the recent condo collapse.

Hm. No. The weirdest one is that the WTC was torn down by tactical nuke, buried under its basement, in context of Silverstein Properties having insured it at much higher value before, essentially pulling off a gigantic insurance fraud.

And the Manhattan Project before that ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com