I was at a smart grid workshop in VA a year after Obama took office; Steven Chu was there. It was mostly technical staff from grid operators. We were there because we'd been doing vulnerability research on smart meters, and a smart meter vendor had asked us to go.
There was a guy talking exactly like your comment in our working group. We'd all be talking about some technical detail of, I don't know, off-peak power storage or something, and this guy would keep interrupting and demanding that we talk about EMF and EMF weapons.
We all just looked at him like something was deeply wrong with him. Little did I know that years later I would read this comment and know the truth.
(Schneier wrote about NSA spying. In Applied Cryptography. In the 1990s.)
One time, I read a physics paper, but some of the words were the same as ones a vagrant fellow was using to try convince me he'd been abducted by aliens the previous week, glad I noticed when I did.
Not understanding the hostility toward someone agreeing with you, but okay.
Also not understanding how someone who's found this community doesn't also see the value of anonymous/pseudonymous identities for the security of freedom of expression.
>We all just looked at him like something was deeply wrong with him. Little did I know that years later I would read this comment and know the truth.
tptacek, my sarcasm detector has been broken from birth, is this sarcasm?
>(Schneier wrote about NSA spying. In Applied Cryptography. In the 1990s.)
Schneier, Bamford, and Cryptome and some others (Prouty) were the origins of my knowledge of the NSA stuff since the 90's as well. At the time not many people listened and we were constantly derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists... of course it would be logically fallacious to extrapolate that makes me right about another subject, (hence understandable if your comment is sarcasm), but I think it's worth remembering in context of similar claims of government technological overreach.
There was a guy talking exactly like your comment in our working group. We'd all be talking about some technical detail of, I don't know, off-peak power storage or something, and this guy would keep interrupting and demanding that we talk about EMF and EMF weapons.
We all just looked at him like something was deeply wrong with him. Little did I know that years later I would read this comment and know the truth.
(Schneier wrote about NSA spying. In Applied Cryptography. In the 1990s.)