No we did not. This is perhaps the most annoying meme to have come out of the Wikileaks and Snowden disclosures. Nobody working in technology laughed about dragnet surveillance or cryptanalysis capabilities or trojan horses. The 1990s was the era of Clipper and Echelon. People did not assume in the 1990s that the intelligence community was benign or disconnected. All you have to do is read _Applied Cryptography_ to see a sober, expansive concern about NSA surveillance. And Schneier's writing was far more carefully considered than, say, Usenet.

For fuck's sake, the most popular show on television centered on government conspiracies.

The millenials did not invent distrust of the government.

> No we did not.

The disdain with which you discard my memories of that time is... interesting.

Invent distrust? Of course not.

However, I and my colleagues (as I recall), at the time just did not take the threat of government surveillance seriously. Did I trust the government? Yes. Yes I did. I'm Dutch. We have a childlike faith in our government. Being spied on by the government was something that happened on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. And in the US. Surely not our very own flattened nook of the world.

And would this surveillance of other governments affect me? Ha! Why would it?

Sure I was naive. And I was hardly alone. Were there more enlightened souls, such as yourself? I'm willing to go out on a limb and trust that there were.

Does that discount my memory of being ridiculed as paranoid for using PGP? Or the times I ridiculed friends and colleagues myself for taking measures against being listened in on? I hope not.

You weren't just naive. You were anomalously naive. It's funny you should mention PGP: the 1990s were the time of the crypto-wars, which were in part sparked by PGP. Remember "this t-shirt is a munition"? You couldn't even sell products with crypto in them without jumping through hoops.

> You were anomalously naive.

Now that type of thinking I find naive.

If you had to break the last 20 years into three time periods: (!) "post Snowden", (2) "post-9/11", and (3) "post PGP", sensitivity to government surveillance would rank 1-3-2. The NSA was a bigger deal in the 1990s than it was in the 2000s, even after the AT&T "Room 101" disclosure.

Technically, Room 641a. But, otherwise, spot-on.

... and thinking that everyone knows this, or can understand the implications, is naive.

"this t-shirt is ammo" is an American cultural artifact.

there was some support for the projects (the PGP source scanning thing, extra-US hosting of crypto software, ...), but other than that, this was the US being stupidly paranoid as usual.

That "you" couldn't sell products with crypto in them was a great business opportunity for a number of European vendors, by the way.

Seem to remember it being popular in Hollywood.

Enemy of the State, The Simpsons.. even AAA movies like Swordfish.. "The Carnivore program, reading every ISP subscribers email- I did what every federal judge wouldn't do"

And of course, Enemy of the State is a sort of sequel to The Conversation, a (great) movie from the '70s.

Let us not forget another great 70's flick, 3 Days of the Condor.

Maybe it makes me a looney but I was educated about things like COINTELPRO and TEMPEST before I was a teenager and the idea that a government wouldn't be doing these things is more surprising to me than the leaks that they are.