Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
> On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
"Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power.
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
"
In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq.
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.
Why what? Why is comparing 3000 murders to 42000 accidents not logical? Because of the second sentence in my comment. Why do we spend time and resources investigating murders despite it being a rare cause of death? Because it maintains public peace and rule of law.
The utilitarian thing to do would be to divert all law enforcement resources to heart disease prevention, since that's the leading cause of death by a lot. But in practice, very few people would enjoy living in such a society.
If Pearl Harbor had been the only thing that happened that day, and the nature of the attack had been such that it was automatically prevented from happening again, then what came after would have been a severe overreaction too.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.
Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…
I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.
Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?
Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?
Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?
This is America. We see constant mass murder of random citizens, often children, via mass shootings. So maybe the question is, why was 9/11 special among murder?
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then.
I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless the mods get serious on stuff that hits the front page, I don’t see that trajectory changing.
> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all.
Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.
It's not about language, it's about culture. If you saw someone running through a crowd with a knife you'd expect them to be thrown in prison. But someone speeding through a neighborhood? Or dangerously overtaking a cyclist? No bother.
If the person running with the knife hurt someone they'd be a murderer. But the car? Oh, it was just an accident.
You think they were doing it on purpose every time someone is in an accident, or you think every time someone says "accident", they're referring to or you're purposely missing the nuance to make a point nobody agrees with, or you think that people in general are not annoyed when someone drives recklessly?
If it's the first, I dunno - you're wrong. People aren't. If it's the second, aside from insurance fraud, nobody is trying to fuck up their day and lose a functional car in the process, maybe getting seriously injured. If it's the third, you're just being annoying and nobody will take your point seriously if you can't make it more saliently. If it's the last, go check out reddit. There are at least half a dozen subs where people post bad drivers and everyone in the comments is collectively grumbling.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.
I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
These things were obviously always concerning but I feel the situation has taken on an entirely different dimension now that they could feasibly use whisper + LLM to actually review _all_ the communication. That's crazy.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
> They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information
Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.
> In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
That was private fiber they had spliced into, not anything routed across public Internet. That's why the DCs weren't encrypting it to begin with.
> Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.
No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing.
> That was private fiber they had spliced into,
No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.
It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.
Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier.
Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
Covered many times before.
How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] (https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc...) 710 points | the-mitr | 4 months ago | 254 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 333 points | hourislate | 6 years ago | 70 comments
Room 641A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 248 points | llambda | 13 years ago | 44 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 207 points | mimsee | 10 years ago | 75 comments
Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 51 points | jihadjihad | 2 years ago | 5 comments
Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
> On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
"Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power.
Amass enough power and the law is yours.
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
" In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...
Hey now. We turn against each other, too.
> 9/11 was the starting point
I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale.
Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11:
I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building.
I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
Mass surveillance has certainly gone too far, but comparing 3000 premeditated murders to car accidents is not really a logical way to argue that. We investigate murder for a reason, despite it being a much rarer cause of death than natural causes and accidents.
Why? Seems to me that dead is dead, regardless of how it happens.
> Why?
Why what? Why is comparing 3000 murders to 42000 accidents not logical? Because of the second sentence in my comment. Why do we spend time and resources investigating murders despite it being a rare cause of death? Because it maintains public peace and rule of law.
The utilitarian thing to do would be to divert all law enforcement resources to heart disease prevention, since that's the leading cause of death by a lot. But in practice, very few people would enjoy living in such a society.
Only about 2500 Americans died at Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what automobile safety was like in 1941, but I’m sure it wasn’t great, then, either.
I’m therefore not sure what weight this argument is supposed to carry.
If Pearl Harbor had been the only thing that happened that day, and the nature of the attack had been such that it was automatically prevented from happening again, then what came after would have been a severe overreaction too.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
We’re certainly not trying 15x harder to prevent car accidents as done to prevent another 9/11.
Prior we had metal detectors for people and hand luggage x-ray. Now we have x-ray backscatter for people, ID and facial photography, and a whole lot of other nonsense. Liquids banned, visitors at the gate not permitted, and the list goes on…
I don’t entirely agree with the actual measures taken purportedly to prevent a recurrence, but it’s hard to argue anything other than significant steps were taken.
Roughly a million people have died in car accidents since. Was there really nothing possible to prevent a fraction of them?
Where’s the new government organization? What new laws have been passed to prevent? What safety features are now required to mitigate such?
Ok, we have backup cameras and the funny headlights that turn off when the turn signal is on. Mission Accomplished?
Right, so we would expect the magnitude of the changes from 9/11 to be about 1/14th the magnitude of the changes we do to prevent car deaths.
Maybe if you have zero understanding of things like emotion and humanity, and also cannot tell the difference between an accident and a mass murder.
Otherwise, this is surface-level insanity.
This is America. We see constant mass murder of random citizens, often children, via mass shootings. So maybe the question is, why was 9/11 special among murder?
hn comment threads on most articles have rapidly taken on the character of Reddit threads ca. 2009. This argument in particular was a classic back then.
I’ve started downvoting inanity and flagging one-liner, content-less snark, but unless the mods get serious on stuff that hits the front page, I don’t see that trajectory changing.
We have a whole licensing apparatus and traffic policing as well as safety regulations for vehicles driven on public roads. It's not cheap.
Traffic policing is generally an income source.
You're right on licensing but I wonder how it compares to the cost of the TSA?
The terrorists keep winning each day the 4th Amendment is not restored.
They died from car crashes.
Not accidents.
Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
> Fixing this broken language and attitude is a step towards ending these deaths.
Is it? The person you responded to sees car crashes as an important issue to solve yet still calls it "car accidents". So maybe it's not that important after all.
Nothing makes me saltier than language policing; I'd say fixing _that_ broken language is more of a step towards fixing issues than the actual language itself.
It's not about language, it's about culture. If you saw someone running through a crowd with a knife you'd expect them to be thrown in prison. But someone speeding through a neighborhood? Or dangerously overtaking a cyclist? No bother.
If the person running with the knife hurt someone they'd be a murderer. But the car? Oh, it was just an accident.
You think they were doing it on purpose every time someone is in an accident, or you think every time someone says "accident", they're referring to or you're purposely missing the nuance to make a point nobody agrees with, or you think that people in general are not annoyed when someone drives recklessly?
If it's the first, I dunno - you're wrong. People aren't. If it's the second, aside from insurance fraud, nobody is trying to fuck up their day and lose a functional car in the process, maybe getting seriously injured. If it's the third, you're just being annoying and nobody will take your point seriously if you can't make it more saliently. If it's the last, go check out reddit. There are at least half a dozen subs where people post bad drivers and everyone in the comments is collectively grumbling.
hello, is this thing on?
bye, bye, miss american pie. drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. and good old' boys were drinking whisky and rye
singin, this'll be the day that I...
it's report card time fellas, the department of homeostasis is feeding marijuana users to the prison system when the incumbent promised to reschedule.
edit: spelling.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
>then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris
Not that it really matters to your point, but this happened in 2015. Seems kind of odd to include that in this list.
Oh maybe I misremembered, for some reason I thought it was much earlier
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
I didn’t say it was justified, I said it had little to do with the absolute body count.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
I mean, given recent voting patterns, people currently in their 30’s probably won’t be elected until like 2060, right?
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
AI psychosis ^
The sentiment here seems pretty anti-surveillance -- but why the false dichotomy? Both are important issues. It just comes off as demeaning to the people that died in 9/11.
So much vitriol here today, jeez.
I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
Okay now you are just being demeaning to victims of drunk driving
Crazy I just walked by this building last night and discussed how ominous it looks with a friend
These things were obviously always concerning but I feel the situation has taken on an entirely different dimension now that they could feasibly use whisper + LLM to actually review _all_ the communication. That's crazy.
Hi NSA.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
> A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
The problem is that the NSA violates everyone's privacy without a care in the world.
This makes it pretty easy for them. Stockpile a bunch of vulnerabilities and go to town.
When you cannot even know what their budget is (since it's classified), can you even know what their capabilities are?
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
> They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information
Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.
> In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
That was private fiber they had spliced into, not anything routed across public Internet. That's why the DCs weren't encrypting it to begin with.
> Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic.
No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing.
> That was private fiber they had spliced into,
No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.
It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.
Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier.
Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol
Enter the .ca registrar: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/
I wonder if the NSA had done a "everyone, get behind this firewall" type of campaign if it would have been more successful/less leaky