Counterpoint: PRISM, which was a very large, very complex operation dispersed over dozens or hundreds of locales, multiple governments, many private companies, etc., that managed to stay secret for at least a decade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something a bit less ambitious could be hidden for at least half a century.
That is an interesting counterpoint, but there’s the fact that things like PRISM can exist in at least something like a pseudo-legal space; if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism. It still came out eventually.
To compare with COVID-19, there probably are forms of more or less convergent behaviours that produce a conspiracy like appearance, but no space for real large conspiracies of that sort I can think of. My most nigh-conspiratorial C19 opinions are that early “masks are useless” recommendations were more of a ploy to protect PPE stocks than genuine advice, and that regardless of its truth, a lab leak was discounted way too quickly and too thoroughly for political reasons. Both these though don’t require large active conspiracies, but simply convergent interests and biases across specific groups of people.
if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism.
There’s no way that would apply to the people working at a facility intercepting high end Cisco routers by the truckload and planting backdoors on them, likely mostly bound for large enterprises of certain countries. No credible terrorist groups, or even all of them combined, would order so many thousands of high end routers month after month.
Counterpoint: PRISM, which was a very large, very complex operation dispersed over dozens or hundreds of locales, multiple governments, many private companies, etc., that managed to stay secret for at least a decade.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something a bit less ambitious could be hidden for at least half a century.
That is an interesting counterpoint, but there’s the fact that things like PRISM can exist in at least something like a pseudo-legal space; if government spooks come to you and ask you to do X and Y because terrorism, and it sounds legit, that’s probably a strong coordination mechanism. It still came out eventually.
To compare with COVID-19, there probably are forms of more or less convergent behaviours that produce a conspiracy like appearance, but no space for real large conspiracies of that sort I can think of. My most nigh-conspiratorial C19 opinions are that early “masks are useless” recommendations were more of a ploy to protect PPE stocks than genuine advice, and that regardless of its truth, a lab leak was discounted way too quickly and too thoroughly for political reasons. Both these though don’t require large active conspiracies, but simply convergent interests and biases across specific groups of people.
There’s no way that would apply to the people working at a facility intercepting high end Cisco routers by the truckload and planting backdoors on them, likely mostly bound for large enterprises of certain countries. No credible terrorist groups, or even all of them combined, would order so many thousands of high end routers month after month.