9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one are likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
> even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year
I have trouble understanding your logic. A lot of trouble is made to prevent car accidents. We require driving licenses, we develop whole categories of law and do plenty of research to make driving safer.
It definitely precipitated the surveillance state and the erosion of civil liberties across not just the USA but large parts of the west, but it's not about body count.
Everyone knew, even in the immediate aftermath, that a copycat situation would never happen again, because passengers now knew to fight back and risk possible death vs certain death being used as living munitions inside a flying death tube.
Don't forget that in 2004 when traumatic memories of 9/11 were still raw and on everyone's daily consiousness, we had the Madrid bombings, the London bombings I think the following year, and then the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.
The world felt like it was rapidly becoming more unstable, and people feared that surprise terror attacks were the new normal. That kind of loss of confidence in security services can cause a rapid unravelling of the social fabric in ways that car accidents can't.
Nobody was talking about starting pogroms against people with brown skin because of car accidents.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
I mean, given recent voting patterns, people currently in their 30’s probably won’t be elected until like 2060, right?
Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
AI psychosis ^
Hi NSA.
I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
> A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
The problem is that the NSA violates everyone's privacy without a care in the world.
This makes it pretty easy for them. Stockpile a bunch of vulnerabilities and go to town.
When you cannot even know what their budget is (since it's classified), can you even know what their capabilities are?
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down.
Mining public forums like this one are likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol