Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Isn't There More Public Outrage About NSA Revelations?
Nerval's Lobster writes "This morning we discussed news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has siphoned up millions of online address books and contact lists. The Post drew its information from top-secret documents provided by government whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spent the summer feeding information about the NSA to a variety of news outlets. Snowden's documents (as outlined in The Guardian, Spiegel Online and other venues) have detailed a massive NSA program that's siphoning all sorts of personal information from a variety of sources — and yet the public seems to have greeted each new revelation with weakening outrage. Whereas the initial news reports about NSA splying in June kicked off a firestorm of controversy and discussion (aggravated by the drama of Snowden seeking asylum in pretty much any country that would have him), the unveiling of the NSA's Great Contact-List Caper has ranked below the news stories such as the government shutdown, negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, and invites for Apple's upcoming iPad event on aggregators such as Google News; it also didn't make much of a blip on Twitter and other online forums. There's the very real possibility that Americans, despite the assurances of government officials, are being monitored in a way that potentially violates their privacy. Surely that's an issue that concerns a great many individuals; and yet, as time goes by, it seems as if people are choosing to focus on other things. Are we suffering from 'surveillance fatigue?'"
..we've all suspected it was true a long time ago. Honestly I think the bigger surprise was that the surveillance wasn't worse. There have been people who've sworn for years that every time you lick a stamp the Post Office sequences your DNA....
ICANN and ARIN are kicking the US off.
That's not fatigue.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Barack Obama is President. George Bush once was President. That is all the explanation you need.
I can't speak for Boomers or Millenials, but for Gen Xers it's because even in the rare circumstance where we care, we can't be bothered to do more than gripe about it.
My guess for Millenials is that their attitude toward authority is to simply ignore authority. So why get worked up about it?
There's the very real possibility that Americans, despite the assurances of government officials, are being monitored in a way that potentially violates their privacy.
What? Possibility? Potentially? Without a single doubt, the mere collection of this information does that.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
People would care but... hey! Did you hear what Miley did?
Seriously, it's too abstract and invisible. Being online and virtual, you don't SEE that your mail was steamed open and re-sealed. You don't SEE that someone watches where you go. You don't SEE that someone is standing there listening to your phone call to your wife.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Because Americans are stupid and only care about movie stars, pop culture, facion, and their stupid overpiced cell phones.
Slashdot is packed with mentally unstable conspiracy theorists who insist that the US is worse than Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, and North Korea all rolled into one. Compared to that level of white hot hatred, most Americans will seem pretty passive over the NSA thing.
That doesn't mean they don't care though. Wait for the next campaign season, and I'll bet privacy will be a big issue. Not as big as the economy, but up there with abortion and gay marriage. A bill restraining the NSA failed by a pretty slim margin in the wake of the revelations this year. If just a dozen or so seats flip on the privacy issue, we can solve this problem.
Or we can sit around screaming for bloody, nation-destroying revolution. I know that seems to be the popular choice on this site.
The US Government / NSA spies on its citizens. They collect a tremendous amount of data and use it in ways which could easily be described as "nefarious." The NSA also spies on foreign officials and citizens, too -- surprise! They collect this data and use it to...what...sell girl scout cookies?!??
People who don't already this are in a serious state of denial or simply aren't paying attention.
Perhaps, collectively, we may be in a state of burn-out on the issue though. With news aggregators posting NSA stories once or twice a day in an obvious attempt for page views, it's tough to discern who the real whore is here...
Beware of the Leopard.
Not at all. I think we've just all come to the realization that there's not a damn thing we can do about it. The people who are supposed to be looking out for us are acting like petulant teenagers. The "hope and change" guy hasn't done anything but make the problem worse. The guys in charge of the whole thing just lie about it and nothing is done. What's the answer, other than ignore the new revelations?
Speaking as one person at a full time job that regularly requires in excess of 60 hours a week, and as a friend to others who work 2 crappy minimum wage jobs at similar hours, it seems like a lot of people these days work themselves to the point where they're just too tired to rabble-rouse politically.
Lagito ergo expectabo
I was wondering about the lack of concern and so I started asking friends and family about their views on the NSA scandal. None of my non-techie friends/family had heard of it. The local news doesn't carry it, many main stream outlets don't pay it more than a passing mention and they don't visit tech websites, so they were all in the dark about the issue. The fact of the matter is that unless you're a tech-minded person you probably either do not know about the NSA controversy or you don't understand the implications.
Instead of saying NSA , say China, or Russia, then watch the yelling start
Oh and it seems as long as you can keep your gun to shoot people everything else can be ignored
It is widely accepted that the people of the US are unable to consume more than two or three news stories at a time. At the moment, at least one or two of those slots are actively occupied by celebrity fluff crap. And what we have in attention limits is completely overshadowed by the lack of comprehension of what is going on in any of these issues and what they actually mean. Issues such as religious and racial tensions not only in the US, but around the world are tuned out while we keep chanting to ourselves "I'm not racist! I'm good! I have a black friend!! See?" And we're being swallowed up by our own debt -- debt largely caused by excessive defense spending... worse, untraceable defense spending as stories of missing millions, billiions and maybe even trillions have been told and few people acknowledge as relevant. And we're seriously nearing the end of the US's relevance in the world as China and other nations are very interested in forcing the US out of the center of the world's influence. We've burned every bridge possible with the NSA unbelievably huge global surveillance and the US government's even larger hubris.
We're on the edge of something extremely bad.
And did you catch the latest celebrity twerk video?! OMG!
With the internet to remind me of everything else I should be violently outraged about (global warming, abortion, Kony, Miley Cyrus twerking), it's hard to fit time in to be outraged about this.
I think maybe I can pencil it in for Thursday at 3am. Does that work for you?
I suspect that the real reason why people aren't outraged is because we've been groomed to accept a lack of privacy for years. We have companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to thank for that.
I personally am ambivalent. I'm 'spy'd on' by my employer here in the US. I had to submit to a background checks that went back to high school to get a job. And in general, the leaks haven't revealed anyone "harmed" (yes, I'll be modded to negative 1000 for saying that but ...).
For 'why' my sense is that there're a lot of 'me's ' around who say:
- I have nothing to hide
- warfare has changed - the rules that the genius Jefferson wrote 250 years ago didn't consider asymmetrical terrorism or email
- spying on us citizens to date has been a conceptual issue - the spying hasn't led to some other wrong
...has got us a wee bit distracted? I mean, the good news is that after our currency tanks, the NSA won't be able to afford their spy center in Utah and their $60 billion budget, but the bad news is that we'll all be eating grass. So it's a bit hard to get exercised over something as trivial as whether somebody in Utah is reading our email.
Seriously. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. People are freely sharing information about themselves than the NSA is collecting. People like you are running around getting upset over some phone numbers while most people are posting pictures of themselves stupid drunk, committing crimes, and telling offensive jokes in public forums, not to mention publicly demonstrating how stupid they actually are.
Why aren't people upset? Because what the NSA is doing doesn't even begin to compare to what people are doing on their own.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
To tell everyone what to think yet.
I have TV and Video games that need watching/playing. Stop bumming me out.
People aren't outraged because all the rhetoric criticizing the surveillance programs was overblown. There are certainly plenty of things to be concerned about, sure. But just go read some news coverage from the time of the leaks and have a look at all the hyperbole and fear mongering. It was ridiculous.
If we want people to have a serious discussion about surveillance, then we need less fear mongering and more actionable activism. We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.
Instead of doing that, we just went on rants about how right we were the whole time and how evil it all is. We vomited vague, nonspecific emotion over the issue instead of proposing tangible solutions people could actually act on.
So yeah, no wonder everyone's suffering from "surveillance fatigue." I am too. And I actually care about the issue.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The media is full of GOP shutdown coverage. How people break on GOP shutdown issue is almost completely different than how people break on NSA spying. The people mad about GOP shutdown don't seem to be talking about the NSA while expressing shutdown anger.
are asleep.
Why isn't there more outrage over revelations about Google and Facebook (among others) gathering petabytes of information tracking users *by name* (not just aggregates) across a bewildering variety of electronic platforms (including sensor networks that most of us have never heard of) and using that information for commercial advantage? Isn't that a bit creepy?
Mostly silence here.
Let's face it, almost no one in the US cares about it. Personally, I've been out of work since feb '13, came home to a $23,900 BS bill from the ex GF, and was assaulted by my ignorant neighbor... now he's in jail. I really don't have time in my shit hole of a life to even think about the NSA. We all know they are the enemy, we all know they are spying on everything (even this), and that personal freedom and privacy doesn't, and hasn't existed in the USA for a long time. And we all know that with technology, it just gets worse.
This country is horrible, it sucks, and the only people who live here are either rich pricks, poor ignorant folk, or fence jumpers from the south.
All-in-all, I really REALLY miss the freedoms and privacy I had in Germany, the US just sucks! -Thats why. And no, not trolling.
And your records will haunt you.
My in-laws are in the camp that their lives aren't interesting so if some guy in the US wants to read my sis-in-law's text messages, who cares... Or find out what brand of tampons she buys... She figures it's better to be safe from "terrists" and lose a bit of insignificant privacy than the alternative... I'm a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid freak, to them, because I refuse to have a passport...
And now the world is mostly distracted by the shutdown.
I don't think it's because people don't care as such. Maybe some don't see it as a problem because they think such widespread spying is actually beneficial for the country. I would bet though the majority of people are just apathetic at this point. People have seen what happens when you fight the system - your life is destroyed. This idea of David vs Goliath is a great Bible story but doesn't have much basis in real life. In real life the bad guys win far, far too often.
Most people see challenging the system as a hopeless endevour because they don't have any power, and there's not enough capability to get others to agree with them en mass in such a way as to be a genuine threat to the powers that be. Even then, running spying programs in secret is still quite possible, and since it's blessed by the Government, who's capable of stopping them? So apathy runs the game and people just accept that this is how it is?
People have enough daily stresses on their mind to worry and be concerned about something that they are unable to stop. I've read glib statements from people suggesting that other countries are probably doing the same in their own countries, so bashing the US for doing it is hypocritical. Maybe, although just because it's pervasive doesn't make it immune from criticism. But it does seem to make it accepted.
Honestly, this is a topic that's garnered some of the most feverant talk on Internet forums and tech sites for a very long time. But at this point unless the people at the top feel that there's a genuine threat to their own lives or power, they'll never change.
is an authoritarian piece of shit who gets off on the idea of people abusing power as long as it doesn't affect them personally?
A new new deal would require massive demonstrations and/or riots at the local, state and federal levels. Writing to your congressman or voting is a farce. Has a rising tide lifted all boats? What about that peace dividend we were promised? Besides addressing income inequality, employment, education, social svs, taxes, prisons, electoral college, gerrymandering, lobbying, central banking and the military industrial complex we need a break on the two party system. A third party won't have success unless all the rascals are thrown out of office. All have betrayed our trust. We need a fairer system and a govt that's actually representative of the people. Creators need to start being rewarded...not the parasites. We also need a review of ALL laws on the books...if it hasn't made life better roll it back. Making pot, nunchakus and 1m other items criminal is a joke.
Withdrawing in disgust is easily confused with apathy. It's been beaten into the American public's head that nothing they say or do will change anything - no amount of outrage changes anything. I don't know many people who thought bailing out the crooks that ruined the economy was a good idea, lots of people tried to stop it - yet it went through nonetheless. When we do speak up - such as Occupy - we get tazed, maced and worse... and still, nothing changes. Does anyone honestly think there is anything at all that will stop the NSA from doing what they're doing? Even if them doing so is akin to a big sick bird, they'll still do it - and just go back to lying to everyone who asks if they've stopped.
It seems like it will take a total and complete collapse before we can rebuild on the ruins of this once great republic. Until that happens, I'm withdrawing in disgust and painting racing stripes on my hand-basket. Hopefully it will make the ride to hell go faster.
Compare the outrage after the Newtown incident. It got a TON of press, lots of people saying we should do something, and then like lots of "hey look there's a problem that requires some serious discussion" issues, the media got bored dropped it.
Contrast that with how quickly the missing death benefits for solders who gave their life for the country got fixed after it was reported. Same deal, it's something that requires lots of discussion and debate that people just stop caring about.
Sadly there's wayyyyy to many other things to occupy most of our minds these days so we stop caring. and once the media stops talking about it, very very few people will think about it again let alone care/try to do something.
They's a bunch of commies across the Pacific whore hackin our computers n such and youse is worried 'cause da Gov't is lookin at yer emails? Wese have gotta keep 'em commies in check. Da FBI 'n CIA 'n such r ther to protect r intrests an we gotta let 'em do ther job. Dats why we have 'em - 't pertect us, ya dummies!
*** Don't be dull.***
Things the "general populace" cares about, from a record of history: Mass murder? Nope. Police state? Nyet. Dictatorship: Maybe eventually, kinda. Forced Conscription and military service: Nada. Pointless war with another country: Often supported to one degree or another. Not getting paid: Revolution time.
That's about it, most people are content to sit their and grumble a bit if they care at all, unless they're not getting paid, which is when people snap. So that's why.
So they are spying, Its the NSA and probably several other acronyms. Nothing I do on the net is illegal. If they want to see what I ordered from Amazon more power to them. I'm not concerned with them having who I call. So I call my partner. my kids, my parents. my friends. Mostly we text, I'm sure they monitor text's too. Again, If they want to know I need to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home more power to them. There is just far to much data to be truly useful. I guess if your up to no good you have to worry but for the average person i suspect they just don't care.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
That's how long it took between stories with NSA in the headlines today.
Two words: Government shutdown.
And while that -is- the answer, there's a deeper meaning here. NSA spying is yesterday's news. People only care about today's news, and they only care about it for as long as it remains news. As soon as the shutdown is yesterday's news, we'll get angry about something else. Our nation's vane hubris keeps our minds tied to the present, leading our general populace to share little concern for the past.
What the NSA is doing is terrible, but the raping of our nation's economy by private financial interests is still far worse. Even more atrocious was starting a war with a foreign nation on false pretenses. But that's all behind us now. Let's get out there and raise our Don't Tread on Me flags against ObamaCare; we live in a democracy, and dammit, if we don't raise up our voice for what's wrong, we're not doing our patriotic duty.
(And if you don't understand the irony of that last sentence, then please don't leave a comment.)
Flame away...but...
As much as the conspiracy theorists and paranoid schizos like to rant about how terrible this all supposedly is...there's been no examples of any of it being abused.
Even after all the ranting and raving, show me one example of someone being dragged off in a black van with a bag over their head or a single instance where all of this supposedly US persons collected information has been used to blackmail someone or some other abuse?
Hell, I'm sure there would be enough data to pretty much arrest everyone on some sort of illegal charge if things were being abused the way everyone seems to claim, but I haven't seen any examples of it yet...and neither has anyone else.
Which is why nobody cares.
Besides, we already give everything to Facebook and Google...who cares if the government has it as well.
At least we can vote on policy reform if they get to crazy with it.
The TV still works, the computer still works, McDonald's still serves swill, and the boss is still harping for more work to be done.
As long as day-to-day life isn't affected, the average consumer cares far more about Miley Cyrus twerking than they do about oppressive surveillance.
Hell, how long has the TSA been invasively harassing people for the sake of security, and they put up with that, so why not put up with something that has no obvious impact on life?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
All governments know that the best way to roll out an oppressive measure is to talk about it endlessly as "purely hypothetical", purchase support (not necessarily with money, mind you; soft political is more than sufficient in many cases) for it in popular media to condition people to accept it. Eventually, you slowly implement it, outright denying the most egregious parts of it and amorphously implying that this is how things will be from now on--or at least in the near future; times have changed and eventually this will be the new normal. Ostracize anyone complaining about it or pointing it out by attacking their character, ridiculing them, or really any kind of ad hominem that doesn't address the underlying points being made. The human tribal identity heuristics will eventually cause most normal people to associate dissent with lunacy. If the system of oppression in question, or revelation of its true nature, is embarrassing, you can use this to mark people opposed to it as destructive or unpatriotic. If you have an economic system and entertainment complex that pressures people away from putting in the time to organizing politically, through a combination of longer hours and the looming threat of unemployment, say, they're then unlikely to actually demand changes (the Occupy Wall Street model, whether you agree with its goals or not, does not represent a serious demand for changes. Rather, it embodies a sink on political frustration. You just tweak the direction the oppositional movement takes until they degrade themselves in the eyes of the public or tire themselves out--so much better than political attrition because they match their own energy reserves dithering rather than sapping yours). The news media can be another Occupy Wall Street: Joe H. Typical can get frustrated and scream at his TV and feel like he's doing something before drinking himself into docility and deciding that there isn't really anything sane he could do to show just how unacceptable whatever-it-is is. That's the press's job, after all. This is assuming Joe H. Typical still watches the news; I wouldn't put it past him to be reading several news sources not owned by the friendly neighborhood media oligopoly. Now the best thing about this entire political structure is it actually demands relatively little management; all you need to do is tip things far enough in your favor that the system becomes self-reinforcing. The intervention needed is minute compared with the leverage it provides.
I think the NSA revelations are were outrageous enough at just the right time that there's serious potential for change, but notice how effective the campaign of psychological warfare has been. The thing about institutions is they have a ton of political momentum; changing them quickly is hard and often dangerous. This is what today's NSA's powerful apologists understand. Americans distrust their government, of course, but I don't think they appreciate how carefully tuned the net political force is, both in the US and in other countries. If they did, they might be scared and not simply uneasy in some vague, inarticulate sense.
When it was President Bush you would get slandered and hammered for being against the wars. You'd be a pussy liberal faggot. Pro-terrorism. Against the troops. Disrespecting the 9/11 victims. And so on.... Now it's the same game. Disagree with Obama on gun control? Then you're a gun nut. An asshole. Anti-children.
I know that posts that slam both sides of the political spectrum equally tend to be looked on favorable by the mods here, but I'll say this...
If you're a guy, you need to grow a pair. Politics is not "nice", and never has been.
When it was President Bush you would get slandered and hammered for being against the wars. You'd be a pussy liberal faggot. Pro-terrorism. Against the troops. Disrespecting the 9/11 victims. And so on.
Remember Cindy Sheehan? Did the media hammer her for being against the wars? Warrantless wiretapping? Whistleblower's daily revelations to the NYTimes? What world are you remembering? The reason people are ambivalent about the NSA is because our independent media, is just a wing of the Democrat party. It has done everything possible to minimize the effects of all the numerous scandals of this administration. If a Republican were president you idiots would be marching in the streets.
We knew it all along. Why would we pretend to be outraged now?
Nobody is talking because they are afraid of being put on a list for later "bad luck."
Your right its now a mental disease to disagree with your authoritarian overlords. And people know it. And they have lives to live even in this shithole we now live in.
Calling it a shithole has 2 net effects. It makes everyone unhappy and gets you slandered and belittled and makes our lives harder.
No one is going to be saying we live in a shithole ruled over by shitlords. That we need to flush down the shitpipes.
I think it's easy to show that Julian Assange is a prima donna, but I hesitate to describe Edward Snowden as one. He isn't crying for more attention or more political power; he just wants to make sure he's safe from targeting of political adversaries. He hasn't offered a lot of commentary besides explaining his reasons. Whether he is or not, though, I don't think it matters all that much. What can be shown--and does matter--is that the media interested in maintaining the status quo wants to make the revelations about Edward Snowden. Turn it into identity politics and relatively few people will care about the underlying issues, then you can destroy Edward Snowden's credibility and cast the issue as irrelevant.
First off most people are stupid, second, most people who are really up in arms about this issue in particular are also snooty douches. Nobody likes snooty douches, not even the snooty douche.
The issue is that the citizenry have not really had their negative example yet. Not a big one.
Most of these laws and programs (the most objectionable ones) came into being post-911. The terrorists still exist and are active, so that's a tangible. The dangers of loss of privacy and omni-surveillance are still abstract and far-off to the average person. Therefore the apparent Risk/Reward tradeoff to curb the spying are still tilted towards the Risk of terrorism and the Reward of security.
Therefore it is easy to get caught up rationalizing the status quo. "I'm not the person the NSA is looking for", "I've got nothing to hide", "I'm sure the CIA has good screening programs for their staff", and so on. And, to tell the truth, there haven't been any foreign terror plots that were carried out on US soil post-911. Domestic yes, foreign no.
What the current generation have not had yet: J. Edgar Hoover. Richard Nixon. Joe McCarthy.
Which is to say, blatant abuse of power by insiders. Something so egregious and obvious that even their supporters cannot explain or justify. Yes it has happened but always as relatively small scale scandals. Easy to downplay or ignore by ordinary citizens.
It's like saying, "Insider at Phillip Morris reveals that cigarettes are really bad for you and the company knew it all along!"
p.
Had the headline been "Snowden reveals what button to push to make the NSA cease to exist" I would have gotten a lot more interested.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There is a problem with USA's bipartisan political system. Since both democrats and republicans politicians seem fine with NSA behavior, There Is No Alternative offered through elections.
When democracy fails, the only choice remaining is getting tired or start a revolution to refound democracy. But since you always know what you loose and never know what you gain, revolution will not occur until people have much more serious problem than being monitored.
Cattle will stand idly by queued up waiting to be slaughtered. Even after the cow in front is killed, they barely react.
1. People in the USA are too busy trying to make ends meet in a Darwinian economy to be properly concerned about gov't surveillance.
2. Everyone is free to become the enemy by exercising the First Amendment (i.e. convert to Islam) and that is why the NSA has to watch everyone.
