I wonder why we're so collectively afraid of being labeled 'conspiracy theorists'. What is so wrong with supposing that bad things are being done intentionally?
It's a pernicious bug in certain kinds of psychology that makes it quite hard for someone to tell the difference between nightmarish fantasy and reality. I don't want it.
When reality has repeatedly put nightmarish fantasy to shame - mostly for lack of imagination on fantasy's part - it's not unreasonable to question the line between optimism-laced skepticism and naivety.
People used to have dreams they aspired to. Now we have nightmares we want to see happen. I don't want it either, but apparently society at large does.
original: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=53510#relPage...
text format: http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html
I think it was Wired that broke the story about AT&T's secret fiber-splitting rooms several years before they were later confirmed by Snowden's leaks. Given the entities and sheer amount of resources in play (or available to be used for that sort of thing), it's not nearly as tinfoil-hattish as, say, HAARP.
Not just plausible; something not altogether dissimilar was documented to have been happening by the Snowden documents back in 2014: https://www.engadget.com/2014/05/16/nsa-bugged-cisco-routers...
I'm good with Bloomberg being expected to do a better job covering this activity than they have. And, without further evidence that it's actually happening, I can't quite take the step into believing that it's probably happening, because that way lies tin foil hats.
But for all the security researchers that straight up claim that what Bloomberg reported was impossible, I wonder what their opinion would have been about reports that the NSA was bugging routing and server hardware in transit before 2014?