To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden. The premise that the government gave itself permission to read and analyze all digital traffic after 9/11 was more conspiracy than science fiction back then, but Snowden showed that basically everything the show claimed (except for the artificial superintelligence doing the analysis) was actually true. And heck, if it is not 100% true today, it probably will be very soon. I'd be very surprised if the NSA isn't tapping into the secret in-house research models at OpenAI that are still a long way from public release.

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TFNA 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The European Parliament's ECHELON report was in 2001. It was well known that the NSA intercepts everything digital it possibly can. When Snowden came along, I was baffled at people treating his claims as uniquely revelatory, because all of that had already been in the news a decade prior, and sites like Cryptome were known in nerd circles.

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e40 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cryptome… haven’t thought of that site in ages. At the time it was hard to know how real it was, but years later we learned it was on point.

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xtracto 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This! Back in the early 2000s I was doing my BSc and had so much free time to spend in the depths of the internet. Cypherpunk lists, web forums and even usenet. Thus has been "known" since way back in the day before Snowden.

I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia, it was one of the reasons I thought.

	▲	bookofjoe 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>I remember when Assange founded Wikipedia... From Wikipedia: >Jimmy Wales launched the site in 2001 and funded its initial servers through his company Bomis. >Larry Sanger co-founded the project alongside Wales, proposed the name "Wikipedia," and drafted several foundational policies such as the neutral point of view. >Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

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sigmoid10 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

PRISM etc. was only born in 2007 from the Protect America Act. Echelon was merely a report that agencies were sharing data (which was never a conspiracy in any world) and them targeting private data. But a secret, global mass surveillance program of basically every individual without court orders was only a plot element of movies before Snowden.

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noir_lord 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> To me the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden

Enemy of the State came out in 1998, Sneakers came out in 1992, If you are old enough to have been around in the usenet and later slashdot days most of us techies assumed then that anything technically possible with a giant budget and no oversight that could be done was been done.

Echelon was "known" to exist for example long before Snowden.

Snowden was essentially useful to confirm that suspicion, sadly it seems to have had little impact on how anything is done.

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swed420 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the wildest part was always that this originally aired almost 2 full years before Snowden

Yeah, but keep in mind there was growing awareness of mass surveillance in the years leading up to the Snowden revelations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Similar to how the show 24 manufactured consent for torture, imperialism, etc post-9/11, part of me wonders how much of a role POI played in doing the same for mass surveillance.

A flamboyant billionaire hoarding all communications and digital events while claiming to be the good guy. Sure sounds familiar.

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lern_too_spel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

PoI had full-take surveillance of domestic data, which Snowden's docs showed wasn't true, despite many people believing it before the dump. It's more similar to Flock.

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FrustratedMonky 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even the part of the "too much data to analyze" was real, before we knew about it.

NSA capturing all data was conspiracy level. But even the problems with having too much data to sift through, also turned out to be correct.

And of course, even more ahead of its time, having AI solve the problem of sorting through the data, is coming true today.