Glenn Greenwald, journalist who helped break NSA surveillance story, leaves Guardian
The journalist who helped Edward Snowden uncover the secret program is leaving the British newspaper for an undisclosed ‘momentous new venture.’
Glenn Greenwald, 46, said the details of this "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity" with significant financial backing will be public soon. "My partnership with the Guardian has been extremely fruitful and fulfilling: I have high regard for the editors and journalists with whom I worked and am incredibly proud of what we achieved," Greenwald said.
Greenwald explained that choosing to leave was not easy but that he was offered an opportunity no journalist could turn down. Greenwald said he will build an "entire journalism unit from the ground up" by hiring writers and editors who share his journalistic values.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/glenn-greenwald-nsa-surveillance-journalist-leaves-guardian-article-1.1486668
No one gives a shit.
fear is generated by unexpected scary events. Expected scary events we get used to. 9/11 was a surprise. More people dying every year from car accidents is not. Nobody was really surprised our government was spying on us. I.E. No fear. No outrage
Wait a minute... there's an upcoming iPad event?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
As long as the government doesn't mess with Joe Sixpack's beer and NFL football he won't give a shit about rights.
When there are a new set of elections as we clobber the fuck out of the existing legislature and put in people who will fuckin' oversee the administration, and will fuckin' pay the bills they've said the will, and who won't fuckin' shut down the entire fuckin' federal government because they don't fuckin' like the laws they've already written and passed. All those fuckin' fucks will be fuckin' unemployed! Until then, we are just biding our time.
It's simple thiers 4 main categories;
1) Technology Inept (Users) Don't understand or care to understand, how/why this should affect them they just think its just data and shows nothing important.
2) Technology Able (Users) Understands the basics but think that you need massive protection to hide your data, They believe that this is the government with billions of dollars to gather all the data they need and nothing they could do will protect them.
3) Technology Adept (Users) Who know how data can be used but what to Help catch terrorists (hey this is what its for right?, I mean it hasn't been used for corporate espionage /sigh) So open data is fine by them.
4) Technology Adept (Users) Who know how is data can be abused and are already applying countermeasures but yell out at the top of your lungs, I protect my data by **** isnt a good way to stay protected.
Ignorance is Bliss.
Someone is logging my calls. So now they know I called the dentist. Then ordered a pizza. For most people, the government wouldn't even care about them. So, why should those people care?
Why - people have busy lives and think there are more important concerns. Carpools for the kids, what to cook for dinner, exercising to live longer, some big project at work, constant texts from work, friends, home ...
I only hope the NSA was sent home during the gvmt shutdown period. I contracted for NASA in the mid-1990s during the shutdown back then, everyone not on mission support was sent home. I really hope the NSA workers were sent home too.
Government has very little to do with most people. I barely deal with any government stuff for months at a time. Where I live, work and travel, I barely see police, much less any other government workers. Quarterly, I send checks to the state and IRS. That's about it besides driving around road contruction.
The government shutdown means I can't hike in a National Park or Forest - that's it. I'm still trading stocks, banks are open, grocery stores work. Everything else in my life is acting just like it always does. The NSA is still capturing all my internet traffic too.
afraid of it's own people - not being voted out, but who'll bring on the guilotines. The surveilance is to nip any attempt to organize against it in the bud before it can catch on. If it's just crazy joe down the street who disapears, no one lifts a finger or raises an eyebrow. But...give me 6 lines written by the purest of men, and I'll find something in there to hang him - most of us have many more than 6 lines for them to work with.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
...At least not an explicit one. I'd argue that this emboldens the government into thinking they can get away with it. The lack of outrage at their actions reinforces this belief. Americans have been sufficiently distracted by the many other calamities generated by their government. Fixing campaign finance and explicitly defining privacy rights would go a long way towards bringing America back from the extreme place it finds itself.
I think a lot of people are saying "Yeah, the government might be listening to my phone calls or reading my emails but so what. If it helps stop the bad guys, I am ok with that".
Others are saying "yeah I heard about the surveillance but there is nothing I can do about it so why bother caring".
Still others believed the promises of Obama when he said he would do something about this stuff (shut down gitmo, wind back the police state etc etc etc) but since he has been in office things have gotten worse, not better and now people have given up hoping that their politicians will do something about it.
Because the vocal minority is still just that, the vocal minority. When a given subject only ever gets coverage from one side by the media than it's easy to think that's the side that represents how the public feels. This has been a problem since at least the days of the earliest telephone polls for politics when conservatives were heavily favored by the polls. When the results came back against it was eventually determined that the only people who could afford telephones at the time were rich (and generally conservative).
You have to remember that just because you always hear a given view always getting coverage at the places or sites you frequent, it doesn't represent how the public feels. It only represents the view that is vocal and being picked up by the media you consume. The same types of questions were being asked about Occupy Wall Street when some people were absolutely baffled that the only change they caused was in local clean up costs.
For another example you need only look at the surprise that happened in California where the gay marriage amendment was voted down. Many people in the public at large (especially outside California) assumed it was a shoe in since most media only ever portrayed one side favorably. My examples listed above were just that examples, other examples exist in other ends of the political spectrum as well. I'm not taking positions, I'm just using them to illustrate the point of how the vocal minority can be over-represented.
It's a self reinforcing effect that can happen in any society over any given issue. All it takes is a given set of people to speak loudly about a subject at every opportunity. Since dissent and other viewpoints are suppressed or mod-bombed into oblivion it's easy to think everyone must hold the vocal view. When in reality all that happens is people quit commenting while support for the position of the vocal minority actually drops with the public at large. You can easily see examples of this here on Slashdot with subjects such as Snowden and Wikileaks.
As a teenager in the 1980's I would talk to my friends on the phone about the NSA, and we would say all the words we thought would trigger surveillance review of our call. "Bomb", "terrorism", "air plane", whatever we could think of. It was a bit of a joke at the time, but on reflection it reveals an interesting vein of thought at the time.
A few things have occurred to me since then. First, I expected them to be listening. The recent "revelations" were hardly new - in the days before the Internet, in town of less than three thousand people in very rural Canada, I knew about and expected to be under surveillance under the right conditions. The NSA has since been regularly published about in popular film, at least as far back as Sneakers (1992) and Mercury Rising (1998) and other films. I think people who care have known about it for a long time.
Second, I did not expect any serious negative ramifications from our phone calls. I suppose I presumed honourable and just people were on the other end of the line, whose interests likely aligned with my own or whose actions were limited by sensible restraints on civil liberties. I think in a sense the fact that people were listening comforted me, expecting that there were good people whose sense of duty would be upheld.
All to say, it is not surprising to me that people are not up in arms. Perhaps it is apathy. Or perhaps along the lines of the reasoning I had as a teenager. Maybe something in between.
In any case, as a matter of interest, the posting for the job of Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer at the NSA seems to have been taken down. I have not heard of anyone being posted to the position, or it being squelched because of e.g. a hiring freeze in the shutdown.
you do realize trying to make the story about the whistleblower is the first thing organizations like the nsa do, right?
Because it's a Brave New World.
Unless you have been sleeping for the last two decades or more, then you're probably aware of the real enemies that we as Americans have been dealing with. It is far from a perfect world and letting some asshole who used to spy on Americans spew top secret documents all over the world for our enemies to see via every #u%ing news agency he seems to be liberally in touch with really gets me pissed.
News agencies haven't got the intelligence enough to turn this stuff over to the authorities, instead they print it and take sides against agencies who may not be dealing tactfully with American freedom, but do have one hell of a tough job, hopefully preventing the kind of atrocities that we don't want to be dealing with. WTF??
This is the problem, partisanship. Both parties like spying. The two party system has your panies in so much of a bunch, it must be the fault of the opposing team.
Just remember that "If you do not make up your own mind, the world will make it for you."
I think this is a reflection of the silent majority already kind of recognizing that this is what they have always gotten paid to do. On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, much less an American Citizen, so the fact they they are collecting a LOT of shit that they probably shouldn't because the vacuum is a bit overpowered isn't really that big of a deal to most people, so long as they are doing a good job of getting rid of it once they find it. (whether they are or not may be an open question)
Long story short, it's not like anybody thought this wasn't happening. Now it's time for the bureaucracy to run it's course and self correct. Somebody at the top will get fired, "institutional protections" will be put in place, a couple politicians will grand-stand come election season, and it will more or less even out a new normal, approved by elected representatives. The system works.
Hopefully.
When life gives you "lemons"... Me from 2009: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html :-) :-) :-)" :-) ... [My] objective is analysts [eavesdropping on these words] being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings ... :-) as well as so Smari and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-)"
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them
Still, I guess most people just don't seem to be able to get this level of indirection yet.. Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable (see Kubler-Ross on grief) and make the most of it. If it wasn't the NSA tapping everything in the USA, it would be the UK and India and China and so on (who may well be doing it too). So if you accept the growth of the NSA or equivalent as inevitable, then what kind of place should it become?
As I say there: "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. ..."
That dovetails with my points here: ... There is a fundamental mismatch bet
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The metric used in the original article is not public outrage, but press outrage. The press is fickle, their attention wanders, and they are easily distracted by trivia. What counts is the public outrage, and I think there is plenty of that. It builds slow, and can simmer a long time, but there is plenty of it out there.
The left-wing media simply refuses to cover it, at all, as does the right-wing media.
They are both arms on the same monster.
You assholes have just been too busy looking for people to call "teabaggers."
unless you're willing to risk your life and liberty. But, congressional elections come in a year, so that's the time to make a difference and throw most of them out.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Honestly, the initial news reports were pretty inaccurate and the reactions overblown. Is it really a surprise that governments partake in spying, cyber exploitation, etc? It's been known for a long time, and its become the primary method of intelligence gathering. Why is that news? Everyone was so outraged that news agencies reported that the government is spying on its own citizens, but nobody actually had a solid grasp of what was actually being done - including those reporting the stories. NSA doesn't care about what you had for dinner last night, what you're posting on Slashdot, or anything else that you may be doing. Honestly - you aren't that important. Sure, NSA collects metadata of communications, and sure US citizens information may get collected at times accidentally. It's collateral damage, just like casualties during war. Is it intentional? No. The government isn't spying on it's citizens unless there is a strong suspicion, and even then it gets passed to the FBI. Unless you actually perform the work, you can't really have an understanding and appreciation for what goes in to vetting what these agencies do, and what a pain in the ass it actually is to do something unlawful. Are there mistakes? Sure. Thats life, it happens everywhere.
