Yeh, so five eyes is where they could spy on anyone they wanted whenever they wanted to, and follow that wherever it went, with warrants and shit, which mostly meant no actual warrants and abusing politicians to get more funding to do more spying, judges to get more warrants, and tech companies to get their commercial allies better hardware. That's substantially different to spying on
everyone and collating their contact data and movements all the time, for the purpose of murdering folk if they match a certain pattern. I think that's a change, seemed that way to me.
Like, the Microsoft thing with the always-on camera and microphone, that came out just before Snowden's leaks, I could see it would have a backdoor, but I didn't get that they'd just always be piping everyone's basic information to the NSA all day. How many people are in the room, who they are, what sensitive topics have come up. All the time.
Admittedly, that Will Smith movie was a while back, but it was supposed to be fiction with the self-driving cars and ... oh right, the future. Even that said they had to look for him to find him, it wasn't just already collected data.
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I was informed by lecturers in ~1992 that security meant a permanent air gap between the secure thing and any modems, and not letting anyone in or out with portable media (which these days everything is a modem and handles data, so probably impossible). Because once it's off a secure boxes you could just assume everyone who cared already had it, everywhere in the world. Encryption was always in reach of brute force searches if anyone cared.
But encryption got better and so now they just bypass it.
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I do vaguely recall carnivore, because it was a joke back in the day to end all your emails and newsposts with bomb the president or similar to give them plentiful false positives. The longer and more mundane the message, the more interesting to have spies read it and try and figure out our secret code. Ah, misbegotten youth.
So, OK, they did keyphrase logging too, of open-text transmissions. Talked to the odd person, wrote reports and got on with life. That's still not spying on everyone all the time, even though their keyphrases could be anything. I guess it's a minor point, just a shift in technology that means they
can capture everything, so they do.
Obviously google got pretty creepy, so why not everyone else. Fair enough. Thanks all.
Doing a bit of digging, I suppose it was there if I'd known where to look, just never in the media, so if you know the right people you knew and everyone else was blind.
@PL, I really do mean just the new stuff from Snowden last year. Did it really get reported a decade back and then no one mentioned it for ten years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_su ... %932013%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_su ... present%29
Says there's a bunch of new stuff out there now. Maybe it's just more detail, implications all made a bit more obvious to poor old me. A bunch of people were publicly surprised though.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.