
Government surveillance is as old as the telegraph - carissaignacia
https://www.timeline.com/stories/the-us-government-has-been-monitoring-customers-since-the-telegraph
======
sandworm101
Horrible title. Government surveillance existed long before
telecommunications. US governments have been spying on mail/letters since
literally day one. I take that back. They were spying on letters BEFORE day
one, before the US was actually a thing.

The OP article equates government surveillance with the modern phenomena
whereby governments must enlist corporate actors to aid in surveillance: the
tapping at the switchboard rather than secreting some device inside the
handset. Plenty of government surveillance is possible without any corporate
cooperation whatsoever.

~~~
snowpanda
Yes I agree. Even in Ancient Rome, Livy [0] actually wrote about this in one
of the his books [1].

This is a good read if anyone is interested:

[http://www.historynet.com/espionage-in-ancient-
rome.htm](http://www.historynet.com/espionage-in-ancient-rome.htm)

\---------

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Urbe_Condita_Libri_%28Livy%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Urbe_Condita_Libri_%28Livy%29)

------
mindslight
Like, duh. Telecom has always been entwined with state security - they're
essentially two halves of the same informational entity.

This is why the 90s were a watershed, when powerful encryption became
accessible far and wide. Having state of the art defensive spycraft at the
hands of anyone who casually cared is unprecedented throughout history.

But the tech community dropped the ball. In the rush to build our dream of
what the Internet could enable, we failed to consider robustness in the face
of hostile service providers, including ourselves.

Let us hope there isn't too much path dependence on this broken
overcentralized architecture.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_Like, duh. Telecom has always been entwined with state security - they 're
essentially two halves of the same informational entity._

It nominally should have been a "like, duh," but as it turns out, it was a
great mystery to a many people, taking well until 2013 when Snowden finally
made it stupidly obvious such that ignoring or denying it was simply rendered
impossible.

I'm not sure how much of it was due to historical ignorance, faith in statism,
or in the case of the United States - its history and culture generally being
heavily enshrined in mythology.

~~~
mindslight
Snowden wasn't the first whistleblower, so to me it's more of a sociological
topic than anything else. While it's tough to get a man to understand
something his salary depends on not understanding, that does not mean he
should be free from judgment for doing so. So I still think "duh" is
appropriate.

I see the same wishful denial as in eg second amendment "hopefuls" who think
that having nerf guns is proof that the government is being kept at bay. The
truth's implications are simply too difficult.

------
pdkl95
Comparing intelligence operations of the past - with or without the help of
business - to the current situation is a false equivalence.

To quote _Cybersecurity as Realpolitik_ [1] yet again:

    
    
        The central dynamic internal to government is, and always
        has been, that the only way for either the Executive or the Legislature
        to control the many sub-units of government is by way of how much
        money they can hand out. [...]
    
        Suppose, however, that surveillance becomes too cheap to meter,
        that is to say too cheap to limit through budgetary processes.  Does
        that lessen the power of the Legislature more, or the power of the
        Executive more?  I think that ever-cheaper surveillance substantially
        changes the balance of power in favor of the Executive and away
        from the Legislature.
    

In the past, there were always fundamental limitations of money or manpower or
capability. It's expensive to run a stakeout, and it just wasn't
technologically possible to build a database about _everybody_ ; even the
relatively simple census took years of work before the invention of
Hollerith's Tabulator[2].

Compare that to today, where XKEYSCORE can search most world communications in
(approximately?) realtime. Compare the handful of bytes worth of personal
information the Census Bureau was able to tabulate about everybody to the
still-growing mountain of data (and metadata) that is gathered routinely that
we call "analytics". Compare the difficulty of _searching_ for some particular
piece of data - even with a fancy electromechanical tabulator - to the
powerful and widely available analysis tools we have today.

It is simply dishonest to say the surveillance capabilities of even a
generation or two ago is even remotely comparable to the surveillance
currently being done by _both_ governments and private businesses.[3]

[1]
[http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt](http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-
TGvYOBpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI)

[2]
[https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/th...](https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.html)

[3] "It ain't the same league. It ain't even the same fucking sport."

------
mirimir
There are some good descriptions of telegraph-era government surveillance
arrangements in Bamford's _The Puzzle Palace_ (1983). Also Carlisle's
_Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence_ (2015). And for fun,
see Yardley's _The American Black Chamber_ (1931).

Edit: And see
[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/82-years...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/82-years-
before-edward-snowden-there-was-herbert-o-yardley/282019/) for more about
Yardley.

Edit: Corrected publication date for _The Puzzle Palace_.

------
numeromancer
Along with his many other abuses of liberty, Lincoln monitored telegraph lines
during the war, and jailed without trial many who criticized the war effort or
argued in favor of the right of secession.

------
leephillips
The book _The Puzzle Palace_ by James Bamford, a history of the NSA and its
precursors, describes in detail how the U.S. government set up shop in the
early telegraph offices, copying everything. As this book came out in `83,
I've been continuously amused at how Snowden's leaks have been greeted with so
much surprise.

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elchief
The inventor of the one-time pad was a telegraph man:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html?ref=sc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html?ref=science&_r=0)

------
Canada
It's much older. But that doesn't make the public obligated to make it easy.

