The dragnets existed before 9/11. That just gave justification for even more funding.

Which programs do you mean specifically?

We know the nature of the mass surveillance changed and expanded immensely after 9/11 in a major way, especially domestically.

There was the Clipper Chip [2] and the super-weak 40-bit 'export strength' cryptography [3] and the investigation of PGP author Phil Zimmerman for 'munitions export without a license' [4].

So there was a substantial effort to weaken cryptography, decades before 9/11.

On the dragnet surveillance front, there have long been rumours of things like ECHELON [1] being used for mass surveillance and industrial espionage. And the simple fact US spies were interested in weakening export SSL rather implied, to a lot of people, they had easy access to the ciphertext.

Of course, this was before so much stuff had moved online, so it was a different world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...

> there was a substantial effort to weaken cryptography, decades before 9/11.

Yes, agreed. Everyone should dig up their favorite programs and discuss them openly.

Every piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine is scanned, front and back, OCR'd, and stored - as far as we know, indefinitely. That's how they deliver the "what's coming in your mailbox" images you can sign up to receive via email.

Those images very often show the contents of the envelope clearly enough to recognize and even read the contents, which I'm quite positive isn't an accident.

The USPS is literally reading and storing at least part of nearly every letter mailed in the United States.

The USPS inspectors have a long history of being used as a morality enforcement agency, so yes, this should be of concern.

Apparently not a pre 9/11 program, if Wikipedia is correct.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...

Some more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_Tra...

Agreed. It’s even worse: they also have the capability with the “mail covers” program to divert and tamper with mail. This happens to Americans on U.S. soil and I’m not just talking about suspects of terrorism.

I've heard rumors that this was going on for a long time before it's been publicly acknowledged to have -- before OCR should have been able to handle that sort of variety of handwriting (reliably), let alone at scale. Like a snail-mail version of the NSA metadata collection program.

Wikipedia gives the impression the modern incarnation of photographing the US mail at scale began in 2001: “created in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, including two postal workers” [0]

However research on photographs of mail was already taking place as far back as 1986 [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...

[1] https://cedar.buffalo.edu/papers/articles/Framework_Object_1...

TFA says: «The European Parliament already issued a 194-page "Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)" in 2001» (July 2001, that is)

Yes, Duncan Campbell’s report is legendary ( https://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/surveillance/echelon/IC2... ). This is the same guy who revealed the existence of GCHQ, and was arrested for this gift to the public.

To clarify, I was asking them for their specific favorite programs as they didn’t indicate they only meant the ones in the blog post.

I'll also add

Which have not prevented anything and instead are used in parallel construction to go after Americans

I don’t like the collateral damages of many policies. But it’s not fair to say that the policies “have not prevented anything” because we simply don’t know. The policies could have stopped in-progress evil acts (but they were never revealed to the public for intel reasons) or prevented attempts of an evil acts (well, nothing happened, nothing to report).

It also could have stopped the Gods from smiting us all, but there's no evidence that it has.

This article[1] is a good start at realizing the costs outweigh the benefits. There's little or no evidence of good caused, but plenty of evidence of harms caused.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/top-5-claims-defenders...

There is evidence of that, in fact. There were many serious terrorist attacks in Europe, like in Spain's subway (300 dead) and Frankfurt, in the aftermath of 9/11 and other...uh howmy gonna say this...other stuff, the Spanish terrorist attacks were done by Basque nationalists or such, not Muslims.

So there's your control group, Europe.

I find it rather funny that we know about the parallel construction which they attempt to keep hidden, yet don't know about any successful preventions. I would assume they would at least want people to know if a program was a success. To me, the lack of information speaks volumes

This is on top of all the entrapment that we also know about, performed by the FBI and associated informants on Islamic/Muslim communities

The purpose of a system is what it does

Considering that they do not obey the law, if they had actually stopped any terrorists we would be hearing all about it from "anonymous leakers" by now.

The bar for public policy should be set quite a bit higher than "it could have done some good at some point, maybe".

In comic books, we read fanciful stories about the good guys saving the world in secret. But the real world doesn't really work like that.

When the police seize some illegal drugs, what is the first thing they do? They snap a picture and publish it for society to see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=police+seize+drugs&tbm=isch

because citizens want to see that their tax money is being used successfully. The same would likely be done by the surveillance authorities if they saw significant success in their mission.

One cannot prove a negative, but given how much public recording of everything there is these days (and in the last decade+), I'd say it's safe to err on the side of them not having prevented much of consequence. ("Absence of evidence..." doesn't really apply when evidence should be ample for the phenomenon to be explained.)