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Americans Don't Care About Domestic Spying ?
S1mmo+61 writes "Salon is analyzing a Time Magazine article today, a piece that essentially claims Americans do not care about the domestic spying. The analysis of the Time magazine piece (which is longer than the article itself) is interesting, if only as a quick history of domestic spying in the last eight years. 'Time claims that "nobody cares" about the Government's increased spying powers and that "polling consistently supports that conclusion." They don't cite a single poll because that assertion is blatantly false. Just this weekend, a new poll released by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University proves that exactly the opposite is true. That poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is "very secretive" has doubled in the last two years alone (to 44%)'"
Talk to most people about domestic spying or the abuses of the Patriot Act, and they say something like, "Well, if you're not doing something bad, who cares if the government is watching?"
I think that's a completely shortsighted and borderline insane viewpoint, but it's the one I most frequently encounter with most Americans.
its that we don't know by whom or why.
The lack of transparency is at the heart of any problem we have with surveilance.
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Why the hell are our news sources giving us anything other than news? Uneducated man on the street opinions (I already know my opinion thanks, and don't trust your statistics on everyone else's), corporate advertising for new products billed as a science and technology item, known political chicanery and fraudulent press statements passed on without any actual scrutiny or independant research, and then a fluff piece to take our minds off it all. Oh how nice, you left some money for me on the bed, and now for sports, traffic and weather.
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The problem with polls is that it is all about the way the questions are phrased: e.g. a survey on Captial Punishment may ask:
"Do you agree that it is OK to mistakenly execute an innocent person?"
alternatively they could ask:
"Should serial killers remain a burden on the tax payer for the entirity of their natural lives?"
People also habitually exagerate and lie when responding to surveys, and I know professional pollsters should be able to weed this out but they have often failed. A survey on food habits asked people to keep a record of all ingredients used over a period of many weeks. To make the lives of the participants easier, if a ready prepared meal was eaten then they could just keep the packaging. The survey found that the consumption of ready meals was much higher than any one ever thought...
Art is the mathematics of emotion
exactly the point, it took sometime for people to become skeptical about their governments, now we are crossing the other mark where people become skeptical about their "news outlets" and what overlords they serve. Before you know it people who admit their source of information comes from the traditional media, something that will immediately show up anyway in their regurgitation of the official propaganda line (eg. talk to an american about the israeli/palestinian issue and then talk to a european, notice the vast difference in reality perception), would be derided upon and ignored or marginalized.
This is a great thing but I'm expecting propaganda to fight back in the new medium of information dissemination, first by trying to control it, and then by trying to dominate on its indexing and resources...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
When the first vote came up to congress on 13-Feb-2008, the only thing covered on every news channel was the baseball steroids scandal. There was no mention of the congressional debate or vote.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/151-Wag-The-Dog.html
When the revised bill came up to congress on 14-March-2008, it was not covered by the mass media. Instead, they repeatedly covered a "captured Al Qaeda leader"... who isn't a leader, wasn't captured recently, and isn't even missed by Al Qaeda.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/164-No-Respect.html
If more people knew about the domestic spying bill, more people would be mad. And if more people knew about the government's manipulation of the mass media, more people would be furious.
He basically says that Time lied . Yep. So, in other words most Americans care about the Bush administration's illegal wiretaps and Time is making up data to support an opposite conclusion.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I wonder how many Americans actually know that the CIA has absolutely no legal jurisdiction to spy on the American people. In order for it to spy on the American people, it has to break a whole host of laws.
The FBI, one of the most thuggish law enforcement agencies in the United States, however, has quite a lot of ability to spy on you.
The truth is, the people likely to be spying on you, are the people who should scare you because they are law enforcement, not spooks.
I love the shock on others' faces when they say "I have nothing to hide," and I respond, there is no innocence in the sight of an evil man with power. This is especially amusing when I point it out to other Christians, generally who support Bush and "strong-on-this-or-that" policies. There is nothing worse than an evil man with unchecked power because when his attention turns to you, he will, by nature, try to turn every good you have done into an evil thing in order to enjoy his power.
I think if he were to come up with something today, it would be more along the lines of
"Because people inevitable fail to learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat it endlessly."
First, RTFA. The summary picks the least useful poll in the entire article as its example of the otherwise very strong support the article gives for the author's position.
