
Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013) - merrier
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460
======
Animats
The output of the intelligence community is surprisingly low. One director of
the NSA said, pre-9/11, that the whole organization generated about one
important result every two days, one that was acted upon.

The output of the US's domestic anti-terrorism effort is low for the resources
invested. Most of the FBI's terrorism arrests are wannabes. They get a report
of somebody mouthing off in a bar or mosque, crank up a sting operation, get
some dummy to go through the motions of trying something, and claim they've
stopped a terrorist.

The DoD/CIA operation to find foreign terrorist leaders and kill them seems to
have paid off. Anybody identified as a major leader in Al-Queda has a short
life expectancy.

~~~
grrowl
I find it amusing to consider the NSA/FBI thinks various terrorist groups have
masterminded a plan and are closing in, while terrorist groups think similarly
about the NSA/FBI's SIGINT infrastructure and capability; when in fact they're
both hilariously unorganised and just trying really, really hard, like a real-
life parallel to Spy Vs Spy

~~~
TeMPOraL
And so it seems that the currently effective terrorists attacks are the
simplest ones, where you don't have to communicate or coordinate too much, or
acquire some very unusual hardware (like explosives).

~~~
ido
I wonder why a more common tactic isn't to simply ride a lot of busses until
one of them is packed full while driving on the highway at full speed, then
launching at the steering wheel to turn it basically any direction...Sounds
like a pretty good chance of a pile up and lots of casualties, with no
evidence the perpetrator is anything other than a normal passenger until it's
too late.

~~~
wayn3
because the goal of terrorism is awareness that there are evil assholes out
there.

they want to get caught. the casualties are a means to an end. if you just
kill a bunch of people without anyone noticing it, nothings been gained in
terms of effective terrorizing.

terrorists want to be freddy krueger, not the rollercoaster from final
destination.

~~~
ido
How is it any different from suicide bombing tho? The terrorist organizations
can still take credit for the bus-on-highway-terror just like they take credit
posthumously for the suicide bombings.

~~~
wayn3
They could already do that for random accidents not actually caused by them.
Why don't they?

Why not try to claim they made the malaysian air flight disappear?

I'm not sure, but it doesnt seem to be on their agenda.

Terrorist code of conduct. "Thou shall not claim casualties you didn't cause."

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Terrorist code of conduct. "Thou shall not claim casualties you didn't
> cause."_

That's because if you are ever disproved, you lose credibility for future
claims.

That's orthogonal to the merit of using such "mundane-looking" tactics _and
then_ rightfully claiming involvement.

~~~
wayn3
youd think that its incredibly easy for a terrorist to regain lost
credibility.

duh?

remember what happened last time nobody took them seriously? a generation of
conspiracy nutters was born.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Nobody taking them seriously is the only way to stop them. Compare with people
starting to take them seriously, which brought us at least three country-
destroying wars, trillions of dollars of waste, and the erosion of citizen
rights in the whole western world - all within last two decades.

------
Naga
I recently finished reading Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, a history of the
CIA. He basically argues that the entire organization has been marked by
incompetence and politics throughout history. It was really eye-opening to me
to hear that the mysterious organization behind all conspiracy theories is
mostly smoke and mirrors. Cue the old adage regarding malice and stupidity.

~~~
Top19
I read Tim Weiner's book 10 years ago...it was great. Am currently reading his
book on the FBI. To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.

At the time I was pretty shocked how bad it was at the COA, but then I
realized...the CIA is really just a metaphor for how large organizations
everywhere run. A good example is how assignments are given out in the CIA.
Your career progression very much depends on which region you get assigned to,
or which embassy you get official cover wth. Very similar to say how sales
territories are handed out and fought over at regular corporations.

Having just left a 100k+ person company, I can tell you it's a miracle of
organization that a company that big can function. It's kind of like seeing a
person weighing 1000 pounds trying to walk, or a 125 yr old man try to cross
the street. The fact that they can exist / operate is awe-inspiring, expecting
them to do anywhere near a good job seems to be out of the question. Obviously
there are exceptions to this, and I hope more of them appear later on.

