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.