What we should be questioning more is why do we consider it ok for companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Target, Amazon, LinkedIn gas stations, etc to request personal information and use that to flip a profit? We willingly hand over our personal information to these companies, who perform cloud analytics on that data, sell it to partners, include it targeted ads, etc, but because they are providing us with a service or convenience its ok. Why isn't there utter outrage over Google driving around collecting home WiFI data? Why has nobody boycotted them for collecting this information, and having the balls to challenge it with an appeal stating that your information isnt actual private? Why isn't there outrage over LinkedIn being called out for accessing members emails and pulling contacts (whats that? contact chaining?). These companies could provide a complete profile of you and your life a lot more quickly and effectively than a government agency. Another intersting story posted to Wired - http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/private-tracking-arms-race/#!
Think about it. What should you be more outraged by - these for-profit companies you willingly hand over your life and personal information to, or the NSA who actually has your best interest in mind and devotes itself in a not-for-profit manner to protecting its citizens from international threats. Chances are everyone would rather be doing something else, making a lot more money, than sitting around analyzing data and writing reports to protect a national full of people that aren't grateful for the service and take for granted the freedom they receive from it. They serve this country just like those in the military do, and they also provide critical support to our military.
Maybe we should all take our heads out of our asses.
Consider who owns the media and what most Americans get for "News" on a regular basis. The real issue with the lack of outrage is that people are distracted and intentionally uninformed. Those that work are working longer hours for less pay, and lack the energy to investigate or protest. Those on state welfare are constantly told that they are being threatened by anyone speaking against state welfare. These themes are not new, and nothing we are seeing is novel. All civilizations have had to restructure in time to remove the people abusing society from power.
I think what "may" be unique in the USA is that people live thinking constantly that "it can't happen here", but with abuse of power and the need for revolution. That will come in time as more people wake up. My favorite tool to wake people is to show The Allegory of the Cave and how it relates to them today. People get it pretty quickly believe it or not.
I am seeing a trend where more and more people are waking up. Politicians are not as free to play the games that they were 10 years ago without being noticed. People are questioning things like Syria, where just a dozen years ago nobody questioned Iraq. It's the start of the ride, and there is much more in store. In a way, I'm glad I get to see this evolution. While a bit frightening, how many people can claim to have lived through a revolution? My hope is that it's softly done, but there is no guarantee. Typically people in power fight pretty damn hard to maintain their monopoly on power.
Here are a few tidbits from history.
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
All of those belong to Hitler.
Now on to Marx, who states repeatedly that in order for Communism to succeed all media must be controlled, including Religion where the State allows it. But in lieu of the Communist Manifesto, Marx has a very interesting quote.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, ... a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
I think that one says a whole lot.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Wait for the next campaign season, and I'll bet privacy will be a big issue.
Are you serious?!
In 2016 we'll be back to the same old bullshit distraction issues and talking points: Gay marriage, "When does life begin? At conception?", Abortion, Spending on entitlement programs while NEVER mentioning Medicare and Social Security or Military spending, what constitutes an assault rifle and other gun control issues.
AND ... this privacy will be spun into who is fighting terrorism the most. Watch America! This was done to keep them evil Mooslims from blowing you up! And we will have candidates falling over themselves saying how much they''ll protect us and ""if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.""
In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
the origins of the 4th amendment are these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance
a writ of assistance is just as much of an abuse as what the NSA does
disgust with the writs of assistance was a genuine grievance and a genuine motivating factor in the founding of this country
so conceptually, the mandate of the NSA is a direct contradiction to a foundational concept of the usa
the difference?
a writ of assistance involves some rude assholes barging into your life and your business and messing up your stuff
meanwhile, what the NSA does is secret, quiet, and unseen
the difference between something invisible and in your face is all the difference in the world, even if it is the same abuse
but eventually, the negative effects will accumulate
extremely vile and unpleasant abuses will occur as the power of the NSA grows. selling information about a candidate or government official for blackmail purposes for example. that judge making that important decision on that coal power plant? blackmail him. that candidate that might spring the balance of power democratic or republican? blackmail him
with 100% certainty this abuse will happen, if it is not happening already. power and corruption and secret dealings: can't be helped, it's inevitable. only transparency prevents corruption, and the NSA is opaque by design, so corruption is a certainty
only then will the outcry reverse these growing NSA tentacles
the problem is, at that point, since they will know everything, will any resistance be effective enough?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a whole, Americans are not smart enough to understand. They don't understand what is going on, why it's going on or why they should care. Make a simple infographic that lays this all out in the simplest of forms. Point out what they can do about it and hope it goes viral. Americans are some of the most ingenious, creative and intelligent people when taken individually. But it's hard to focus a scared herd.
It's the economy, stupid.
Do you have any fucking clue how much it would cost to sequence DNA from that many stamps? Err...
I agree with you, we all suspected it was true a long time ago. I too am surprised it isn't worse.
Agreed 100%. Moreover, use of these sorts of weasel words that "journalists" love so much is part of the problem.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
The previous "firestorm of controversy and discussion" was the strange and unexplained phenomenon! The fact that US government has been violating the constitution and becoming more police-state like has been painfully obvious since 9/11/2001.
The discussion and outrage was back when things like the Patriot Act were passed. Or congress voted to give telcos retroactive immunity for their violations of laws and constitutional protections. Or when the NYT reported on the wide-spread warrant-less wire-taping. Or when the EFF filed a lawsuit in federal court about the NSA's widespread tapping of all US internet traffic, and got stopped on grounds of state secrets.
All those things, which happened several years ago, got fervent opposition by most intelligent folks here on /. and elsewhere. But the vast majority of the public and lawmakers went sheepishly along with those police-state programs, no questions asked. The fact that Snowden's leaks (that only served to provide further confirmation of what we all knew) had a big impact, is the one and only deviation from this pattern, and one that could never have been anticipated by anyone.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4296175&cid=45028863
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is so much you are ignoring beyond just spying, We are seeing things now that have never happened before. This country is not moving on the proper trajectory.
Because it's been overtaken by the current circus in Congress.
The economy generally pushes everything else out of the news.
The 4th Amendment of the US constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally, this can be taken to mean that the police cannot pull a random passer by aside and go wrist deep into your rectal cavity on the off chance you might have something illegal up there, as it is unreasonable. I think I will get no disagreement on that.
Now, the reason that the above example is an unreasonable search is that it is absurdly invasive and there is no warrant, and in that particular scenario, there is no way to easily verify that the police officer doing the search did not plant evidence (or basically lie about finding a quantity of drugs or contraband up there).
The above example might become reasonable if the authorities were to follow due process and had reasonable cause to believe that there is something deep inside the suspects rectal cavity.
I think most people get hung up on the idea that the only reasonable search is one that has a warrant.
If the authorities opt instead to data mine thousands of e-mails looking for evidence of random wrongdoing the assumption of many is going to be that it is an unreasonable search. But on what basis is it unreasonable? Lets say such a search of several thousand suspects the authorities identify a few potential suspects of legit crimes, and the authorities then prosecute them. The people that were not implicated in that search will probably never know they were under scrutiny, and they would be hard pressed to prove any actual harm from that search.
So why exactly is that kind of search unreasonable? I am not about to say that such a search is reasonable (at least not without a warrant to go looking for something specific), but the only argument against it is for an expectation of privacy. While such an argument is valid, I am not aware of any laws in the US that guarantee privacy from non invasive scrutiny.
END COMMUNICATION
People are scared of the mysterious boogeyman/bad guy we're told is out there and trying to get us. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't, but I think it's hard for the average person to feel this isn't helping protect them. They are too short sighted, perhaps, to see the long-term effect this may have where we become 1984 or Animal Farm.
There's actually quite a bit of public outrage over the NSA revelations, but the people who benefit from this spying are spending a lot of money to suppress the story in the media and to astroturf social networks to make it seem like all the reasonable people are perfectly OK with their own government spying on them.
If you think I'm wrong, start paying closer attention when the story about NSA spying comes up on websites and blogs. Read the comments about how you should "Stop being such a drama queen about it, because privacy is so 20th century" and notice the similarity in the form of these comments.
I'm not saying they're made by the same people or even by an organized campaign (not necessarily anyway), but I'm saying that a lot of the "opinion makers" are worried, and that's the real story here. They're worried enough to either decide just to not talk about it too much or save their own bacon by coming out in favor of NSA overreach. It goes something like this: "Yes, mistakes were made, but the issues are being addressed" or, "There's overreach, but at least we're safe" or "The people who have exposed this overreach are a bunch of attention whores" or, "Get over it, princess. Privacy is a thing of the past because you use Google". Don't ask me to explain the rationale of that last one. I guess somehow, if you decide to have a private transaction with a private party and you give them your name and phone number, I guess it means that it's OK to do a pen register on your phone or put your contacts list into some database of some private contractor working for the government (and working for other private companies).
People see what happens if you rock this boat too hard. People are tacitly aware of what can happen if a little birdy drops a word in someone's ear about you. There are names in the news of people that nobody really wants to mention too much, like Aaron Schwarz and that Rolling Stone journalist with the car accident or even just Glenn Greenwald's partner getting hassled in a UK airport. For 9 hours. Nobody needs that. Ain't nobody got time to fight a faceless contractor who works for a company without customers and without accountability who works for the Federal Government. Hell, I don't even have time to fight with my phone company, and I'm gonna take on who knows who?
If your credit rating goes bad, you could lose your job. If the FBI start talking to your neighbors, you could lose your apartment. If you're so much as questioned, it could change the way people look at you. In an environment where jobs are scarce and things uncertain, it's not hard to put enough fear into people that they'll just decide to keep their heads down and pay attention to their fantasy football league instead of expressing their outrage that now our government treats us all like the enemy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We just don't give a shit anymore. Moscow doesn't give a shit about you anymore either. Your grandmother's email is much juicier. You should try reading it. Do you know who your real grandfather is? Do you know what the milkman did with your mother on her 16th birthday?
We do. God, it's better than any reality show.
- The NSA
People don't care because the actual harm is too ill-defined and nebulous for people to relate to.
A politician that campaigns on fixing this will put 80% of the voters to sleep. A politician that promises to force cable companies to offer ala carte programming will win unanimously.
The bottom line is that the foaming at the mouth rage this induces in... some slashdot users... barely registers as a issue at all to the vast majority.
Yes, I am outraged, I am angry, and I share my feelings and my fears with others.
What else can I do?
Who cares about this? Justice For TRAYVON!!
You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that.
Conspiracy theorists' version: it's all part of the plan. Tank the economy so that citizens have to work their fingers to the bone just to survive and they'll be too busy and tired to care.
Who are you going to vote for for this to change? both Dems and Reps are in favor of spying on their own constituency, so it has become a fact of life. Setting up a new party that would implement something different is (a) too much work and (b) it wouldn't work anyway.
In addition this is not surprising, totally in line with what most Americans think of their own federal government (corrupt, inefficient, a sort of necessary evil and a complete circus). This will only drive people only further away from being bothered to vote next time around.
This is in fact very very bad, but ordinary citizen can only feel totally powerless against this.
Are we suffering from 'surveillance fatigue?
