alt Hacker NewsHave you been around at that time? NSA had recording boxes at ISP routing places, every few days guy would come to swap hdds. Most com was unencrypted. Or read about echolon...
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I was four when I was programming my Commodore 64.
I have seen "parallel [dial-up] modem banks" for "lawful interception", then specialized Ethernet cards for DPI, watched traffic analysis dashboard of a REDACTED country live, did DPI on powerful-enough systems myself for personal testing.
I have gone through USENET, flame wars, IRC; did my own MITM, etc. Always knew about echelon, how escrow based Encryption canceled last moment, etc. etc. etc.
At least, the barriers were higher then. These barriers required people to be considerate, well-targeted and selective. Now we don't have any of these. The overhead is almost non-existent for these things.
Doing dragnet operations were costly, and this allowed curious yet good-hearted people to understand the environment they lived in. Now, we're all blacklisted by default and whitelisted as long as we don't touch the wrong paving stone on the internet.
It used to be other way around.
TL;DR: I'm not 15 years old.
Yeah echelon seemed overwhelming at the time, and encryption was to be the answer.
But it turn out surveillance works just fine if you only focus on the meta data. Knowing who takes to whom, and which sites people visit is much more valuable (and much cheaper) than scanning the actual payload.
And why collect all that data yourself if ad companies are happy to sell it to you, ie to the government? (Huh, maybe that's why Facebook changed its name to Meta, come to think of it)