How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt](thereader.mitpress.mit.edu) |
How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt](thereader.mitpress.mit.edu) |
It's just considered normal now. The west is very sick.
Edit: UK not EU
I don't know about The West as a bloc, but at least the USA was supposed to have respect for the basic individualistic privacy and freedom of the average citizen. We've allowed that to largely evaporate. The differences between the US and something like the PRC are rapidly eroding.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still an order of magnitude more free but you can see a future where the trend lines are converging.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/cash-coronavirus-questions-an...
That wisdom will not be much comfort to babies born last week. The first news they get in this world will be News subjected to Military Censorship. That is a given in wartime, along with massive campaigns of deliberately-planted "Dis-information." That is routine behavior in Wartime -- for all countries and all combatants -- and it makes life difficult for people who value real news.
In 2021-2022 I was vocal about the CIA being a terrorist organization (I bet many people adjacently believe similar things and are silent) and this got me attention from them. I posted several things I learned from documentaries and on the web, and from my personal background I think it was enough to trigger something in their system. From that time onwards, people I could best describe as Agents w/behavior that matches what professional interrogators would do kept showing up at public events I was a part of and in the most terrifying scenario also infiltrated my public commune.
There's an odd history with the FBI and possibly CIA and communes such as Osho the Bagawan (see, Netflix documentary) and I witnessed firsthand how deceptive, harmful and insidious this was. In some cases I believe substances were put in my food and drink, and in the cases matching that my body would later have adverse reactions with the agent's closely observing my behavior and consistently trying to elicit Black Web conversations. I had to flee and colocate to the familiarity of family and friends since, and only recently 3-years later have I been socializing my experience and writing to my congress and house representatives. That said, that was a month ago and they have yet to provide any substantive relief or support - I asked for assistance and guidance with investigating the intelligence community for misconduct as when they're doing this to Americans without any accountability, it undermines the integrity of our Country and I believe our national security. It brings into question who they are really serving. I'm no terrorist, even if I call you one and my skin color is brown and matches what the media-funded-by-the-CIA tells you to believe. I want this story documented and heard, believe what you will, though I leave you with the story that "We know our intelligence community does unethical things, its part of what we've given them the responsibility to do so we ourselves don't have to, and now when that unethical thing has happened to you or someone you know what do you do? What do you do when everyone you turn to for help gaslights you and tells you that surely did not happen? Find proof that the organization whose job it is to go undetected, did indeed do that thing to you." I ask for some empathy and understanding, please.
True, you can't publish a book anonymously anymore: that ship seems to have sailed. But if you want to publish a political piece or anything else potentially "substantive", can't you just ask AI to rewrite it for you? Instant anonymization!
Unless the AI is 100% offline and locally hosted there's a record there. Also generating text isn't really the hard part of being anonymous. You also have publish it somewhere, and somewhere it will be seen, and that also means a trail back to you.
Most of the time the information you have to share, especially anything verifiable, will be traceable back to you. That's the problem with knowing something very few people have the access to know. Anyone who does know will be one of a very small number of people.
If what you're telling the public isn't at least somewhat verifiable you're just another anonymous/random person spewing unconfirmable conspiracies and you should expect to be treated that way. No respectable publisher is going to print crazy unsourced manuscripts filled with unverifiable claims. The internet is already filled with people doing that who rightly get ignored making that a very crowded space. The ability for AI to push out massive amounts of unconfirmable conspiracies at rates that were previously difficult to achieve is only going to make the problem worse.
Yes, there are these things called "Local LLMs" that run entirely on your machine.
>Most of the time the information you have to share, especially anything verifiable, will be traceable back to you.
Maybe by other mechanisms, but not by this one (writer profiling). The "profile" would just be of the style of the LLM you use.
I would never hand them over. As i dont know who is cleared. And wait for the court to decide what should i do with them. Or meet the president and hand them personally. By the good semeriton, should protect the lawyes, as they did their best to hold the secret.
I am no lawyer .
Secondly. I doubt any agency is going to hurt or drug you over that. Investigate you? Maybe. But its not worth the money.
Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff. Although I'm sure these groups do take threats seriously, I don't think you are a threat.
I'm worried about your mental health is all. I'm not saying that in a way like "you sound suicidal" because you don't at all. You just sound paranoid. Wishing you the best brother
Is it possible? Sure. But it is very unlikely that much resources and effort would be devoted to someone that made a few critical comments.
> Just keep in mind all the dangerous people who these groups investigated that they did nothing about that went on to do bad stuff.
There are numerous people that America's intelligence agencies have intimidated, harassed and yes drugged for similar reasons.
OP, I hope you have been seen by a mental healthcare professional. They can help you determine the nature of these experiences. I hope you have extensively documented these experiences. Sharing that documentation with your family or others who you know to be sober in judgement is probably the only mechanism you have to distinguish if your experiences are based in reality.
How can you tell the difference between an algorithm and topics genuinely being consistently unpopular, though?
> Would anyone be surprised if the agencies are themselves running bots, algorithms and accounts to affect visibility of discourse on threads like these?
On HN specifically? Yeah.
On actually popular platforms? No.
There are plenty of laws on the books that can be used against people sharing classified information (whether or not they are effective is another question) so why would they need to follow you around and poison your food?
That's not to say that whistleblowers don't get followed, they certainly do but in an inconspicuous manner. Real intimidation comes in the form of two guys knocking on your door explicitly telling you to knock it off or else they'll arrest you, beat you, kill your dog, etc.
Are you implying that all governments are autocracies? Rather pessimistic view, in my opinion.
I post on here all the time reminding people that tech companies are defense companies. Because I think it's important people remember what that implies.
No one is chasing me around or anything. At least I don't think so. I'm not saying put yourself in danger for your views. But I am saying, the world isn't as scary as anyone's brain can make it be.
These are tough times. Managing stress and mental health is hard.
Pretty cool of you to share your experiences bladegash. I always thought they wouldn't let people with mental health conditions into those environments. Shows what I know.
Some mental health conditions, like mine, don’t really show up until later in life and it is at least part of the reason I no longer work in that field :).
However, things are well managed now and I have a good career in the private sector!
I'll sit with several of your bits of statement.
Downvoting this comment is funny, because it's a burned account anyway, so not hurting me, and you want less people to know this fact about HN?
It turns out that open web forums are mostly emotional places and often the most inflammatory or in group opinions rise to the top. With that knowledge, manipulation isn't that tough.
Corona paranoia incentivized upgraded to tap-to-pay, but it was already prevalent in other parts of the world. It was more ubiquitous in Singapore in 2019 than it is in the US even now.
1. Double tap power button on a phone you are already holding
2. Tap the reader
Versus
1. Find an ATM
2. Take your wallet out of your pocket
3. Take your card out of your wallet
4. Spend a minute withdrawing cash from the ATM
5. Put the cash in your wallet
6. Put your wallet in your pants
7. Go to the actual place you want to spend money
8. Take your wallet out of your pocket
9. Take cash out of your wallet
10. Hand it over
11. Wait to receive change
12. Put the change in your wallet
13. Put your wallet in your pocket
If you want cash to make a resurgence you need to figure out how we can make a digital version of it.
This is the endgame of surveillance capitalism: submission, or opting out. Few can, or care enough to, do the latter.
There's always someone will to take cash. It's still king, despite the naysayers.
maybe during peak covid? but certainly not now. this comment is either being intentionally disingenuous or just parroting a random article from an extraordinary (and no longer applicable) time of our lives and presenting it as if its still the current status quo.
i am in canada for weeks at a time multiple times per year, and i have family that live in BC, AB, and ON.
cash is my primary form of payment and not once have i been turned down using cash on any of my visits. not once has family complained about being unable to use cash (several of the older of them, like me, primarily use cash).
> Even a report commissioned by the Bank of Canada suggests it's time to protect access to money.
> That report, titled "Social policy implications for a less-cash society," recommends legislative action, arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...
the fact is i can still use cash, despite your very bold claim otherwise.
whats your goal with the misinformation, anyways?