If you work at a big company though please don't be discouraged. It's almost
impossible to have good processes for a company that big as mentioned above,
so things are, ironically, even more dependent on people's actions and
personal leadership.

~~~
bhalperin
> To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.

Stefan Rudnicki (the narrator) is an absurdly good narrator. He regularly
narrates the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, a sci-fi short story podcast, if
that perchance interests you.

~~~
scandox
Sometimes he and Wayne June just go too deep though. All you can hear on
certain words is a bass rumble...

------
erikb
Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of
being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need
to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.
And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of
considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open,
important and even marketed information. Think about how many actual secrets
there are that are kept by people who really try.

But there are other things these agencies do wonderfully.

A) When you have a real hint, and even if it is just a competitor, you can
employ lots of fighting power, technology etc to track them. This in itself is
already worth much. Think about bugging another country's chancelor's phone.
Awesome!

B) Scaring your own population into behaving. If you think you are observed
all day by CIA, FBI and NSA you are more likely to do stupid things that harm
the common piece.

C) Doing things that would be illegal for the government, like funding
dictatorships delivering weapons to drug lords, etc.

So I think even if everybody knows that spies don't really succeed as much as
people thought we will still continue to have spy agencies.

~~~
beagle3
> Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or
> reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.

I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost
exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No
one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".

There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no
standard code, everyone is free to choose their own; It's a question of what
likelihood you assign a-priori for ethics and morals to be chosen, and a
question of empirical data as well, which likely no one has, so no statement
can be disproved and everything is "equally right". (Was this paragraph about
spies or about atheists?)

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me
> almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about
> atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics"._

Which is not far from true.

Morals one makes for themselves ("personal moral code") are not morals proper.
They could just as well include that's its ok to kill kittens for fun (to give
a silly example) -- that they don't is mostly thanks to their idiosyncrasy.

> _There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no
> standard code, everyone is free to choose their own;_

Ha, haven't read your second paragraph while replying to the first, but
basically, yes, this.

~~~
rnentjes
Actually I would argue that the only "morals proper" are those that one makes
for themselves.

Externally enforced behavior is not "morals".

~~~
coldtea
> _Externally enforced behavior is not "morals"._

That's a new definition then, because for millennia morals were derived from
exactly those "externally enforced behaviours": from religion, society,
culture, etc.

The personal codes someones makes on their own can be anything and everything
("shit on everybody to get rich" is a perfectly valid code that millions use).
Nobody would call that "moral" though -- because precisely morals are those
beyond the individual whims (though whether an individual follows them its
their choice).

Personal principles someone follows are only fit to be called morals if they
follow an extended, external, moral code. Which might change over time, and be
culture-specific, but it's not "whatever I say".

~~~
beagle3
As far as one can tell, social animals show something equivalent to morals in
every experiment we can devise -- and in the vast majority of cases, it is not
a learned trait (elephants being the best known counterexample in that their
cultural norms and morals are indeed learned).

We can't really experiment with humans, but the few experiments that have
cleared ethical committees, it appears that babies as young as 6 months have a
sense of equality and justice, see e.g. [0]

[0] [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero-
action...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero-actions)

------
Analemma_
This comment is more amusing than educational, but for anyone who hasn't
already, I recommend watching the Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading.

When you watch it, you get the strong sense that this, rather than Jason
Bourne or James Bond, is the movie that comes the closest to depicting what
the intelligence community is actually like: nobody knows anything and
everyone's bumbling about helplessly while they pretend to be omniscient,
except they have a lot of leeway to (figuratively and literally) bury the
bodies when things go sideways.

~~~
fullshark
Similarly: Politics is Veep not House of Cards.