I don't think it's "surveillance fatigue", more like corruption apathy. Our government has become so openly corrupt that most people have become desensitized. I would bet that Obama could rape a twelve year old boy on national television and even though that's against the law and it would cause a shitstorm of outrage. He would have a press conference and say that he's following the well established Regan/Bush doctrine that "Presidents aren't subject to the law, Presidents ARE the law." and I would predict that nothing would happen and Obama would still be president a week later. OTOH if Obama cancelled next years Super Bowl I would wager 75% of the country would be matching on the White House the next day.
I think the results are clear.
1) The American people know the surveillance program is larger than they were led to believe. 63% believe the government was lying about what it was collecting and another 18% don't know.
2) They generally oppose it as it is run now but support it with more oversight particularly better court oversight.
Why would the new revelations change opinion?
It's just that a lot of that outrage is being focused on the design and implementation of new technology rather than on emotional expressions of outrage. That kind of outrage takes time because good crypto is hard to do and requires a lot of testing and peer review to get right. However, I am confident that one or two years from now, people who are interested in such things will be talking about how a critical mass of awareness about the greatest mass civil-rights violation in US history spawned the greatest burst in the development of communication and data privacy encryption products and protocols in human history.
Most will end like a frog in boiling water. Releasing the documents bit by bit don't let people absorb how bad the whole thing is. They got the first memory, and then all is more of the same, without analyzing what implies or what new thing had come to light.
Also had been a good media (and social networks) campaing downplaying it, it was just metadata, then was just snooping, then that others governments do something similar, and so on. By the time most of people know someone affected by this would be already too late.
Regarding the rest of the world, some of them are doing something to protect themselves (i.e. Brazil), some are partners in crime (i.e. UK), and others behave like minions (like some european countries).
Back before the Internet, the various spy agencies listened to phone traffic, radio traffic and the very few digital communications that were going on back then. It was even easier before 1984 because AT&T was the phone company, so you didn't even have to go to a million providers to get customer data. The thing that's different this time is that IP communications are easier to archive, search through and draw patterns from. So why isn't everyone all up in arms about this?
- There are quite a number of people who grew up during the Cold War era and lived under the constant background threat that the Soviet Union would have a bad day one morning and finally get around to wiping us out. I think those people understand that spying is a necessary evil in cases like this, and tend to give a pass to the NSA/CIA/??? on most things.
- I think a lot of people (myself included) had a notion that something like this was going on. How is it that, immediately after terrorist attacks, law enforcement seems to know exactly who was involved, where to find them, who their parents are, etc.? It's the ultimate open-source intelligence tool.
- Also, the standard geek answer -- everyone's just too stupid to understand, and all of us smart people need to rise up and fight the power.
That said, I actually don't get why so many people are making a huge deal out of this. Ironically, many of the same people making the most noise about this are in the Millenial generation -- whose entire lives are sometimes posted online for everyone to see. These same people also happily give all of their personal web search data to Google/Microsoft/Yahoo in exchange for free services. 30 years ago, no one would have thought twice about spy activity, given how important it was to protect nuclear weapons secrets and other vital information. Now, all of a sudden, it's a huge problem just because the data allows people to connect the dots faster.
The Internet is a public network -- always has been. Nothing you want to keep private should be put on it.
It's *outrage* fatigue. We live in a world with a "24 hour news cycle", which doesn't mean "news" in the old fashioned sense of painstaking shoe-leather journalism and fact checking, but quick and cheap shoot-from-the-hip opinion from hired gun pundits.
So trying to get people excited about government surveillance these days is like offering a joint to a man in an opium stupor.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ranging from overworked/consumed with their own lives, to what i think it actually is: despite all the rhetoric that you too could be a terrorist, the government is actually very careful here, and none of the people they know have been disappeared or brought up on bogus terrorism charges. So, you can run around screaming the sky is falling, but its just an abstract story to most people, sure the government could do XYZ, but for them, they dont.
Of course, all of the people running around with 'simple' fixes like use HTTPS! and GPG! make it seem like a far easier 'problem' to deal with than it really is.
For me personally, if they intercept everything, but only act on the very legitimate and even then valid warrants are required if they want to drag me in front of a court-- then I'm sorta all for intercepting everything.
The privacy activists have damaged their own mantra by insisting US spy agencies can't spy on other countries, which as soon as that is explained loses the support of your average person, as we all kinda sorta get that spies, spy.
We've all the institutional responses now. That's extremely interesting news.
Also, I'd imagine Greenwald, et al. released the simplest revelations early. At present, there are many shocking revelations remaining, but they're much too subtle for the public. Tor's effectiveness was already much too subtle.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It's just being done in person and not online.
Voters refuse to vote for policies; instead they treat elections like popularity contests. Faces change, policies remain the same, and government is broken because the people want broken government.
I support the troops and this also means the NSA who are doing America's and thus god's work.
You are a fucking asshole, do you know that?
There are a lot of people out there (some of my good friends included in this) who simply feel we're rapidly accelerating down a slope to a really bad place, and we've picked up too much speed to where you can say, "Oh, don't worry... We can still put on the brakes and slow this down gradually, until it comes to a peaceful stop."
Life in America *is* good by most standards, and it's great by selected others. But that's part of the reason for the apathy. It's tough to get people too worked up about loss of individual freedoms or rights, or an eventual economic collapse when right now, they're still enjoying what's clearly a "first world existence".
Problem is, the powers in charge know this too. As this continues, you'll see them juggle money and debt all around, doing whatever gymnastics it takes to ensure our poor still qualify for assistance programs, and to ensure everyone who serves in our military continues to get benefits and "special treatment" in various ways. They know a sure path to failure is angering the poor masses enough so they're motivated to riot, or to put a crimp in the supply of people willing to take orders to fight the "enemy" (whoever the govt. claims that happens to be at a given time), as part of the military.
The "literal crazy person" you refer to who advocates revolution (with mass murder and a long period of violence -- though decades is perhaps questionable) is quite possibly just a "long term thinker", who unlike the majority, is willing to give up a comfortable lifestyle if it means securing 200 more years of a fair, just political system and nation for future generations.
I'll be honest.... Despite all the problems I see looming on the horizon, I've been able to get by well enough for myself and for my family so I'm at least keeping my head barely above the waters of "middle class life". I'm not in any hurry to throw it all away for a life of hardship. But I also have a growing fear that time is running out to turn this thing around. I'm not sure my kids won't grow up cursing our whole generation, saying "Why didn't you fight this tyranny while you still could!?"
There's that saying about the 3 boxes used to change things; the soapbox, the ballot box and the ammo box. I'm on the virtual soapbox all the time, at least online, trying to talk sense into those who will listen about where we're going wrong and where we might be able to fix it. The ballot box feels pretty ineffective to me, as of late, with the corruption rampant throughout the political system. (What good is your vote if your only selections have the same fundamental flaws?) I *really* hope we don't have to crack open that ammo box.
most ppl dont really understand the relevance of NSAs actions and the consequences of loosing ones privacy.
Frankly.. No outrage because I don't care about them having information about me... *shrugs*
Recall how the upper and middle class faced a real risk of their young men been drafted?
The escape was eduction, faith or leaving the US vs death, been wounded or returning damaged in some other way.
They protested and changed the domestic optics to a point where the US mil had to rethink its many options.
The draft risk is lower and a lot more people feel the middle class is no longer in the 'war' mix.
So now the protesters are watched, tracked and infiltrated, turned before they can gain traction.
Its the same with the NSA, people are looking at code, academics, brands and trying to find the junk gov code.
So the public is outraged, just at every expression of their anger they confront sockpupptes, police, gov and agents provocateurs.
The public is quickly persuaded not to risk been seen protesting.
The USA is at the 1970 East Germany, 1975 South Africa moment, the power of the gov can still isolate you.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Just kidding. They might be dumb, but it's beside the point.
It's a failure of representation. Bringing the rule of law back to this country is hard and everyone in a position to do it is a public figure. They're usually wealthy; they often have contacts and conduct business overseas. I figure that it's two complementary reasons:
Being free to move about the globe as they please, they could give two shits what happens in a particular country.
Travelling and conducting business, along with being public figures, has put them under the thumb of the NSA already.
At least upgrade to grid thinking like over at politicalcompass.org.
Well maybe the reason people don't really act out about this type of stuff is because we have been poisoned for years with Fluoride so we don't act up. We have all been slow boiled to not get upset with this crap going on all the time.
Too many people want their reality TV and their gibsmedats. They're not fit to vote.
Organizations like the CIA. The NSA doesn't really do PR or propaganda, just SIGINT.
Look, if this had been Bush, Slashdot would've been running wall to wall posts about the NSA atrocities and Bush trying to implement American Imperialism... Code Pink would be out protesting left and right and the news cycle would've been locked onto it like yellow cake in Iraq.
But it's Obama in charge and, well... golly-gee-willickers why is nobody up in arms... that evil NSA is just gosh darn so uncontrollable.
I had somebody, here on Slashdot tell me that the executive office of the USA does NOT control the NSA or the CIA.
Really.
Nancy Pelosi swore that if Democrats would retake the house in 2006 that she'd repeal the Patriot Act (which would've rescinded most of these NSA powers).
They did.
Nancy Pelosi than swore that if only the Democrats could take the Senate in 2008 that they'd repeal the Patriot Act.
They did.
So you know what the Democrats did in control of all branches of government?
They made the Patriot Act permanent.
Golly-gee-whillickers... why are 'muricans so stupid?
the powers that be aren't going to let us go to war. It's bad for business. Take that one terrorist attack ages ago in India that was traced back to Pakistan. The Indian people called for blood, the corps said no (since real war cuts into their profits) and everyone backed down.
Oh, for sure you're going to see a lot of human misery for the sake of the super rich being super rich. But large scale wars that wipe out the pleebs aren't going to happen again.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You should all have those French coffee houses of the 18th and 19th century nearby so that you could leave at four and scuffle and argue about politics over multiple glasses of cheap red wine. At least one of the Founding Fathers should have had the audacity to add that to the US Constitution, namely Jefferson.
This country is on a perfect balistic trajectory, we had our up swing and are currenly plummeting back to earth.
Fluoride.
It's not a conspiracy theory, even Hitler used it for numbing down the masses. Do your own research.
Absolutely. And until the U.S. decides to actually win a few of these dopey little vanity wars they are so fond of, things will get even more dangerous
and oppressive. Of course we wouldn't want to make anybody mad at us. We can show what nice guys we are by letting the NSA crawl up our asses.
Fucking skeeved shit.
Most people I know (outside of the technology sector) don't quite understand what these news stories mean, and they figure it's probably some kind of partisan or outlier hype. And in any event, it's just another thing that seems like it might be wrong, but they trust the government, and they are resigned to the fact that they can't do anything about it in any event. Surely it will all blow over soon.