Reading the popular media, you might get the impression that the people don't care that our government is at war with our country. But then, that may just be the media pushing its preference for a stable tapestry on which to paint transient images of sex scandals. Those people who supposedly don't care have also been giving tens of millions of dollars a month, in individual amounts betraying the fact that they are not members of the ruling class and in numbers demonstrating an extraordinarily broad base, to one presidential candidate who does not represent business as usual.
If you look to establishment journalism for serious critique of the establishment, should you really be surprised if what you find is not truth, but spurious defense?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I actually had a similar confersation with my mom last night. I was arguing that on the Internet nothing should be blocked/censored, even child porn. We should be setting an example for countries like China. I'm not saying that child porn should be legal, downloaders and uploaders still need to be prosecuted, but to treat everyone like a criminal and just block access is, in itself, criminal.
She would not agree and even went so far as to say that all porn should be filtered on the Internet. She was of the impression that filtering content from the internet was for the greater good of society. She would not budge.
I got frustrated. She can not be the only person that thinks that way. If you believe that, then it is likely that you believe that spying on the public to catch "bad guys" is good as well. After all, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so go ahead".
Part of freedom is freedom to break the law. After you have broken the law, you should lose some of your freedoms, but until you do, you should be assumed to be as pure as an angel.
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The downside is that the Millenials don't really care. They're more amused than outraged. They think you can't change it, because the system is too far gone, too corrupt, whatever.
Also, it's not "cool" to be all that involved. It's okay to have an opinion that so-and-so is an idiot, but to get really pissed off, go to rallies, and be a real-life activist loses the cool-points you garnered as a laid-back, amusingly cynical do-nothing.
It's hard to be a concerned American right now. We're realizing that American's don't actually have an innate moral sense. The indifference to wiretapping is the least alarming of the current apathies. Wasn't torture wrong, just last week or so? What happened to that?
Now there are entire movie franchises (Saw, Hostel) where our best and brightest go to watch torture FOR AMUSEMENT. For you Jack Bauer fans (torturer par excellance) there is even a guide to Christian living written in the context of that show--Jack Baeur is Having a Bad Day, or something like that.
I have to explain to my kids why I won't rent them these movies, and how they have influenced military members serving at Abu Ghraib, etc. I miss the days when the "moral issue" consisted of explaining to your daughter why she shouldn't show her boobs to the world. Now our culture is to the point where we have to "have a dialog" about torture. Thank you, John Yoo.
Well, Barnum DID say "There's a sucker born every minute." I think he was being charitable.
Well! Thank goodness I'm not Martin Niemöller.
But just out of wondering... why hasn't anyone mentioned Godwin's law? I'd love to point out that it does not apply in this case, for the simple reason that government spying on its citizens was one of the characteristic marks of the Nazis. Oh, and so was propaganda.
And the soviets, too. (Hayak, Road to Serfdom).
And the British, and now the Americans (also Hayak, but forecast).
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Nobody cares until its their business being snooped.
So the lesson here is use an emotional metric. Ask them why they spent three hours on the phone with their mistress/lover discussing whether or not "this feels wrong", or, why they felt a need to buy a 50 count box of Preparation H at the Kroger on the corner of West and Spring the other day, or, why they felt a need to withdraw $1000 dollars from their checking account on a Friday night at around 11:53 P.M. and who was that woman standing next to them at the ATM on 5th and Pine?
Ask these kinds of questions, explaining that all the information came from readily available sources, and I guarantee you'll see some outrage.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Do you realize that you've just damned your argument?
So what you're saying is that "your generation" perceives the government as being the bad Big Brother. Ironically you don't seem to realize this meta point as you slide immediately from "haven't changed in fact" to "Its turned into".
No it hasn't; instead your negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it.
That is democracy. Such a discrepancy is almost surely a consequence of living in a republic and not in a totalitarian state that has brainwashed us to all have identical goals. I suspect you're experiencing Confirmation Bias and Selection Effect: surrounding yourself with like-minded people and restricting your reading to partisan sites.
I'll go one better. I have a poll--perhaps unscientific in that its participants were self-selected, but the sample size is orders of magnitude larger than all the other polls put together--that says Americans indeed do not give a rats patootie about domestic spying and if they do care, it's in support of it for the sake of security.
