I think this should rather say "nobody ever came forward". I'm sure there always were enough pieces of evidence even if scattered and nobody had the whole picture. But the ones who were close enough to put together some of it and get an idea had no incentive to open their mouths.
Coming forward with enough evidence was likely close to impossible until a decade or two ago. The ones who have such comprehensive evidence also have some "incentive" to keep quiet. Up to the proverbial "terminated with extreme prejudice" option, which I'm sure must have been employed given the sensitivity of the topic. Or perhaps risking being labelled a terrorist which would likely lead to even worse outcomes. When the efforts were escalated after 9/11 so were the security measures and the "incentives".
And coming forward with just shreds of evidence of something like this will only get you labelled a nut, enemy of the state, shill, etc.
Snowden and a few others did it at great personal cost and I'm sure they now serve as an example for others to not do it. Look around even today, people see the world in black and white and if you're not with them, you're against them, and they will treat you as such.
It reminds me of that "CIA manual" that floats around about how to derail conversations and sew doubt when infuriating an organization (can't find link). About doing things like bringing up irrelevant information, highlighting less meaningful things, revisiting already solved problems, etc. I mean what did the GGP do besides say "_I_ knew about this, but you all called me a conspiracy theorist! Who's laughing now?" What good does such a statement do? Clearly they are following the CIA handbook and derailing the conversation! (I'm joking)
But I think it comes down to not wanting to read the entire article _AND_ process the information contained within. I think a lot of people read things for the words written and not for the meaning, and I find this odd.
Most of what's listed as "disinfo agent" tactics there are the general fallacious and bad faith tactics that go on in almost any forum under heated discourse.
But yeah, I fully agree that this is essentially about bad faith tactics. My new strategy to dealing with this is to call these people out on their bad faith rather than engaging in the misdirection that they are creating. At least in my experience it seems to push these conversations down from the top spot (but that may be a selection bias).
>The purpose of this post isn’t to discuss the legality of the NSA's actions or the morality of the leaks, what we are trying to answer is: "Why did we never see it coming?"
They clearly made it the central theme. With enough context what they are saying makes sense, but that phrase is so often used to describe how people predicted something without evidence. I'm sure I've read several articles talking about how some health organization "saw the cornavirus pandemic coming in 200x"
All of the talk of how some people on HN totally for real knew the NSA was hacking people is irrelevant and a total distraction from the far more interesting question of why we needed a leaker to confirm it.
The article then goes on to explain why, even with hundreds of thousands of ppl doing incident response investigations, nobody caught / correctly attributed these attacks.
1. Even if you were right it doesn't matter. Coming to the comments to split semantics while obviously missing the point of the entire article is adding incredible noise. There was more than one sentence in the article and more than enough context to forgive an ambiguous or even incorrect sentence.
2. I don't agree that you're right. You state there's only one interpretation. I could just as easily interpret it as "Why didn't we see the NSA coming for our network?" or "Given all of these NSA attacks, how did no one detect them entering the network?".
So between those things I downvoted it.
I didn't 'come to the comments to split semantics', nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article. I simply replied to an already existing discussion about the meaning of a phrase.
Describing that one short post as "incredible noise" is frankly beyond absurd, particularly when you have no problem making noisy, unnecessary complaints in two separate posts here.
> I don't agree that you're right. You state there's only one interpretation. I could just as easily interpret it as "Why didn't we see the NSA coming for our network?" or "Given all of these NSA attacks, how did no one detect them entering the network?".
I didn't say there's only one interpretation, I said there's only one meaning, with the point being that if a phrase is used that has one specific meaning then obviously some people are going to assume that is what is meant by it and comment accordingly.
Being right/accurate does matter, precisely to avoid incredible noise like this.
Thank you for replying and explaining.
Yeah, only one person needs to start the semantics-splitting topic and the rest of the lazy uninformative pseudo-discussion just flows from there, with every other guy adding one short harmless post. That’s how we get completely-derailed garbage threads like this. (Did I participate in the thread? Yes. Though in my defense I was trying to impress on people that this kind of thing should not happen.)
“Nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article” — that should probably have tipped you off in a small way about the value of your addition.
Maybe you should learn how to scroll instead of reveling in the very thing you're complaining about, otherwise people might take you for a hypocrite who is only making matters worse.
> garbage threads like this. Did I participate in the thread? Yes.
And how was your cake?
> “Nor did I say anything at all about the rest of the article” — that should probably have tipped you off in a small way about the value of your addition.
Do you think all comments are required to address every word of an article? Maybe someone should tip you off that not everything posted here is going to be written with your personal satisfaction in mind.
> If the NSA was owning everything in sight (and by all accounts they have) then how is it that nobody ever spotted them?
It’s sad that people routinely find the first disagreeable thing in any submission then derail the whole discussion based on an out-of-context misrepresentation of that.