This is hilarious. Toronto has no respect for facts, it has shown it will just fabricate histories out of whole cloth.
Nevertheless I'm tired of people citing anecdata and personal experience when upthread I have linked to a CBC article discussing a Bank of Canada report "arguing that cash-based transactions have plummeted from 54 per cent in 2009 to 10 per cent as of 2021."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-sleepwalking-in...
Reminds me of rougher-and-readier days, when everything about online discourse felt more self-evidently… what’s the word… contingent? Provisional? Local? Playful, game-like, made-up? Afforded the seriousness of pub banter, rather than any kind of indicator of some broader Truth.
I think my point—which I apologize for putting a little snidely—echoed @rkomorn’s: I completely accept that you or “agencies” can manipulate HN’s proudly old-school mechanics. I just feel like our hangout here is less important in the scheme of things than we’d like to imagine it to be. At least to the sort of agencies who do that kind of work. They could, but why?
I've been on Discords that have told their users to go and brigade HN threads to express their opinions. But these have been petty things like politics and programming language flamewars (two examples I've witnessed.)
It turns out that the above statement is not entirely correct. I was aware of this rule at the time (early 90's), and was very surprised to find that it had been routinely violated for at least a decade. Unlike Snowden, I kept this to myself because I had signed (many) NDAs with the US Government.
Words mean nothing. They can be interpreted how ever they need to be interpreted by those in power.
The number of terrorists who have been caught because they were controlled by a police officer "because they ran a traffic light" (yeah, sure) is wild.
In the EU at some point after every single terrorist attack the terrorists' names were known because they had left their passports in a car they left at the scene. (yeah, sure again).
The really amazing thing is that they don't know the name of the terrorists right away: because the terrorists don't have the passport on themselves apparently. No: they all leave them in the last car they used.
Probably that, by now, terrorists see past terror attacks and think: "Oh, I'm supposed to have my passport with me, but then leave in the last vehicle I'll use before killing people".
You say this like you are proud of it. Admittedly, I cannot say what I would do in that situation as I've never been in that situation, but I'd hope I'd have the fortitude to speak up on it. Having employees/contractors doing tasks that are illegal just because they came from the higher ups is no different than soldiers refusing illegal orders. Quitting would be the least of the moral options. Speaking up would be higher up the complicated options.
Snowden had the same dilemma. He was asking the NSA lawyers about the legality of their programs, and he never got an honest answer.
Quitting would not have stopped the activity, and disclosing it would have subjected me to the same treatment that Snowden got.
(Years later, I heard an NSA program manager boasting that they would keep asking different government lawyers for an opinion on the legality of proposed programs until they got the answer they wanted. This was after Snowden's revelations.)
Pretty much everyone in CIA has a "ends justify the means" philosophy. It's easy to fall into that trap when you learn about all the devious things our enemies are doing.
Apparently EOs have been used to circumvent the constitution for quite a while.
If you do an illegal thing while following government orders you can only be convicted if your country loses a war.
(I first observed it watching a broadcast of JD Vance, but have encountered others effect the same usage since then).
1. https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/18/2002875198/-1/-1/0/NSA...
During my career I signed dozens of NDAs. They were all either umbrella or caveat specific. All of them cited Title 18 referencing punishments (including death) for violations of the NDA, and all of them were related to either Title 10 or Title 50 activities.
Without being too specific, what I observed was the use of NSA assets to surveil grow operations within the US. It was explained to me that it began with Ronald Reagan's War On Drugs.
I've seen much worse since then while supporting Waived / Unacknowledged programs. Present classification requirements dictate that those be reviewed for declassification after 40 years, but they will never see the light of day because all documentation is destroyed at the end of the program and not archived anywhere.
That's awfully convenient. Impossible to check if something's classified, but you can still go to jail over it.
Do the other party have evidence against you? Declare classified documents and they go to jail instead of you.