~~~
naasking
Rather, politics is Veep while thinking they're as clever and devious as House
of Cards.

~~~
Bartweiss
Generously, politics is _The Thick of It_. All kinds of scheming and malice,
but none of it ever amounting to anything.

~~~
fullshark
Same creator as Veep! I think he left Veep though and the show is becoming
more cartoonish as a result.

~~~
Bartweiss
I had no idea! That's reason enough for me to watch the first part of Veep
then. The commercials had implied it was all cartoonish, but I should have
known that's always the way of commercials.

------
calinet6
The older I get, the more I realize: pretty much every organization everywhere
is highly flawed in some (usually many) ways. This has been an extremely
useful observation in my career and life, and I have found exactly zero
exceptions.

~~~
fspm
Primary reason that I don't buy into elaborate conspiracy theories right here.

~~~
mistermann
Snowden's leaks didn't reveal somewhat of a conspiracy? Was that behavior not
both secret and unconstitutional?

~~~
cassowary
conspiracy <> secret + unconstitutional

i think to reach the level of a conspiracy theory, you need a lot of people
doing something outrageous. for instance, if you have the army, the navy and
fbi and the russian kgb (or whatever they're called nowadays) in cahoots
without a single leak for twenty-five years, that's improbable.

i tend not to buy conspiracy theories because they usually need a leak which
doesn't exist. for instance, my brother is a 911 truther. in his opinion, a
civil engineer saying "that's impossible" establishes it as a conspiracy. in
mine, the fact that no-one from the pentagon has said "haha, and we cut up
that plane and put it in the building, it was amazing, look come here check
out my emails" when he was drunk establishes it as the real deal.

~~~
beagle3
I have no horse in this race, but you are not more logical than your brother.

First of all, "conspiracy theory" is often taken to mean one of the tinfoil
variety ("government and gay aliens experiment with mind control beams" style,
or "immortality treatment hidden by pharma for the last 100 years in attempt
to increase profits and for eugenic purposes"). But a "conspiracy" simply
means an act of collusion done secretly which contrasts with public statements
or the law (or is generally harmful). Thousands of these happen every day in
various scales. Assuming that you can trust government statements is, based on
history, naive. So, do you have a different term for "small conspiracy I
accept happens all the time"? Because your rhetoric seems to exclude these
from existing.

With respect to the (missing) 9/11 leak, there are countless stories that came
out decades after happening. "Establishing it as the real deal" based on the
lack of a leak makes to me about as much sense as a statement from a fellow
truther (however well informed in his subject matter) establishing it as a
lie.

~~~
pfisch
A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing
something big to deceive a massive group of people.

Like a faked moon landing, a large false flag operation like 9/11, or a
hillary clinton/democratic party death squad murdering leakers.

Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden
thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being
surprised when that came out. Maybe if hitler burned down the reichstag? I
don't think that was ever proved though and I'm not sure how many people would
really need to be involved in something like that.

~~~
beagle3
> A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing
> something big to deceive a massive group of people.

> ... death squad murdering leakers.

Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand
correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to take
out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well
documented court cases involving organized crime.

> Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden
> thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being
> surprised when that came out.

I wasn't surprised either; but I do remember tens of people I interact with
changing, practically overnight, from telling me "you are paranoid, they only
listen to bad guys" to "of course, we've always known that". Most people
remember always being on the right side of history, even when they
demonstrably weren't.

It has happened countless times. The Enigma code breaking story involved tens,
perhaps hundreds, deceiving hundreds of millions, for over 30 years; When the
secret did get out (officially; no leaks involved), it was a huge surprise.

Also,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers)

There are tens of others if you care (I don't have time to list), but ... do
you really believe that whatever Snowden informed the world of ONLY started
with the things documented in his leaks, and that it ONLY concerned the NSA?
That would be the irrational position. (Stated another way: the snowden leak
might be unprecedented in depth and breath. But the operations it exposes
aren't)

~~~
pfisch
> Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand
> correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to
> take out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well
> documented court cases involving organized crime.