Since most people get their knowledge of the world from Hollywood movies which have portrayed pervasive government surveillance for many many years the reality is not much of a surprise for them. Most people are actually expecting it to be much more advanced. For reference see movies like Enemy of The State http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/
I suspect people are more surprised by the fact that you cannot infinitely zoom-in digital photographs like in CSI or easily track people with satellite based cameras in realtime. It is also interesting how these movies and CSI TV shows affect reality, for instance http://www.npr.org/2011/02/06/133497696/is-the-csi-effect-influencing-courtrooms
We voted in enough Tea Party congresspeople to shut down the government and cause a debt default. Goodbye, surveillance state.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."
Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."
Jan 2009: "We are going to shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare."
July 2009: "We will fight to the death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."
Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."
March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."
April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."
Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."
Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."
Feb 2012: "We are going to elect a candidate who will immediately revoke healthcare."
June 2012: "We will go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."
Aug 2012: "The American people will never re-elect you, because they don't want healthcare."
Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."
Nov 2012: "We can't believe you just got re-elected and that we can't repeal healthcare."
Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."
June 2013: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."
July 2013: "We're going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare."
Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare."
Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"
Outrage won't change anything for the better. National security trumps law in every country in the world.
When it comes to internet surveillance, it is up to us, the engineers, to come up with practical solutions that make such simple data collection impossible or at least harder. IPv6, end-to-end encryption, better certificate authorization schemes and open computing platforms for mobile devices should be within reach. Social networks, cloud services and hardware/firmware backdoors will be tougher nuts to crack.
Say what you want about Bush; the enormous increases in surveillance has come mostly on Obama's watch - and be honest, now, most of you KNOW that. But you voted for him, so what can you do?
EVERY Obama promise was false, most especially this one: “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009
Obama was the guy who corrupted the IRS, and deployed more armed guards around the Barry-cades than he ever did around the southern border. He's the President of Drones.
Don't bother modding me down; you all KNOW it's true. Even if you HATE admitting that you were had by styrofoam phony "Greek" columns and a smooth teleprompter delivery.
There is very little on this from the media, because there's a democrat in power. It's just that simple.
If a Republican were president, you'd be hearing about the NSA revelations every hour, on the hour...
This is exactly why it's such a terrible thing to have a wholly partisan press, because if the wrong person is in power at the right time nothing will be done and people will not be informed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Please stop calling it that - no one attacks the USA, so it's not a "defense".
Call it for what it is: "War spending" - murder, mayhem, disruption, destruction, chaos.
The largest export that the country has, is pure evil.
Thanks, guys.
And yes, we do hate you for "your freedoms", because "your freedom" to sow death and horror on those who oppose your dominion is a sickness.
You shall be cured, in good time, but one suspects it won't be very clean nor very funny.
Because they still don't understand the purpose of the NSA. Look at this and begin to understand what the government has become.
>independent media, is just a wing of the Democrat party
Translation into reality-ese: most people are moderates, including the press, and don't subuscribe to the far-right's views.
*zing*
Oh Man, I can't beleive this question is asked?! Narcicists! No one cares! Most are wrapped up on their own little world. And as long as that "Own little world" is not rattled they're ok with it all. And besides. If you're not doing anything wrong? What have you to hide? Sick, just plain sick! And some form of Freedom sapping tyrany is just around the corner as a result. Tyrany will worm it's way into this setup. How can it not?! No one's on guard!
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
And remember, because of Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 744 (1979), every United States citizen has no expectation of privacy when dealing with any business. They can grab as much metadata as they want because it isn't a 'search' although I believe it is definitely an unreasonable seizure of evidence from citizens.
Maybe we wouldn't be in this mess if the electoral college didn't exist since Bush lost the popular vote in 2000. Maybe we should have an upper limit on age when selecting anyone for a position in power since old people are easily swayed by scams. Maybe there should be a test to check basic intelligence since it seems there are people like representative Todd Akin that believes that women's bodies somehow block an unwanted pregnancy after being raped. Voting for the other guy to change things doesn't seem to work, he's just as bad as the last guy. Protest and petitioning seem completely ineffective. At what point does a government become irreparable.
People have a short list of priorities and in the USA thanks to the American Dream TM, that is making your car payments, mortgage payments and credit card payments. Someone who has a debit card, a bus pass and rents, can move jobs at a moments notice and only needs a small amount of money to do so. A home owner with two credit cards living on credit? Tied to his job, to his area.
So people might care about privacy or the environment but what they care about most is being able to make their debt payments next month. Long term planning? Hell, if they could plan long term, they would never have saddled themselves with all this debt. But they did and now they either pay each month or lose everything.
Chris Christie or whatever his name is is now being pushed forward as the moderate republican choice... he isn't moderate at all, just not totally insane compared to the tea party funny farm. The next president after this will be to the right of Obama since Americans are scared shitless that taxing the rich will rob those poor millionairs of their second sports car. That is if the country isn't going to bankrupt itself this week (unlikely but when you elect crazies (not just people with outlandish ideas but people who can easily be diagnosed with a mental illness) you can never be certain).
Remember that Romney almost made it in and that those republican voters who have some sensibility left insist we should forget about how crazy and evil Romney was because he lost so everything is alright... yeah. He lost, by a tiny margin. All this tells us the next crazy republican just needs to refrain from biting of babies heads in public to get in. That is a scary thought.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...but, what am I going to do about it? You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist. My "representatives" could not care less what I think about it. Elections are decided by a fraction of the eligible voters, and most are in the bag before they ever even get to the polls.
you sound like a loon, that's why hardly anyone protests.
How about public outrage *against* Snowden? What he did is absolutely traitorous based on every law we have in the US. I'm absolutely thrilled that we have these programs and am livid beyond belief that these were leaked by a traitorous spy -- an American citizen no less.
I work in a very similar field to him and I feel he's given my trade and industry a horrible name. When I was younger I was a bit of a grey hat and part of the computer underground. The "feds" were the evil enemy when I was still a green teenager script kiddie and phone phreak. Now that I've grown up and have lived abroad the past 6.5 years the most important thing that's provided has been perspective: America ain't the best at everything and is an empire in a state of decline. There are other countries and organizations which have far more intrusive surveillance of their own people and I believe it to be extremely beneficial to law enforcement (maintaining the peace), to keep tabs on corporate espionage, and to keep tabs on foreign governments, militaries, and their capabilities.
Snowden has done irreparable harm to my home country's surveillance capabilities and I hope that he's brought back to US and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
... and money is what drives the US government.
And, for many years, if you expressed public outrage against the establishment, the establishment branded you a "communist", later "unpatriotic", or in Snowden's case "criminal".
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
1. This is not news. Did anyone read "the puzzle palace" (1982!). What has happened lately is just a 'natural' continuation of what was going on then. And long before that, the UK government established the Post Office monopoly so they could read people's mail.
2. It is not that people are not outraged, most people SUPPORT THIS. They buy the asinine argument "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
Because nothing that was said is anything new? We all knew already for a long time that they were gathering information, it all started in the 50's..
You really must have been very naive and been living under a stone if you didn't know this...
Dear Nerval's Lobster, AKA shit-for-brains:
What part of "GET A FUCKING LIFE" do you NOT understand???
The ENTIRE NSA TOPIC IS BULLSHIT!!!!
BULLSHIT!!!!
It's a bunch of shitty losers in their mommy's basement trying to blame all of their first-world problems on government. Guess, what, the government can't do anything about your lack of a girlfriend, the high price of weed, or your shitty score on WoW, and you care about nothing else.
"Why isn't there more...?" Any time you have to ask why there isn't MORE stupid screaming about an issue, you have to face the fact that there has in fact been FAR TOO MUCH stupid screaming about an issue already.
It's solid stupid conspiratards wanking over meaningless bullshit they don't understand. Have YOU worked in government? Have YOU bothered to learn what actually goes on in the day to day business of it? Fuck, can YOU even name your representative, or draw a picture of your voting district, or tell me what even half the terms you scream about even mean??? Fuck no, you retarded piece of shit, because the NSA / Obama / PRISM / all government is nothing but a Loch Ness Monster and a Bogeyman and an Area 51 to you, something for you to shit random fucking noise out of your face sphincter and then tearfully wail that the whole wide world isn't sticking to your every world like you had anything important to say at all.
Die in a fire of cancer, please. KTHXBAI
It goes like this: "Hey, the NSA is spying everyone and people are getting mad about it. Oh, wait, they are getting mad because they spy USA citizens only. Well, fuck them."
.... are brainwashed. They are politically unaware of history, and hence most americans are some flavor of capitalist. Which means they're screwing themselves. The reason things got as good as they were, was because of revolutionaries (socialists, communists). If not for them FDR would not have had to do the new deal.
"Think about this: think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
Check out my novel.
The one thing that really surprises me is you haven't heard more from NRA type organisations. The one thing they are always shouting about as a reason for the right to bear arms is to defend themselves against their own Government and yet here is what could easily be perceived as an attack by the government on the people and not a word is heard.
Same goes for the Tea Party members who are supposedly against government interferrence and want smaller government yet I've not heard a word about something which could easily be used to influence policy and costs a fortune.
Both groups seem to be treating this as a seperate issue from their own agendas but just a little logical thinking shows it makes great arguments for their own positions.
Note: I'm in the UK, so maybe those groups are making those arguments and it's just not being reported over here.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
In such cases, I always find it strange that there are so many movies where "revealing the truth" is the final success. Off the top of my head, there's Soylent Green, Serenity, Pelican report. The thing is, people generally don't care unless they see the same thing repeated over and over in the news. Remember how many times the Fukushima nuclear disaster was shown in the news? Compare it to the appearances of the actual tsunami, and of NSA spying.
You can't stop the signal, but you can usually prevent people from caring about it.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I remember living in the USSR. It seemed that it would last for at least a thousand of years. Elections were won by 99% of votes, after all.
But if something is wrong, as it certainly was with the governance in the USSR, it will surface sooner or later. Even if at first people are scared and vote 99%.
I can see how the lack of outrage upsets the psychotics. Their egos depend on ginning up as much outrage as possible; the more outrage, the more important they feel.
Greenwald and his bum buddies screwed up the timing of the releases. They're trying to leak damaging material times to causes maximum chaos and damage. Unfortunately for them, Congress have knocked their capers off the front page, and unsurprisingly, they're feeling angry and butthurt.
The only thing that surprises me is that they actually got all of this to work. I have seen far less complex IT projects that failed miserably.
The best thing that can happen is that Obama says sorry to the public, and meanwhile the NSA registers the outraged as anti-USA. Come on... information is power, you don't really believe they will give up their bad practices, do you ?