> "if you were not the intended recipient and you received it anyway and read it but you were not meant to, you can be prosecuted"
“This is a blog about how culture is made, continuously updated since 1999 for free, with no ads or trackers.”
Anyone who is more employed than me, highly recommend finding a way to support the EFF! They have proven themselves to be a firewall between the way we want to live our lives online and countless antisocial attempts to make like seven people richer, etc..
“For individuals like you and me, privacy is fundamentally for control—for giving us control over who can know what we do, where we do it, and who we do it with. In that way it is fundamental to our individual safety, dignity, and human rights.
But here’s the broader, less talked about thing that privacy is for—one that has animated my work for thirty years: privacy is a check on power.
Privacy limits the power of individuals over each other. It limits the power of governments over us. It also limits the power of corporations over us. Privacy allows people to protect themselves while creating a space to think, connect, communicate, share, and most critically, organize for change.”
Crash carts sat unattended, usually a screen filled with porn and a cable running on the floor to the nearest tap. I got the feeling that many of the techs were hosting porn sites as a side gig.
On my second visit, in plain sight, was new construction. A corner of the room with what looked like four inch fiber bundles going in and out. One dusty, one fresh. Taped dry-wall, unpainted. If the door wasn't so fancy you'd never look twice.
Is that...? Dude grimaced and nodded.
I worked data centers for my IBEW apprenticeships — during Snowden revelations — and it was definitely "confusing" knowing that all the technology they said didn't exist existed. "Black, LLC" didn't officially exist/make connections among our clientele.
Unless you were actively vandalizing our public infrastructure, I never questioned anybody's presence/activities on our datafloors.
Probably security is tons better now, but the social entries are still most-commonable.
Can't wait to read Cohn's book.
Also RIP Mark Klein. A true American hero who never tried to turn his whistle-blowing into becoming a celebrity.
That's a better outcome than I'd feared.
We are basically trading marginal comforts from new technology in the short run for political freedom in the long run and the latency is decreasing.
The difference is overt governance of this nature is vilified and amplified in the media and the covert governance is insulated and critics marginalized.
Governments have utilized clandestine wiretaps for as long as there have been wires. Bad guys and the children and all that. Not to mention, what an advantage that people think you're kooky when you talk openly about this stuff!
1. If this were some covertly installed device, would it have a government attributable IP address?
2. If it were being used for surveillance, why would it be visible at all, instead of being on the other side of a passive optical tap?
3. If it’s really on the same broadcast domain as you, and on some other IP subnet, how can you talk to it?
4. You can configure a device on a network to use any IP address. Why do you think that means it belongs to the government?
2. Not something we can answer. Why would it need to be invisible to function as network surveillance?
3. It is on the same broadcast domain, which is how my edge router is able to 'talk' to it.
4. See response to #1.
“I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
https://time.com/article/2026/04/27/fisa-fbi-spying-surveill...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/trump-congress-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.
(Not to suggest the EFF has not waged a valiant effort regardless.)
> "since they don’t have to have markings and can still be classified"
There was a short period at the end of the Bush years when this was a big deal, but as soon as the gaslighting was coming from both political teams, it became a non-issue politically.
> President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans."
"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. "What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. ... That information is useful."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
I'm not saying I'm for this, but just acknowledging that it is only inevitable. You can hope for moral people, but that's farcical.
Adding this to my tsundoku
Like they still do (just buy the data instead of getting warrants for them.)
Apparently, if the government did this directly that would be a breach of our constitutional rights and blah blah blah blah. But if a private company does it's fine (there's probably something in the terms of service or license agreement waiving your rights) this and then they go buy that data from the private company and that's apparently okay.
https://www.cybereason.com/blog/malicious-life-podcast-kevin...
> his brother introduced him to a hacker named Eric Heinz, who told him about a mysterious piece of equipment he came across while breaking into Pacific Bell: SAS, a testing system that allowed its user to listen in on all the calls going through the telephone network. SAS proved to be too great of a temptation for Mitnick, who desperately wanted to wield the power that the testing system could afford him.
Then of course other people started finding similar black boxes at other telecoms and data centers.
