Majority of Americans Say NSA Phone Tracking Is OK To Fight Terrorism

An anonymous reader writes "While the tech media has gone wild the past few days with the reports of the NSA tracking Verizon cell usage and creating the PRISM system to peer into our online lives, a new study by Pew Research suggests that most U.S. citizens think it's okay. 62 percent of Americans say losing some personal privacy is acceptable as long as its used to fight terrorism, and 56 percent are okay with the NSA tracking phone calls. Online tracking is fair less popular however, with only 45 percent approving of the practice. The data also shows that the youth are far more opposed to curtailing privacy to fight terror, which could mean trouble for politicians planning to continue these programs in the coming years."

Comments

Well played, Slashdot

[benjfowler]

Click bait for the countless 14-yo libertarians who infest these boards.

And who be just OUTRAGED, that somebody dared to point out that the government is the collective will of the people, and may actually have our interests and safety as their core mission (as opposed to merely making a handful of rich people richer?)

Now having made this comment, I'm sure I'll be modded down into a smoking crater. But I suppose there's a little pride to be had in being reviled and hated by idiots.

Re:Bull Shit!

[cold fjord]

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
-- philosopher George Carlin

Two things: First, George Carlin was not a philosopher, but rather a profane leftist comedian,. Second, much of the disparity of views between the typical Slashdot poster and the American public can be found in the simple fact that a significant percentage of active posters on Slashdot have more extreme political views tending towards the fringe than the American public. Some of that is due to the fact that many of the posters aren't Americans and they are indifferent to, or even applaud actions that actually damage the United States. A previous example of the result of this is the strong support on Slashdot for the document theft by Manning and the publishing by Wikileaks of over 100,000 stolen classified US government documents. As a result, over the last couple of days it has been popular to depict Snowden as a hero and bashing dissent from that view. It has also been popular to depict the entire US government based in Washington as traitors that need to be punished by execution or removed en mass. Needless to say, these are distinctly minority views among the American public. So in this case the issue isn't the stupidity of the American people as a whole so much as the tendency of the population of Slashdot towards the what would be the political fringe in the United States. It would be interesting to learn exactly which countries people on Slashdot think the general population would welcome a massive theft of government documents from the security agencies, or the unauthorized disclosure of intelligence programs after the individual performing the theft and disclosure fled to a nation which is an ideological opponent. Would Britons welcome it? Russians? French? German? Spanish? I doubt it. And yet it would likely always be cheered on Slashdot.