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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

You mean the era of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, which spied on every domestic activist group and potential subversive from Vietnam war protestors to Martin Luther King? The same FBI that assassinated Fred Hampton? Or a CIA that operated with zero oversight, ran drugs, orchestrated coups, committed assassinations, and experimented on people to see whether LSD was a truth serum?

You think that's a government that's in control? You think all these abuses and expansions of power are a new thing?

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I'm not sure you disagree with me. I'm not saying the abuses are new. I'm saying that those abuses happened in the context of trying to, for instance, suppress large-scale domestic insurgency in the context of a cold war against a state-level foe that specialized in generating domestic insurgencies.

Compared to that, you have a "group" so paltry that every couple years the FBI has to convince a mentally unstable guy to "join al qaeda" so he can be busted. Yet, the level of pants-wetting insecurity seems to be much higher.

>You mean the era of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, which spied on every domestic activist group and potential subversive from Vietnam war protestors to Martin Luther King?

they were forced to prioritize their limited resources and abilities somehow. Thanks to technology advancements, today the NSA is spying on everybody who uses any technical means of communications.

>The same FBI that assassinated Fred Hampton?

try to gather a group of armed young black men in an appartment in a city today and see what happens. Or imagine if "Occupy" guys were armed.

>Or a CIA that operated with zero oversight, ran drugs, orchestrated coups, committed assassinations, and experimented on people to see whether LSD was a truth serum?

CIA black prisons around the world. Extra-judicial renditions and torture. Drones. The only change here is that the effects of LSD are well known today so no more experiments. I mean with LSD. The stuff they experiment with today is much more interesting.

What happens today is less of a change in direction and more of a logical extension in what covert agencies have always been doing.

NSA has always done dragnet surveillance as long as it's been feasible. Look up Echelon.

I'm not even sure the word "logical" is necessary there, and I haven't seen any indication that the activities are anything other than a continuation of what Hoover started.

Hoover's overreaches were one thing, and certainly created their own set of harms.

The level of overreach possible people's entire existence is logged in minute detail via online and electronic services -- your location, contacts, calls, and texts via your phone, your reading via your browser and ISP, emails, purchases, etc., is simply beyond compare in all of history.

The map circulating a few months back comparing the size of the surveillance archives of East Germany's Stasi vs. the NSA, if both were represented as paper files, is hugely telling:

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/05/stasi-vs-the-u-s-nsa-back-to...

A quote from that link:

"So where the hated Stasi surveillance was a building in area, the NSA surveillance today is an entire continent."

And:

"As a final note, the word Stasi was a contraction of the East German surveillance agency’s full name, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. It translates to National Security Agency." (Google translate says Ministry of State Security).

In the French revolution, the group pretty much playing the role of government during the Reign of Terror with many beheadings every day was called the Committee of Public Safety. The original or supposed reason these organizations claim to exist seems to be a justification to claim power and rights from the population.

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