Ghosts in the wire (his book) mainly focuses on the FBI using the system for wiretaps. And if they can, I'm sure the NSA could just as easily.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
j/k It's a good excerpt, and makes me want to read the book.
When both parties threw their weight behind the "nobody is spying on Americans" lie, we went from only the hyperpartisan fans of the right wing making excuses for spying on Americans to the hyperpartisan fans of both parties doing so.
Everything is political. Electric cars, crude oil, rocket launches, rare earth metals, cargo transportation, public transportation, housing, taxation, data, compute... which of those aren't political?
The problem is Americans believing obvious lies like "Privacy is a human right" and "Don't be evil" and then blaming the government instead of themselves.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/litigate_v?tab=meaning_and_us...
So - sure - it’s the “right thing to do” to speak out, but when dealing with government you have to do it with the foreknowledge that this may have mortal (or worse) consequences for you and your family.
Profoundly formative experience for me, witnessing it all.
Tying chain of custody of online actions to identity makes data incredibly valuable information.
>The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/executive-director-cindy-...
Oh maybe people assign law firms to disclose this stuff but that’s a decently sized tax to pay when you’ve done nothing wrong.
Hey thanks for sharing what you could
Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.
1: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-0...
2: https://www.newsweek.com/new-documents-shed-light-cias-conne...
In the original Dunning-Kruger paper, one bad guy thought that since rubbing lemon juice on his face made his eyes blurry, he felt that it also made cameras blurry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I find it amusing to watch sovereign citizen videos. One of their failures is that they think that "law" is magic. All they have to do is utter the correct recipe of magic spells/words/red ink/stamps and they will be able to force the legal system to bend to their wishes.
> they were controlled by a police officer
I'm reminded of the COINTELPRO program run by the FBI in the 1960s. On more than one occasion, every participant in the "terrorist cell" (modern term - the common one in use back then was "subversive group") were FBI informants attempting to implicate the other members of the cell.
I hope that Oregon can continue to elect people like him when he's gone. We really are a more free state than the rest of them (see our state constitution protecting rights to profanity up to allowing being topless in public legally, as just one tiny example)
Or some weird scenario where an individual technically dies but is then brought back to life?
Or maybe they secretly recruit zombies and only drafted one set of employment contracts.
Or you don't control your key material.
Or your tech supply chain.
Or leave your device unattended.
Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.
I could go on...
In politics as a team sport, you can't admit that your team would lie like that other team does.
I use to think power was the problem, but then I watched a video from someone I respected[0] and it changed my mind. Plus reading Hannah Arendt[1].
The people that treat surveillance as a political flashpoint don't take it seriously enough to inspire change.
This has no basis whatsoever in Australian law.
Procuring someone else to do it on your behalf is still an offence under s 7(1) of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth).
TELECOMMUNICATIONS (INTERCEPTION AND ACCESS) ACT 1979 - SECT 7
Telecommunications not to be intercepted (1) A person shall not:
(a) intercept;
(b) authorize, suffer or permit another person to intercept; or
(c) do any act or thing that will enable him or her or another person to intercept;
https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-...
Which provision of the treaty purports to enable this conduct?
Imagine my nonsurprise, stumbling upon more evidence for your (bigfatkitten) having a lack of essential information from the Snowden disclosures, and colloquial explanations of operations during interviews and talks.
Contested. Very supported theories.
Of course, seeing what happened with Snowden or even other whistleblowers more recently, like Suchir Balaji or John Barnett, makes it clear that more than financial security is at stake & acts as a chilling effect.
It truly is. I can’t emphasize this enough.
Yeah the solution is to not put yourself into a position where you need to make these choices. The fuel for the fire that are organizations like the CIA are people who don't have moral qualms or who have flexible ones.
The less people who work for these organizations the better.
If all the people of conscience quit, they are left with a workforce without a conscience, which I guess is pretty much what they have now, at least in certain areas.
Or work to pressure change internally, and occupy space that might have gone to a more morally flexible person if it was made vacant; but while doing so engage in supporting immoral behaviour.
