this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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The US government has been spying on "private" communications for a looooooooooong time. Idk if "well over 80 years" is accurate, but sometime around mid last century for sure.
Almost 110 years minimum (at least for the British), 1917
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram
Maybe not over 80 years if only due to the lack of technology (it would have taken a lot of agents manning a lot of switchboards to listen in on every telephone conversation), but saying "at least since the late 60s" wouldn't be inaccurate at all
Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.
You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people's communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.
Mind you, what's being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it's just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.
WW2 started over 80 years ago. And they had the technology to spy on electronic communication then.
100% true, though in the same vein as I said; it would take a lot of agents personally listening in to cover the sheer volume of phonecalls and radio transmissions that occurred over just the US, let alone the level of granularity they have with today's "every message on every service goes through a datacenter server and is analysed in realtime" mode of surveillance that leads to things like this teacher being raided for a snapchat message faster than the cops responded to Uvalde.