Google and Microsoft are loosing contracts in Europe unless they can prove that NSA is not in their pants. That will take new laws
Seconded. In this time of high unemployment, most of us are just tired after working ever-increasingly long hours, and are just a little bit more than afraid of losing our jobs. I know that I should protest against this, but I have so many more pressing, more immediate and personal issues to deal with that this gets pushed to the bottom of my list of priorities. I think this is how other countries keep their citizens in line: work them hard enough so that they're just above surviving, so they can buy a few toys and trinkets, yet not allow them enough free time to stop and take stock of how their being oppressed.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
When was the last time you saw an interview with or a statement by Snowden?
I don't work in classified fields, but I've been generally aware that the capability of the US and UK to intercept communications is much greater than was generally known. Any engineer in the communications field inevitably finds this out one way or another and generally keeps his or her mouth shut about it. Snowden didn't reveal anything terribly surprising, he just provided more detail on how it was done.
Henry L Stimpson, the US Secretary of State between World War I and II, said in his autobiography that his attitude was "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail". As a result he shut down the Cipher Bureau, one of the predecessors of the NSA. His mind was only changed on the realisation on how invaluable the codebreaking and message intercepting efforts were to winning World War II.
The problem is that codebreaking and a day to day knowledge of the intentions of other countries and individuals is necessary, even knowledge of the intentions of some of your own citizens. But that that doesn't mean we have to like it. Placing limits on your nations intelligence gathering agency should try to gather is a silly idea. However, that doesn't mean that people should make it easy for them to gather information!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
People don't seem that outraged because of the enormity of what they have been faced with.
The size, scale, scope, and capability of the NSA domestic survellance programs literally surpass the wildest dreams of secret police organisations like the Stazi. Snowden's revelations have dropped an undeniable bombshell on the US public, which despite its best efforts to ignore, not even the mainstream media can completely hush up. American's now know that they are under 24/7/365 complete and total government survellance each and every time they go online. Everything they do is monitored, recorded, and kept on file for the rest of their lives.
It takes time for a human being to fully come to terms with something like this.
For American's, it will taken even longer. The idea of a free America is still a very powerful one. The idea that certain things don't happen in America is a founding principle of the nation, and the reason why so many millions chose to build a new life there. The idea that a secret police -- the most quintessential aspect of an oppressive state -- now exists in the US on a scale never before seen in human history is an idea in fundamental conflict with American's own national self-image. It would be easier to accept that the individual states never actually existed than to accept this.
But facts are stubborn things. Despite all efforts to smother it, this story is not going away, and American's are not going to be able to ignore it. This is too huge. The NSA and it's programs are a sledgehammer, slowly pounding at the very foundations of the US itself. No matter how asleep, how apathetic, how cynical, or how uniformed you are, eventually the punding is going to wake you up too.
May the Maths Be with you!
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/a-necessary-evil-what-it-takes-for-democracy-to-survive-surveillance/
"always make new mistakes" E.Dyson
They have tasted the Cool-Aid and they like it.
From now until the end of time every thing that you do on any public network, using any public software is tracked.
Your GPS location
Your e-mail
Your phone calls
Your online transactions.
Your Facebook friends
Everything.
NSA spying on people is like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon except it's 2 degrees and it's you and the rest of the world.
(If I knew how to make a tag line this would be it)
If they are following a member of Al-Qaida in the US and you come within 10 feet of him knowingly or not. Your phone will be tagged.
When Americans protest, they don't take to the streets. No, in the United States, they buy guns and lots and lots of ammunition.
and taking care of us. I feel safer knowing that the government is looking out for me. If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. Dissenters must be punished for the good of the community. What we really need is some of them there re-education camps for some of our wayward members who have lost their way.
It is much like cursing an omniscient god that get one of its daemons to strike you down at any moment. People don't like it at all; people know better than to become an enemy of god.
1. the Supreme Court ruled that transaction records are the property of the service provider, not the user
2. the patriot act made getting the actual emails and just about anything under the sun easier - therefore...
3. people should watch who they elect. the people made this happen by their choices.
Apathy. Collectively, so long as we have our bread and circuses, we don't really care.
Most people in the US rely on their local news, which doesn't report one bit about the NSA spying. I'm willing to bet the "world news" doesn't either.
My guess is the biggest problem is that there is a perception that there is little to nothing we can do about it. And given the lack of anything having been done so far that may be true.
Boston proved that the government is NOT concerned about foriegn terrorism. Its efforts are focused on domestic threats to its power.
The U.S. government was warned twice about the Boston Bomber but didn't put any effort to investigate. This went beyond what the electronic monitor should of picked up. This was a direct alert. We ignored it. We really don't care if a muslim jihadist bombs America. That's beneficial, they get to strengthen their power base.
We're concerned about the Tea Party, OWS, and the total terror to the government. The idea that those two might realize they're both fighting largely for the same thing. And that the Tea Party and OWS have more in common with each other than either has with the Repudemocraticans.
Do no wrong Obama is in office, that's the problem. Americans walk right into their governments ovens because he is black and it was time they had a black president. Oh and he's also a do no wrong democrat too. And he won the Nobel peace prize even before doing anything only to go on to drone bomb the crap out of people even other Americans . Yet he still has his Nobel peace prize and he's still their president. No impeachment let alone even any backlash from his supporters. Hitler could have learned a lot from the obamination.
Whistle blowers should take notes from Hitchcock and increase the tension as the time goes by. Release more shocking documents more often, not less, and in the final act unfortunately there needs to be a human sacrifice. That's how communism has fallen, how "Arab spring" kicked off, and where many of the most successful acts of civil disobedience have their roots. Let me just say I'm not advocating this as a viable solution to the issue at hand, but rather sharing my observations regarding political history of the world.
Sorry, I'm unloading as an AC in a nasty mood.
We don't care because "Nick Kolakowski" of "Slashdot's Business Intelligence staff" calls himself "Nerval's Lobster" to post articles. Because that extra layer of obfuscation fools 309% of the readers, which makes them happy. So no, Dice Holdings, we don't care about your article until you quit playing games with our news site.
The people who were outraged were rounded up and put on plane to Guantanamo Bay.
Reason One is that most technical folks already knew that this was possible, we've been discussing it for years and just laughing it off with "but there's too much data", which is still nominally true.
The second reason is that we're still waiting on the smoking gun. We've got some stuff that needs some real conversation, but mostly we've got potential for malfeasance with not a lot of evidence and a drip feed from the Guardian. Supposedly soon we're going to get some big shocking reveal, but whether it'll actually amount to anything who knows. We know they can spy on us, we know that they do spy on us with FISA warrants and we know they're probably not as careful as you might like about who they sweep up when they're tracking foreign entities. We don't have any evidence of widespread or systematic abuse, we don't even have any evidence of any specific instances of abuse. We don't even really know how much they're actually capable of getting and whether they can get it retrospectively. All this is worth having a conversation about, but it's not a smoking gun.
Mostly though, Greenwald and the Guardian has just been milking this damned thing for so long without anything really concrete that everyone's just sick to death of it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure whether Snowden ever even had any access to anything interesting at all and the fact that his political views are significantly right of centre isn't really helping his case any.
No, we're suffering from low information public.That is the ENTIRE problem with the U.S.
Cold beer, warm pizza and watchable TV. Public outrage is only genuinely piqued by a restriction in supply or enjoyment of at least two of the above commodities (or their provincial equivalent).
I think that a lot of Americans have deicded it's all gone too far, that the secret illegal courts, and illegal searches have all gone way too far, and turn about is fair play.
I REALLY don't understand why this is news ... this has been going on all along, Enemy of the State, a 1998 move, Gene Hackman's character says
"The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there. At least it'd better be."
While the movie is fiction (DUH people) I think this captures the true depth of what is really going on...
The Media has the ability to make just about anything an issue. In this case, the media really doesn't seem to overly care. They are busier whipping up a furor over other items.
Now granted, the media will start to embrace anything that drives the ratings up and is popular to report on with their viewers/readers, but as others have pointed out, people in general aren't pushing for it to be a big deal.
Besides, in our culture today we need someone to demonize. Who do you demonize here? There isn't any unpopular character to lay the blame on and drive into hiding. So it's a topic best left alone. Maybe if Bush was in office, it would be the headline every day.
Hey, this Cyrus thing is serious business. She was just the beginning of it. What if this spreads throughout entertainment?
Imagine the psychological devastation from John Goodman twerking.
Now, that foreign governments get bullied in line so they don't deviate from the US administration's wishes (e.g. w.r.t. Syria, NWO, whatever else), partly also due to NSA knowing a lot of personal secrets of the politicians there, that's another thing. However, that doesn't affect Joe Sixpack's daily live, so he won't care either (he may even appreciate the NSA's foreign spying).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
People are not acting up about being spied upon because most of us have known it was going on for quite some time.
Since this is a bipartisan efforts to erode our constitutional rights the news media who are so in love with big government does not put out too many stories of outrage over these unconstitutional activities. How about if we put it this way: They think that it's ok, it's only people over seas that they are spying on. So then therefore is it just OK if our partners in Europe start to spy on American's? Would we like if if Germany was watching our every move, and who is to say they are not. And in the end swap data with our partners on what's happening in your own country? Sure this is all connected and it's probably a NATO wide effort.
Paul E. Bahre
I don't think most of us know anymore what the real consequences were, are, or will be of constant snooping and surveillance. What can we tangibly be outraged about? It seems to me that the most parsimonious, and enduring, solution to this perpetual cat-and-mouse game of information-hiders and information-seekers, is to make EVERYTHING public. No one has an advantage if all things are made public AND (this is key), the information is freely accessible. And luckily, we are living in an age of very eager amateur communities of citizen activists, who are monitoring the branches of government, monitoring corporations, monitoring the environment, monitoring media outlets, in real time and in critical ways. These groups will only grow in value, and will fold in the perpetual co-snooping into their tasks, to make sure the NSA does not have any particular advantage over the rest of the world's population. The question of privacy, and how to protect, will become moot.
...people feel awkward laying responsibility where it is due.... In the White House.
Disagree?
It's simple. The news media isn't playing it up like they would had it been a Repub. (Bush for example) Why?
BHO is on their team. They voted for him.
What about promises of the most transparent administration. Disregarded,
If you blame BHO, it's racist. Therefore, it's OK to ignore blatant, illegal activity.
It's so pervasive that news media only use the term "The Administration" instead of "The Obama Adminstration."
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Fools....
Everyone here is saying it is.
The reason is, the United States is corrupt. And everyone that lives here is corrupt.
People *could* do SOMETHING about it, but we'd rather just enjoy all the cheap shit we can buy and all the smug self righteous outrage peddled to us from both political parties.
Our media is disgusting, our medical community is a profiteering murder machine, and our government is rotten to the core.
It's all bad, and frankly, I hope something horrible happens sometime soon, something awesome like 9/11, something to rally everyone together in delusional unity and fake purpose. What we need is another war. War, good. War = money.
Because America is populated by twinkie brained couch potatoes with fleeting attention spans.