Here's the Safety Ladder that exploits Fears to justify anything - Why are you doing X?
We are doing it for your safety.
We are doing it for the safety of your family.
We are doing it to keep the org and thousands of jobs afloat.
We are doing it to save the country
Reducing peoples fears, not increasing them is the only path to prevent the entire chimp troupe quickly climbing that ladder any time something unpredictable happens.
I know HNers don't like "surveillance everywhere", but...
if you're some law enforcement, every chance to get info means hours/days saved on your work... so you reach for the "easy-way": if you can get comms of a drug gang, you can identify who belongs to that gang (instead of risking their own life by actually 'joining' the gang)
But... some do cross their lines (eg watching comms of their ex, getting paid by political actors to listen over opponents, etc)
it's not like law enforcements are 100% bad guys, but things are "complicated"
Quitting a job you think is harmful (or even maybe meaningless) can be good for yourself, in addition to the morality question.
From the inside, talking to coworkers definitely seems risky. If they are not like minded, they could report you. It'd have been better to just have quit at that point.
Because of all of that, "ethical" leaking really does seem like the only option left. It's then a matter of can the leaker live with the consequences.
That’s a good thing.
It isn’t really a radical or counterintuitive thing to say ‘don’t do evil work for evil people.’
People who give mealy mouth excuses like ‘I was just following orders’ or ‘I was just a contractor’ are part of the problem.
That... Isn't really how that works in the real world, though.
What happens when people with conscience leave legitimate institutions is that they lose legitimacy. Now you have a legitimate institution with power and no conscience, and a myriad of non-legitimate institutions with little power and some conscience.
This is a strictly worse situation to be in.
It has in the past.
What changed?
It's been thirteen years since Snowden, and twenty years since Mark Klein, and there have been no real reforms in the system, people continue to work for them, and with them and it's only gotten worse.
The course of action that you suggest is exactly what has lead America into a Mad King scenario with big tech oligarchs and theocratic running the show with China on the cusp of becoming the world hegemon.
People keep chasing that carrot, keep working for the man and the end result is that they to chase that carrot a little bit harder, burning them out until the man replaces them with someone new just as eager to chase that carrot a little harder.
And all along the way the noose around all of us tightens a little bit more the temperature outside gets a little bit hotter and America's grip on the world weakens.
Where does this go?
Most people on HN? Definite no. Most people on HN who work in roles where they're exposed to such mass surveillance or other evil at scale (like Meta)? Absolutely not.
Well you don't have to live anywhere near paycheck to paycheck to be intimidated. If you're stonewalled from employment, you're in trouble unless you are so fabulously wealthy that you can afford to never work again.
- A lot of people who are actually poor and live pay check to pay check aren't ruined for years if they lose their job. Because the nature of their work and lack of career usually means they're unstable and replaceable "commodity" jobs in the first place.
- Almost everyone who is in a position to be exposed to evil at scale as a tech worker, is among the top 5% earners in the world. I'm being very conservative there, it's likely top 1%.
What a different world we'd be living in, if the (back then, at least supposedly) greatest democracy would have shown the way to a universal safety net.
How fucking sad that we ended in a world where the finders of flaws or zerodays are being suppressed and prosecuted, instead of allowing them to make the world a better place.
A handful of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths now hold almost all power with these structures.
At least now the pretense of democracy is dropped.
Organizations are always reflections of the individuals of which they exist, in aggregate. I think that has always been true, and always will be true. It's sort of true by definition?
I mean, unless you're talking about revolutions, I suppose, but that's usually the end result of the ruling class distilling their support structure too much?
The US has been leaning toward the worse for years. I think it can be traced back to the JFK assassination or earlier. The Church Committee found out a lot and ultimately changed very little. We certainly have a theocratic influence but I think the Christians are played off the leftists masterfully to subvert the nation. If people weren't at each other's throats over random issues, they might start to think about where all the tax money goes.
