Bullshit; I remember trying to instill the same point to techies 7 years ago and a majority of technically competent people would say that, while possible, is not certain.
Hindsight is 20-20.
"In 1996, a detailed description of ECHELON was provided by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager in his 1996 book "Secret Power – New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network""*
This was common knowledge in the 90's ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
There were a few people who actually extrapolated the technical abilities to their possible extents and realized what was possible, indeed probable, but they were not the majority.
Despite Nicky Hager's testimony before the European Parliament in 2001, here in Australia, many people didn't even realise the DSD existed (Now ASD) until about 2011, and a lot of their abilities weren't known until 2013. The collusion between the ASD and other foreign departments was ignored, or even seen as positive, by any main-stream press coverage at the time.
Saying this was common knowledge in 1996 is attributing your specialist knowledge to the entire population, who couldn't, and still can't, really be bothered by said knowledge. You may have known about it, but the vast majority of the world didn't. And now that they do, they sadly still don't really care.
As an example, there's now an Academy Award winning documentary relating to mass government surveillance available online, legally, for free. Do you think I can get any of my non-tech friends to watch it?
Bad effects from smoking were know for years, same with the effects of asbestos, DDT. These days, it's fracking, global warming, junk-food and lack of exercise.
These ideas were all and are currently in the media. People being the irrational beings they are pick and choose what they want to believe. Belief doesn't change the truth.
I would say that truth doesn't change belief, and unfortunately, it's belief that people act on.
It was a joke, of course, but it anchors in my head that I was certainly aware of the vulnerabilities of the technology at the time.
Off topic digression - I was there with a couple friends, we were all scruffy looking 20 somethings. In the parking lot, a middle aged man approached us and if we were being recruited by the NSA. A reasonable guess, I suppose, given how we looked and where we were. Anyway, he then proceeded to go on a rant about how we should never work for them or it would destroy our lives and we'd regret it. It's strange this guy went to Ft Meade to hang out in a parking lot and tell people not to work for the NSA.
The museum itself is definitely worth a visit if you're in DC. It's a short drive outside the city.
We're at the point now where we pretty much assume that the former implies the latter. It was not always thus.
What’s left is how to pay for the Wi-Fi access anonymously, if people aren’t willing to share it with you for free. If your wireless network access is all done through a centralized company, like a cellphone carrier, you could easily use one of the Chaumian centralized-issuer digital cash schemes from the 1990s: the “bank” is your cellphone company, and they sign a “blinded” form of a bunch of “coins”, which you later sign over to wireless base stations in exchange for bandwidth. The protocol assures that the base station can confirm that the coin hasn’t been double-spent and that it’s properly signed by the bank, but the base station and bank together cannot figure out which coin it was.
I guess people are talking about 2 different things though, one discussion is about the implications of a radio (you and others are talking about this) and the other is about government capacity to gather the information revealed by using a cell phone.
Making that to be a big conspiracy to infringe upon everybody's freedom and privacy is what makes Stallman's position so ridiculous. It always sounds like the rambling of a technophobic. No, that's not entirely true. Like the rambling of an old man who wants computing and technology in general to be exactly like it was in the 70's when he was sharing a mainframe with his pals at uni, and who can't think of anything more innovative than that.