No this coverup would have to include the DC police with his laptop and many
others to bury all the other connections that would exist with wikileaks.

~~~
beagle3
He might not have left anything visible. The police in this case would not
have to be in on it, just not very enthusiastic - which they often are.

~~~
pfisch
So he wouldn't have tor installed? His computer wouldn't be encrypted? This is
ridiculous, the laptop would be full of all the software required for being a
leaker.

------
nihonde
Between Flash video and geographic restrictions, the BBC does an excellent job
of making sure I'm unable to see Adam Curtis' video output.

------
boznz
I worked as a technician for GCHQ twenty years ago and heard some good stories
in the London Office at Palmer Street (loose lips guys!) it was so obvious
that wearing the right tie or being a Freemason would get you further than any
degree in this circle.

But lets face it, it's the same at the top levels of all civil service they
are all really just job clubs for people with Latin and History degrees.

~~~
Declanomous
As much crap as people give the civil servants in the US, I feel like our
government does a pretty reasonable job at finding competent employees. I'm
from Chicago, so I definitely know how false that statement can be, but most
other places in the world seem a lot more about who your parents were and who
you know.

I mean, the social stratification of the public/private school thing is
somewhat baffling to me, as someone who attended school in one of the best
community-run school districts in the US.

~~~
jimnotgym
In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all
the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them
are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is
the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or
beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to
for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex public school boys still seem to
dominate public life. What still surprises me is the willingness of brits to
'doff their caps' at them like they are still Lord of the manor. I see it
daily where there is still a feeling that they are somehow better, because
they had an expensive education.

This is one of the huge things that holds Britain back. So many 'businessmen'
in the UK were in fact set up in business by their father, or family. They
then run their business with a sense of entitlement, and not a hint of maybe
sharing equity with founders. Private Equity is dominated in the same way. If
you want to meet a VC in Britain, you would do much better if you had the
right old school tie. Access to capital for ordinary people with a good idea
seems impossible, unless it is via some kind of research funding. It is the
same thing that makes UK business so male dominated.

It will carry on too, until Brits stop believing in the Downton Abbey model of
British identity. I thought the article was really good too. Thanks for
sharing

~~~
_coldfire
Nameless resumes are a good way to counter the inefficiencies of a system not
based on merit.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
How does a nameless resume help if you haven't removed schools, class, year of
graduation, grades and all the other signifiers correlated with free-time and
networks.

And that's smoothing over the little problems of the jobs not being open for
competition in the first place, not being item for competition once they've
been appointed, and that no one has yet to come up with an agreed upon
definition for what meritocracy even is...

------
angusmacphail
And doesn't it fit neatly that we're force-fed the narrative of Islamic
extremism as public enemy number one... Poor religious radicals are the only
foe our intelligence services are likely to outwit

~~~
pjc50
There was a suggestion going around that some of the recent London attackers
had at one time been recruited by MI5 to fight in Libya. My google-fu is
failing to find me the alleged details, though.

~~~
pjc50
[https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/872365671434379265](https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/872365671434379265)

------
nickpsecurity
Most of them. The good ones you rarely if ever read about. Only learn about
them later on when docs are declassified, books are written, or they're
shafted for politics.

~~~
seppin
or never

------
jonyt
Not sure what the author's point is. That all spies are incompetent? KGB
infiltrated UK's intelligence establishment successfully, got the plans for
the nuclear bomb and the space shuttle etc. etc. So clearly at least one
organization is not completely without merit. Maybe he means specifically UK's
spies? If so his anecdotes are not very convincing.

~~~
nthcolumn
I would say rather than KGB infiltrating it was a case of British socialists
fearing an imbalance of power reaching out to the Soviets. And yes he is
poking fun at old Johnny English.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood)
was the most important of these atomic spies, was never prosecuted and ended
her days in a cottage in Bournemouth I think it was, the nice little old lady
next door. The BBC itself is heavy with British spooks so this piece may not
be the jolly little fna-fna it purports to be. I even suspect OP (no offense
old chap).

------
oska
This is why I love _Get Smart_ and am bored by _James Bond_.