It is pure arrogance to think that the US can essentially rule the world forever. Being in this position and having the reserve currency is why we seem superficially rich as all the production goes abroad. Instead of factory jobs, kids get to drive for DoorDash and stuff like that. If this trend is not reversed soon, we won't produce enough of anything to defend the country. We may already be in that position IMO.
Where does it go? I think we are in for a rude awakening. We might see severe economic turbulence and war, hopefully followed by peace and preservation of our individual and national sovereignty. I would count anything past this as a bonus.
Which do you think works better--protesting/suing the people making the decision? Or being the person making the decision? It's much harder to change the course of law from the outside, without access to power. The problem is that power corrupts.
Either works if enough people care enough. Maybe instead of blaming the messengers for not putting their own careers on the line, you should blame all the people who just didn't care at all?
You speak as if "the man" is by definition "on the wrong side" (i.e. lacking conscience), but there is no "man", just a body of civil servants trying to do what they think is right, for varying definitions of right. After all, isn't that what folks were out protesting during the DOGE days, when whole departments were eliminated?
Your argument assumes its conclusion, and thus is circular.
I agree with the issue of folks trying their best and burning out--but this is why it's important that the people replacing them be just as hungry to do the right thing, if not more so.
However, it's been a tactic in politics recently to call entire departments corrupt, and insinuate that anyone who wants to work for them are likewise so.
But I don't understand the logic of doing this. If, for example, you think "all cops are bastards"... Wouldn't you want more people who think like you to become cops, instead of fewer? Wouldn't you rather run into your best friend in a cop's uniform, than someone you don't know? Why, then, would you vilify the entire organization, and make it clear you could never stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would dare want to be a police officer?
Wouldn't that make it less likely that someone who thinks the same as you would consider joining?
And yet the need for police persists; thus by vilifying them, your end up increasing the concentration of people who don't think like you. This seems, like my statement above, a strictly worse situation, and seems to be exactly what has played out in many jurisdictions!
You can apply the same line of thinking to all parts of the government, with similar results. In fact, I'll go further: I think this dynamic better explains the rotting of our institutions than yours does.
We should be encouraging people who think like us to work in the government, not discouraging them with pointless fatalism.
The way I see it the modern American left-right paradigm that you identify with is the problem. The little gotchas that you describe with people who complained about DOGE or ACAB are the problem.
Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that Americans for generations now are conditioned to not be able to reason about America not being the dominant player in the world, they can't process a scenario where America falls, and due to the past ten+ years of hyper-partisan political discourse and the corrosive effects that it has on their brains they lack the ability to understand these things when people talk about them.
Many Americans still believe that their country can be saved -- that it merely requires a reconfiguration of the existing pieces with some hardworking, dedicated people in the right positions to put things back in order. I'm sure there were people who believed the same in the USSR even in the final days before it fell apart but that didn't turn out to be the case.
You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
The time to fix this was twenty years ago. George Bush and Dick Cheney should have spent the last twenty years in prison. Same with the heads of the NSA and CIA and thousands of other bureaucrats, the oligarchs who caused the 2008 financial crisis.
It didn't happen and it won't happen for this bunch of pedophile war criminals.
Authoritarians and theocrats have taken over.
America is falling down and it isn't going to get back up. I don't want that to be the case but it just is.
Not really. And you can choose to not subscribe to a "left-right paradigm", but it remains a functional reality in the US. Not believing in something doesn't always make it less real!
> Modern America itself is the problem. Modern Americans lack the mental capacity to reason about this.
This is a wildly arrogant take. I don't necessarily disagree that there are (a lot of!) real problems with "Modern America", but writing an entire country off, as an outsider, is incredibly self-centered.
> You can put as many friendly people as you can find in the police force, and the same with the NSA and CIA, but it would be just as futile as doing the same with the Stasi, the KGB or the GRU.
This is completely incorrect. If the government behind any of the examples you cited were actually full of "friendly people", those organizations would never have reached the points the did, or done the things they did.
You have a weirdly immutable view of the world, as if completely changing the moral and ethical makeup of entire governments would somehow have no effect on the actions that government takes?