It's the 2004 election.
This is the same American people who still think that we found WMD in Iraq? Or that Sadaam orchestrated the 9/11 attacks?
It's not that the American people are stupid, as peoples go. It's that we're as vulnerable to fuzzy thinking and misinformation as anybody else.
The problem isn't that there is proof that the Executive branch has been spying on Americans -- at least if we're not counting the by now well documented fact of FBI use of national security letters; or the fact that NSA domestic surveillance program which supposedly was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks actually started the previous February. You also have to discount the now well documented fact that the NSA has a data mining program that tracks every number you dial, or are called from, and how long you talk. Let's stipulate for the moment that these sorts of things only concern the "tinfoil hat" crowd -- your open minded way of asserting people who disagree with you must be mentally deficient.
The problem is that "take our word for it" isn't a good enough answer in a constitutional system. It's certainly not the way our Constitution was written. We may or may not like this, depending on who is in power in each branch, but the Executive Branch's powers are supposed to be exercised with Congressional oversight. Even his war fighting powers -- or perhaps especially his war fighting powers.
Putting restraints on executive power isn't something done out of theoretical view of what unrestrained governments could hypothetically do. It's based on hard won,real world experience of what people with power do when nobody can restrain them. The outliers -- who may at times be admittedly a bit paranoid -- play an important role in our society. You may lose patience with them; and they may get attention at times for all the wrong reasons. But if they didn't get attention for the wrong reasons, they'd never get attention for the right one either, which is that nobody is supposed to have unlimited authority to decide for the American people what is in their best interest. Every decision, even if it is not of a nature that is publishable in the short term, is supposed to be subject to independent scrutiny.
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I find that I hit the same walls with family and friends about this issue as well. The problem is that nothing really bad has been done with the info yet. Historically it takes something really bad to wake an American from their Mc Donald's induced coma. Yes, I am American, but I am increasingly ashamed of the people living in my country that also refer to themselves as Americans. I truely believe that we are well on our way to a police state. It took about 4 years of planning and 2 of execution to for Hitler to sieze power, a few more to turn his country into a police state. the same goes for Stalin. All of them did it with the bullshit bravado of "national pride". Most people think I'm crazy, I imagine that this would also be the same contingent that believes sacrificing liberty for safety is something worth doing. When all they really give up is liberty; as safety is a relative term and can never be truely achieved in the way they preach. The only thing to do is to continue to talk to family and friends about this in the hopes that they see what is happening before it is "too late". I honestly think the tipping point has already been passed though, and we are screwed. I think the day is coming that all Americans are going to be faced with a tough decision, one that can only be made once you realize that the life we had no longer exists. I think protesting and questioning our government is important and everyone should take part, while we are still allowed. It will take something bad before people wake up, it will take their neighbors being arrested.
From the 40's until recently the United States was a booming country, everyone was getting richer, the standard of living was great and improving. The U.S. benefited greatly from the fact the rest of the world has been flattened by World War II. People tend to be generally happy with their government when they are prosperous. Look no further than today's Russia where people LOVE Putin because their income is skyrocketing partially thanks to the huge influx of oil and gas revenue, even though he is for all practical purposes a ruthless thug, and returning Russia to a one party state.
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
Widespread spying has an extremely corrosive effect on good government but most people don't realize that or are to indifferent to care. As with Nixon and Hoover it almost inevitably is used to find dirt on people. In the case of politicians that dirt is then used against them to make them vote the way the people who have the dirt on them want them to vote, or to drive them out of office. Spying is almost inevitably used to destroy Democracy, that is why its bad. In the case of vocal opponents and protesters its used to silence them and lock them up. Widespread spying is a great way to find little indiscretions like drug use, infidelity, sexual indiscretions and tax evasion.
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report). The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts. All politicians are especially closely monitored. It is quite possible some powerful people decided to destroy Spitzer because of his crusade against the thieves on Wall Street who have been quite obviously stealing this country in to poverty. You have to wonder if Spitzer had his money in a bank where the bankers decided to retaliate for his crusades against Wall Street.
@de_machina
Any infraction, real or perceived, will be used against him. Ask Don Siegelman, who was railroaded to prison on trumped-up charges and is being denied an appeal because his case hasn't been transcribed (for a year).
You think they replaced all those US Attorneys for nothing?