Comment by ilyanep
12 years ago
Any amount of paranoid ridiculousness can be justified after the fact by some sort of big incident. It's how we justify the PATRIOT act after 9/11 and how one might justify Stallman's actions after the NSA leaks. That doesn't make it any less ridiculous to go to such radical measures.
We could just shut off the Internet entirely and force everyone to walk around naked lest they strap a bomb to themselves.
Well, that Stallman page is copyright 2006, which is after the Stellar Wind story broke: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pa...
As for not believing intelligence services attempted to monitor the Internet prior to that story -- that would have been just silly. If they didn't they wouldn't be doing their (illegal) job.