Post A2oIgdRC58dNZxtipU by roxie@fedi.queerdorks.club
(DIR) More posts by roxie@fedi.queerdorks.club
(DIR) Post #A2oHfpVpbQb4mi7RR2 by roxie@fedi.queerdorks.club
2021-01-01T12:19:40Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Maybe when my teachers said "everything you put on the internet will last forever" just bad intimate knowledge of the NSA and GCHQ full data collection programs...
(DIR) Post #A2oHfpk0khwJUgklXM by danielcassidy@mastodon.social
2021-01-02T00:11:55Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@roxie They were pretty well known at least as far back as 2001, but nobody could actually *prove* anything and so the mainstream lumped the idea in with wild conspiracy theories.
(DIR) Post #A2oHhLBXKWDTIzLYqu by roxie@fedi.queerdorks.club
2021-01-02T00:15:14Z
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@danielcassidy well i have seen some docs that at least show it was more like 2004 when it kinda takes off as a thing that is for sure happening. the scale though is never revealed at what level. Its actually part of why Snowden found out about it as he said in his book. He looked at the actions of the whistleblowers before him just out of curiosity not cause he was planning, and noticed that they got fbi raided for not adding much information and wondered why would these people risk something without actually having a leak. And then he finds the document he wanted to find declassifed and it has like the full extent of Stellar Wind legal capabilities which is "yeah go collect everything". Im tired and not explaining it well >.<
(DIR) Post #A2oHhMFTNMxWbUCDcu by danielcassidy@mastodon.social
2021-01-02T00:19:10Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@roxie Yeah, there were also similar but more specific programs of mass data collection (phone calls, text messages, email, etc) going back decades before then that were open secrets in the security community for a long time but nobody could actually prove it publicly, but we have proof of all of it now.I said "at least as far back as 2001" because that was when I first got wind of it and I couldn't be bothered to look up the actual history :-).
(DIR) Post #A2oHp8m5M7RT8DA4NU by galena@paws.moe
2021-01-02T00:22:15.927403Z
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@danielcassidy @roxie It's amazing how many conspiracy theories end up being true.
(DIR) Post #A2oIfHLyhkYCnSoN2O by danielcassidy@mastodon.social
2021-01-02T00:28:12Z
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@galena @roxie It's more than zero, which is indeed quite amazing. But I think it's important to keep perspective and remember that most of them are nonsense.It seems to me like since Snowden, people are more inclined to believe crap like QAnon or 5G causes Covid, and that's clearly not helpful.The difference is that mass data collection was always plausible and always had evidence to support it, but non-experts are bad at telling the difference.
(DIR) Post #A2oIgdRC58dNZxtipU by roxie@fedi.queerdorks.club
2021-01-02T00:23:16Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@danielcassidy well 2001 is mostly the start of "pls spy on everyone" which is mostly only different because it started including the americans themselves. Part of the snowden thing was a lot of the level of things was very high. So he had to really search it and only got the thing by accident because someone left the draft of the document on a lower tier drive he had to clean. the gist i got was there was so much happening that no one person could really leak it at all cause no one really could access it. It was only snowden finding the uncensored steller wind doc that he was like "cool imma just go collect all documents I can and see what the fuck is happening since this position allows me to do that. might even create a search tool for documents that might accidently help me cover this too" lol
(DIR) Post #A2oKLqvwuOPRGOV8fg by galena@paws.moe
2021-01-02T00:50:34.564342Z
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@danielcassidy @roxie It’s just enough to give the tiniest shred of credibility to whatever insane nonsense people will start pushing. Theoretically speaking, could the CIA put some kind of device in cell phone towers that made people sick? Maybe, the technology for that probably exists. Would they? Well, it’s the CIA, who knows. I wouldn’t put it past them to actually do that if they were able to, but why would they do that? What possible reason would they have for that? And then you get another crazy conspiracy theory designed just to patch a hole in the other theory. And then another one to patch the holes in that one, and so on. It’s endless.It’s easy to just say “Well it’s the CIA (or whatever agency), they’d probably be willing to do that” for basically any conspiracy theory, but the main thing to ask is why they’d even bother doing it. Imo if a conspiracy theory can’t answer that simple question, it’s a bit easier to disregard. Shit’s all fucked and it’s impossible to ever know for sure anymore.