NSA mass surveillance was not just a matter of "wiretap some central points on the internet" as a one-and-done operation. It required thousands of people to work on various infrastructure and operations and to maintain it on an indefinite ongoing basis. It actually would have required far more sophistication and coordination to keep quiet in perpetuity than doing 9/11.

However, in point of fact, mass surveillance actually was kept quiet for years after it was spun up. Long after the evidence had leaked from multiple sources and become undeniable, you would still be called a crackpot if you said to someone on the street that all their electronic communications were being collected and stored indefinitely. Then, on a certain day in 2013, a former CIA employee dumped the NSA's files to the Western press, which obligingly flipped the narrative and dedicated weeks of extensive coverage to the government's shiny, new, and by then well entrenched panopticon. A surveillance system is ultimately most useful in its purpose only if the people know they're being watched, and the time had come for it to be unveiled.

As always, a large amount of media coverage in mainstream press outlets was a good indicator of what it was that the state wanted people focused on. The massively lower level of attention drawn to the Vault 7 leaks (which were arguably even more crucial than Snowden's) is stark and instructive, as is the different fate of the whistleblower (obscurity in prison vs international celebrity status) and a good indication of what they don't want you thinking about.

"Use Signal, use Tor."

The Vault 7 page on Wikipedia lists a strange ordering for E2EE messengers. Telegram has the weakest security and has only opt-in E2EE for chats, yet is listed first. WhatsApp's Facebook ownership is obviously problematic, but irrelevant to the specific context. I'd reorder it as “Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram”.

> While the encryption of messengers that offer end-to-end encryption, such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal, wasn't reported to be cracked, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7#Messaging_services

It doesn't matter how secure the messengers are if every device they're running on is compromised.

Does it really require all that much coordination?

Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack.

I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.

Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...

AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story).

I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

> I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

You can see this with every time that the COVID lab leak discussion gets equated with lab creation.

And also creation for research/treatment development purposes vs. bioweapon purposes.

I tend to call that tactic "Joe Greening", from the guy in the original Deus Ex who mixed the (in-universe true) conspiracy theories with alien nonsense to discredit people who knew about the conspiracies.

https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Joe_Greene

This comes up in The X-Files, too.

Agreed; I spend probably too much of my time debating conspiracy theories online, and I find these tactics incredibly common and incredibly disingenuous. It's very easy to reduce any conspiracy theory to the most absurd of its claims and claimants. One has to break down the different possibilities and the conditional probabilities that follow.

Was Epstein murdered, or did he kill himself? If he killed himself, was he told to, permitted to, or not permitted to and did it anyway? Did the towers fall due to plane collisions and fires, or explosives, or both, or something else? Were al Qaeda responsible? If so, did they collaborate with the US government? If they were responsible and didn't collaborate, did the US government have specific forewarning and let it happen for geopolitical purposes?

Any and every conspiracy theory absolutely should and must be steelmanned, and every person lobbing allegations must be taken seriously, if we're to have any hope of getting a micrometer closer to a shared sense of reality. Good epistemology requires taking conspiracy theories seriously and in good faith, even if one believes some percentage of conspiracy theorists may be acting in bad faith or may be in a state of psychosis, etc.

Buddy, I don't have time to evaluate all the true information that comes up, let alone all the probably false information.

Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

>Not to mention that conspiracy theories and other complex claims are an asymmetric demand on people's time: it takes a nut 10 seconds to say that the towers were hit by missiles, and 10 minutes for you to find video recordings from multiple sources.

This is true. I've lost countless hours exerting 50 times more effort trying to refute conspiracy theorists' claims than the effort they put into it.

But I don't find it a total waste. Do I ever alter or influence anyone's opinions in any way? The person I'm debating: probably almost never or never. But other people reading it? Probably very very rarely, but if even one person reading it has ever had their view slightly shifted, then it's worth it, to me.

I know the efforts don't go totally unappreciated; in online discussions, I've been privately thanked for being one of the only people who'll try to take a conspiracy theorist seriously and have a serious, long debate with them. I get why almost no one wants to do it. But, in my opinion, someone has to. I definitely wouldn't fault someone for not wanting to masochistically subject themselves to that, but I think there still needs to be someone willing to sit down with them, treat them and their views with respect, and present reasonable counter-arguments.

