How many people tweeted about storming Area 51 in the 1950s? Or put up long political monologues on Tik Tok? I think your argument is 180 degrees backwards from how things actually are.
Just because people didn't have Twitter or TikTok in 50s and 60s doesn't mean that people didn't think about these things. It was only disseminated to a tighter group, so they're closer, less prominent and smaller.
Increase in the speed of communication and in overall population allowed greater dissemination in shorter time, that's it. Before, more manual methods worked well enough to get a sniff of these activities, but it doesn't work now. So, governments want their cake back.
CIA did mass surveillance on state level with Crypto AG. Russians bugged whole fleet of diplomatic IBM typewriters. Intelligence agencies listened people via central heating pipes, insiders were planted inside suspected groups... The ways were numerous, and still are. The people, society and technology is evolving. So the game.
I don't support the initiative, but that's the state of the play right now.
This might be backwards when looked from there, but this is how it looks from here.
Right. So in the past it took massive amounts of money and manpower to watch relatively small groups of people. Now those same groups organize on easily accessible and sometimes straight up public websites so it takes less money and manpower to monitor virtually everyone. What power is the government trying to get back? Seems like achieving their goal got easier, not harder.
> Seems like achieving their goal got easier, not harder.
Nope. E2E communications have buried a lot of stuff proverbially underground. The leaks are reduced. Hence, governments lost the ability to monitor as they liked. There's much more and invisible communication going on when compared to the past, and it's much more detailed and direct. Also its volume has increased exponentially.
So monitoring that stuff got way harder, and they want the easy way back.
Notice the part about where the conspiring here took place and how those conversations were discovered and revealed. Sure two people can communicate over E2E but if you want to start a movement (something that actually would matter rather than just complaining to your bestie), you need to open it up to the public which turns out also opens up the door to people spying on you.
I'm not sure I agree but at least that isn't outright ridiculous like the 18'th century would be.