~~~
Taniwha
It does rather imply that Get Smart was more of a documentary doesn't it

------
rrggrr
The Human Factor, by Ishmael Jones.

Required reading on this topic. Tl;dr - Salesmanship, cold calling, closing
and relationships are worth a LOT more than acronyms, budgets and bugs.

------
dflock
This is all covered in _great_ detail in "The Defence of the Realm: The
Authorized History of MI5", by Christopher Anderw:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm)
\- this article is a nice summary of that book.

The book goes into _lots_ more detail, including the CIA/Angleton side of all
this.

------
bayesian_horse
Covert intelligence is important, because it is a channel of information which
cannot be seen or controlled as easily by adversaries as open source
information does.

But the very covertness also means these intelligence services are highly
intransparent and poorly supervised. And poor supervision usually leads to
poor results, as viewed by those who should be doing the supervision.

------
EGreg
And here I thought this was saying something:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-
you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent)

Is this article for real? Or does it cherry-pick only the failures?

~~~
Bartweiss
This is for real, although we should acknowledge that some successes would be
much harder to see than failures. (Some should be much more obvious, though...
The FBI loudly celebrates terrorist attacks it prevents, and yet all the self-
described wins turn out to be pretty lame.)

SIGINT sometimes does really well. Enigma is the obvious example, but I'm sure
the recently-revealed wiretaps on international conferences produced some
politically valuable stuff.

There are even occasional wins on analysis. The German tank problem was a
major statistical breakthrough, and Abraham Wald pioneered operations research
doing air force design analysis. But... both of those were unconventional,
marking breaks from normal intelligence work.

Moreover, almost all the wins I've outlined here came during wartime, a
setting where a very clear 'they' is undeniably out to hide secrets and attack
you. Things tend to get way less impressive during peacetime.

I can't find it at the moment, but John le Carre tells a brilliant story about
this. He was an MI6 man in the cold war, before he was a writer. And the
beginning of _Tinker, Tailor_ , a mission to Hungary to meet a defecting
general, was inspired by a real experience. But in real life, there was no
general - le Carre's superior had made him up. His boss led him on a dangerous
covert mission across the Iron Curtain for _no reason_ , simply because real
Cold War spy work was so aimless and boring.

------
arca_vorago
The real problem with spy agencies is that their compartmentalized nature is
ripe for abuse from the top down, which is why I theorize they have been
compromized from the top down. Also, so tired of hearing the trite ol hanlons
razor (a logical fallacy on it's face) trotted out, or the inevitable follow
up of "but how could so many people keep X a secret? No conspiracies are
possible..." That shit has been debunked time and time again and it's utter
tripe.

The only commentor here that even gets close is the one who said something
about freemasonry. I would add secret societies in general, such as Knights of
Malta and Jesuits in there as well. But that's stuff the public dismisses as
crazy conspiracy theory and the agencies themselves don't like to talk
about...

So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I
told you so".

Couple of people use the cambridge 5 as an example. First of all, it was the
cambridge _6_ , and they were triples who were always ultimately loyal to the
crown.

The middle men of spying are never allowed to be too good because if they were
they would realize the top of their own orgs are the problem. Even the one
group that used to be allowed to be good, the analysts, who told truth to
power, have been slowly being ousted so it's easier to manufacture intel for
whatever geopolitical/strategic purposes those at the top want.

The technological revolution has scared them though because they are afraid of
being outed, which is why they are quickening the pace to turn the key of the
totalitarian dystopian surveillance society. The information revolution is a
threat to the powers that be, which is why we will continue to see nothing but
an increase in attack tempo on the internet and it's freedoms.