When not a single person will try to seriously engage with them and their arguments, it only deeply reinforces that they're right and everyone else is crazy and/or a liar and/or an idiot. For example, if you Google terms related to Holocaust denial, pretty much two things come up (at least as of some years ago): Holocaust denial websites or websites saying it happened. You almost never find someone actually trying to directly address the claims of Holocaust denialists. You just get things like the current top hit:

>In most cases, a healthy debate promotes understanding. But even in the most liberal societies, certain matters are closed for discussion. For good reason, we choose not to argue about whether the Earth is flat, or whether white people have (as some white supremacists claim) “superior germ-plasm.” Nor should we argue about whether the Holocaust happened. It did. Arguments against this fact reveal little about history and much about the arguer’s wish for the world to replace memories of Jewish victimization with a monolithic image of Jews as powerful and treacherous.

On one hand; sure, I agree with all of this. But try putting yourself in the shoes of someone who's been indoctrinated into truly, earnestly believing it's all made up, and then read that statement. What are you going to think?

>Also the goal posts are moved whenever convenient: most conspiracy theorists that I have interacted with are attached to the idea that there is a conspiracy more than any specific conspiracy.

Yes; their strongly-held priors are that there are lots of conspiracies. In my opinion, barring scenarios like antipsychotics for people in psychotic states, the only way to really dislodge any belief a conspiracy theorist has is to attack the entire jenga stack from the root. You need to chip away at the priors in order to move the needle on anything in any direction. This isn't easy and probably takes months or years of time spent with a specific person to have even the slightest chance, but I think it's the only way.

In my opinion, if humanity is to have a chance of surviving in the long term, there need to be at least some people making concerted efforts to try to bridge the gap between people who hold fundamentally different views of reality. I think it'd be bad and a net waste of time and energy if a lot of people were doing this, but I think it'd also be bad if no one were doing it.

That is indeed a well known tactic. In the same way as critics of mass vaccinating a global population with an experimental vaccine are lumped together with anti-vaxxers who believe in a nanobot spiked mRNA vaccine by Bill Gates.

Right — why isn't it cool to distinguish, and rank, various adjacent conspiracy theory likelihoods anymore?

> 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition

Speaking for an entire group, almost always going to fail.

Pffft...you got it wrong. "Zem planez have been remotely radioed in!"

Military funding of terrorists is nothing new.

Pakistan as a proxy state of the US created the Taliban in Afghanistan.

US wanted religiously motivated fighters countering the USSR. Pakistan, armed with US weapon, and flush with US money, obliged.

Taliban was actually created at the behest of the US.

It is an open secret.

The US, to counter Al-Assad, armed and funded Al-Noosra front. Much, if not most of the money and weapons went to the ISIS.

In the case of Al-Noosra turned ISIS, the US has plausible deniability. It doesn't even have that much of it in case of the next generation of the Mujahids fighting the USSR being turned into the Taliban.

The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

The personal risk for the top level execs would be massive, maybe even up to and including a death penalty. The payoff is a budget with too many 0s gets more 0s. The plot isn't rational.

The bombers are useful idiots. True believers that aren't aware that they're part of an inside job.

Right. You just fine someone else that wants it done and grease the wheels.

Thank you.

That's what you need true believers for: cannon fodder. Unlikely for someone to chicken out if they're already heavily emotionally invested in the idea of achieving spontaneous unity with God by blowing themselves to bits.

> The sticking point would be the bombers themselves. Maybe they chicken out at the last minute and then expose the conspirators.

Very trivial to deal with, if one of them starts to speak up you just send the FBI to conduct an "interview" during the course of which they can be assassinated, like they did with Ibragim Todashev.

I think the hard part is not doing it as a false flag op, but getting away with it after the fact. There was a lot of eyes on the aftermath of 9/11.

Especially after the centralization of the American surveillance and enforcement infrastructure in The Patriot Act.

The TLA organizations in the government are rival siblings. If the FBI caught wind of a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11 perpetrated by the Department of Defense in the newly-authorized data sharing, they'd have run it to ground.

Ha. In fact, you could hardly be more wrong.

https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-ar...

This is not an example of the FBI caught in a conspiracy to orchestrate 9/11. If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation... Not terribly surprising, because (for starters) the FBI's job is domestic investigation, not international. The CIA or NSA would be in charge of looking into Saudi connections to 9/11.

After the Patriot Act, these responsibilities became intertwined, but in the timeframe the article's describing, the nature of that entwining was nascent, and it's not surprising the FBI would have continued to act like the traditional FBI.

> If anything, this is an example of the FBI demonstrating, perhaps, insufficient willingness to pursue investigation into a politically allied nation

When you regularly use other nations to do your bidding, what the hell is the difference?

Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years

This is one of the points of the article.

Conflation of adjacent theories is an easy route to defeating them in court of public opinion.

"fake 9/11" isn't even close....

Is there a category of "reduced protective on the ground work to sloppy SIGINT surveillance willingly" to provoke a incident that would ensure future funding?