~~~
Brotkrumen
>So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I
told you so".

Which theories are you thinking about here?

------
minademian
Am I the only one unable to read anything about spies these days and not draw
parallels with the series The Americans?

------
zghst
So manny parallels that even occur today.

------
ribfeast
Maybe their jobs are also absurdly hard.

~~~
seppin
"sit at this desk, and tell us what will happen tomorrow."

sounds pretty hard to me

------
urig
Oh God. That was long winded and contained a lot of namecalling backed by very
little evidence :/

------
alunchbox
pretty funny having this posted after the resulting cluster$#!& with Reality
Winner.

------
jstrate
Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone
much about the capability of spies, nothing we didn't already know. If you're
interested in a good book about the technical history of the CIA check out
'The Wizards of Langley'. It gives a pretty accurate history of the technical
ability of spies throughout the years, and the bureaucracy which limited them.
[https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate-
Science-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate-Science-
Technology/dp/0813340594)

~~~
nyolfen
>Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone
much about the capability of spies

i absolutely loathe when people say things like this. people would _nearly
without exception_ treat you like a lunatic if you talked about the kinds of
capabilities revealed by snowden prior to 2013. making references to ECHELON
made plenty of people write me off as a paranoid crank.

the ex post facto 'everyone knew this' is a fucking crock.

~~~
pluma
Everybody had _heard_ of this, maybe. Everybody in the tech community at
least. Or let's just say enough people that some people feel like everybody
did.

However when I heard of this, everybody also knew this was just a conspiracy
theory. The NSA records everything -- Hello, NSA person who inevitably reads
this -- sure, but c'mon they wouldn't _actually_ store any of it or even pay
attention as long as you didn't use trigger words. And even then you knew they
wouldn't _actually_ listen to _your_ conversation because why would they care
about some rando on the internet.

So, no, everyone _didn 't_ know the NSA was doing what Snowden said they were
doing. It just sounded familiar enough that it seemed like it wasn't news. I
think the conspiracy theories (or leaks?) may have actually softened the blow
of the revelations. "Oh, I guess the conspiracy theories were right. Huh,
who'd have thought. Anyway, how's your sex life?". People carried on as if
nothing happened.

I swear if we somehow found out that there really were aliens in Area 51 all
along, techies would derail every conversation about it by pointing out how
_everyone_ already _knew_ this. And the common man probably wouldn't even
freak out because it doesn't sound like news.

~~~
DanBC
> sure, but c'mon they wouldn't actually store any of it or even pay attention
> as long as you didn't use trigger words

How did you think they were listening for the trigger words?

~~~
pluma
First of all, you stated the same thing twice in separate comments.

Secondly, I wasn't making an argument, I was describing how people at the time
would think about claims like "the NSA records every conversation".

There are flaws in the argument (well, duh) but that's not even the point. The
full extent of NSA surveillance was so absurdly unthinkable that people would
go out of their way to rationalize anything as long as it was less
preposterous than claiming the NSA literally taps, records and stores all
Internet traffic.

* The NSA doesn't spy on people, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on people outside the US, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on innocent, law-abiding people, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ , that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ as long as I don't act suspiciously, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ all the time, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't record everything I do, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't store information it collects about me, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't store all information it can collect about me, that's absurd

etc etc

Also, the way I recall it, at the time the conspiracy theory was (likely due
to the popularity of the X-Files at the time) "the FBI is reading our IRC
chatlogs", which is a far cry from "the NSA is rerouting all internet
traffic", which is what we now know to be true. Not only does it seem less
nefarious (law enforcement vs literally spies) but the scope was far more
plausible (the network operators might cooperate with law enforcement).

Heck, even Guantanamo and drone strike assassinations seemed implausible back
then.

~~~
DanBC
> you stated the same thing twice in separate comments.

Weirdly when I posted the comment that you replied to HN said "please try
again", which made me think the comment hadn't posted. Thus the re-wording.