Hmm, OK, I was only being half facetious, but I'll take it ;)
And the current administration has been masterful in changing the topic as soon as any single topic starts to attract any meaningful attention. In every instance they have successfully changed the conversation away from anything that demonstrates their level of corruption, ineptitude, or over-reach. They never address any of those questions in any meaningful manner other than obfuscation. The Commander-In-Chief lies to the American people when the truth would do. I remember being in High school and discussing the horrible propaganda coming out of the USSR, and feeling sorry for the populace in the USSR because their leaders weren't allowing them to see what was going on in the world outside of the USSR. Now, Americans have let what used to be a trusted information source transcend into just another part of the Political machine that is the US Government. There are still media voices of descent, but they are immediately labeled as unPatriotic, unAmerican, or civil terrorists. No make no mistake about it, we now enjoy the same propaganda machines in the USA that chilled us to our bones when used by those that wish us and our way of life ill. I haven't completely gone away for the main stream media outlets, but now I can't even watch a football game without someone deciding to make political commentary at half-time! And the people that pay Bob Costas' salary are guilty of providing the soapbox. He shouldn't have a job in sports broadcasting. If he wants to spout political rhetoric he needs to do so in another forum other than Sunday Night Football. And NBC should be boycotted by every American that believes that Sports broadcasting should be left to sports and not political rhetoric. With over half of the adult population receiving government handouts in some form, it will be all but impossible to get these politicians voted out of office, because how many people do you know that would vote against the very people that are providing them with a living income? When you add together the non-working entitlement consumers to the number of folks that work directly for the Federal Government, and are therefore totally dependent on the Government for their economic existence, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even political scientist to see that the workers of this country are in the minority.
You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that.
LOL! Well done.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Conspiracy theorists' version: it's all part of the plan. Tank the economy so that citizens have to work their fingers to the bone just to survive and they'll be too busy and tired to care.
I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but there are members of the Elite who think this way.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Previously attempted to blow up the World Trade Center using the McVey Method.
Previously attempt mass aircraft hijacking.
Taking flight training in the United States.
Now, here's a sample of FBI-CIA counterintelligence heads:
Rick Ames: Led CIA operations in Soviet counterintelligence. Betrayed country for money.
Robert Hanssen: Led FBI counterintelligence operations. Betrayed country for fun.
Sometimes I wonder whether our leaders have the right priorities.
"The previous budget did not prevent terrorism. We need more resources."
"Accountability has tied our hands. Don't ask what we do with the money."
When Americans found out that Johnson was lying about the war in Vietnam, the reaction was pretty much the same. He was deemed a traitor, just as Snowden is now. I swear that things like Friday Night Football, pro sports, college football etc, matter to people more than just about anything else in life. You'd never get 100,000 people out to support a cause on a regular basis but that happens in cities across the U.S. every week. Add to that Survivor/DWTS/Idol etc, and you've got the same drugged masses that we saw in 1984 or Brave New World, can't remember which. Then again, you have FOX news being the only source of information for millions of Americans, outright lying to them about everything. PBS Frontline told us all about the NSA back in 2011, including how it was scanning everything on the Internet, but how many people did more than switch the channel to something else? The blasé attitude allows things like this crazy government stoppage to happen. It's tough to watch from up here, that's for sure.
The American political system is so corrupted that the general public realizes that, despite all the feel good exceptionalist propaganda, there is absolutely nothing that they can do. They realize that they are powerless and that Empire cannot be cured and must be endured. Until, of course, like Sampson and the Temple, they utterly destroy the only known living planet.
I for one would like to fight back in whatever way possible that does not involve criminal activities, however, I see what happened with Occupy Wall Street and fear what would happen to me as a result of the US increasingly becoming a police state without due process.
I would imagine other share the same fear of threat to live, liberty and, well, justice is already gone.
Sure I can write the government to express my outrage, disbelief, or view on how they do things or my rights but those in political office are only interested in lining their pockets instead of standing up for us and anyone who thinks differently is lying to themselves.
Most Americans rationalize it this way, "Well, I haven't done anything wrong. How can their snooping harm me?" They don't realize that facts about them taken out of context can be used to harm then later, having forgotten the history of the McCarthy Era in the 1950's. People living under one regime can find themselves to be targets in a replacement regime when their efforts to serve get scrutinized in a changed context. I am predicting that many member of the Republican Party are nervous right now as the finger pointing will start. Lets construct the following hypothetical situation. What if it comes to light that members of the Tea Parties in the House of Representarives were really Chinese agents working to undermine the dollar as an international standard currency by causing a debt default and a run on U.S. Treasuries? They would be labeled as traitors and would be hunted down and imprisoned, if not worse. If NSA knew that you were on a Tea Party web site or mailing list, you might be looked at in an entirely different light. What the NSA does is ultimately bad for democratic institutions. It is caused by the government giving too many high security levels to information that does not need to be as secure. It is abuse of power.
It's not apathy, it's impotence. What can we do?
If Snowden had come ou during a Romney or McCain administration, the NSA abuse would be top headlines all the time. The major media would make sure that American citizens knew, and heard over and over again, about teh NSA under President (name your current Republican President) was horribly violating American's civil rights and privacy and it was the Worst Thing in the World.
Ditto the IRS abuses, which have disappeared from the news.
But since such activities now would splash on their darling Obama, whose water they continue to carry, they minimize the stories and shuffle them off to the back page as quickly as possible.
It's been observed that the American public will tolerate just about any political scheme so long as it does not obstruct traffic. I imagine this to be the case here. The NSA's spying, creepy as it may be, hasn't harmed anyone yet so nobody cares.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Why so much argument about "privacy," when clearly the real issue is life and death?
NSA information is used to kill -- and the U.S. government openly kills American citizens without giving them any chance to correct elementary mistakes -- and "signature" strikes kill people whose names the U.S. doesn't even know. It's not known if the U.S. kills Americans within the U.S. without any adversary process, but if the government ever wants to do wo, we're at most just a White House memo away.
And when Homeland Security ordered enough ammunition to kill every man, woman, and child in the country, and couldn't keep stonewalling when U.S. senators asked about that, Homeland Security said they placed the huge order to save money. How does it save money to buy so much, unless there is some possibility that you are going to use it? And much, maybe most, of the ammunition is expanding bullets that under international treaties the U.S. does not use in war; it can only be used domestically, mainly to kill Americans.
The entire social contract of modern society rests on the government not being allowed to just kill citizens for any reason or none, in secret, with no process whatever for the target to challenge the decision. Governments routinely go wrong, and citizens must resist.
We are on the verge of effectively throwing out the Magna Carta (the very concept of individual rights that can be asserted against the sovereign), and all that followed it, including the U.S. Constitution -- in a world where computers will soon make "better" decisions that any human intelligence agent could, on who should be killed next. Obama may keep his death list, but how could he know enough to "improve" it?
This is why privacy is important.
To quote Thomas Jefferson:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
I think we all know what it is going to take to fix. And, as upset as I am at our government, for that reason alone, I keep quite, until the time is right to rise up!
Peace! :)
There is a lot of outrage, the lickspittle media simply doesn't not cover it in order to protect their sacred cow of the Centralized Authoritarian State.
I noticed in the last US budget debacle how one party called the other "anarchists", "hostage takers", etc.; pretty soon they'll mean it and the purges will start. I think within 8 years whatever party is in power will fully turn the system against the citizens and political opponents, and outlaw any dissent, criticism of the government, or simple individualism, as well as the opposing party. It will happen simultaneously in the US and UK, and will probably coincide with whatever massive screw up the government is responsible for at the time, probably the same time the US and UK governments decide to "bail in" and confiscate 10-20% of the assets of everyone with positive net worth per the IMF report.
It's because the so-called "revelations" of NSA spying (which anybody who pays attention to current events already knew about) have been dramatically and actively suppressed in many, many, subtle ways. Such ways include the swaying of public opinion all over on the internet, including here, but also YouTube, Facebook, online news sites, forums, etc. by the deployment of forum spies. The 'higher-ups' are adamant about controlling public opinion, and so far I think they've done a pretty good job with suppressing or preventing the anger that SHOULD be present in the average US citizen. I see no hope in said average US citizen coming to, as they are all too engorged in their MTV and Facebook.
It's old news. We're all suffering Guberment fatigue in general.
It's even more funny that you're modded funny. It doesn't take a conspiracy, not even collusion. Folks up at the top of the heap like the status quo - it's making money for them. Measures which improve the existing structure are good. Measures which might change it in any appreciable way to interfere with the current system are bad.
One doesn't have to buy and sell all the politicians, only influence enough of them to keep things running your way. Things such as who's delivering the goods and who isn't, what policies are working and which aren't, which bills might change things.... well, you get the idea. These things are talked about informally in informal conversations at the country club, fund-raiser, art museum opening, what ever. General agreement happens, it doesn't need to be directed.
Finally, once one reaches CEO at a 500, you're made and you've got it made. You could retire anytime if your needs are not extravagant, but if you want to spend a mil on a painting and only have 50 in the bank, then you gotta stick around for a bit. There are no job worries; with golden parachutes, even if you tank a company, you just fall back on directorships for a while.
Everything else is noise, if you happen to notice it at all.
And that's why nothing will happen to appreciably change anything, according to whatever it is you think something could or should be changed. Things such as ACA, which some seem to think changes things, for instance, is of no concern to TPTB; it's beneath their notice. It does make a nice diversion for the hoi polloi, though. The government defaulting might affect some investments, but there are their people to manage such things, along with the costs of a season at Gstaad or the Riviera or where ever it is they like to go for R&R.
(Years ago by happenstance I got a glimpse of a very minor bit of this - it was an eye opener and made a lasting impression. The world in which those at the top of the food chain live is not the same one many of us live in - it's not a matter of degree, like some people being rich; it's a matter of kind, even alien, when it comes to world-view. They may eat some of the same foods, drive some of the same cars, some even like Levi jeans, but the real differences are staggering, and boggling.)
Here's one thing that's long bugged me, the lack on the part of many to differentiate 'twixt rich and wealthy. Best definition I've come across operationally is that the rich have more money, the wealthy own the means by which the rich make that money. At the low end that means owning say-so stakes in a variety of corporations and banks, as an example. For the high end I can't even usefully speculate.
So when the question arises, such as "Why isn't there more outrage over....?", I sometimes wonder, "Why do you ask?"
As a few have pointed out, democracy carries the seed of its destruction. Republics or monarchy/republics in are maybe more durable, mostly; the Swiss, for instance, seem to be doing OK so far, and the Brits have managed since Cromwell. I think so far the families comprising a fair sampling of shadow plutocracies and the like are probably longer lasting. It seems that wealth after sufficient concentration finds enough custodians to maintain itself, whatever the public faces of it may be, and doesn't need to concern itself with government per se, and something like the October revolution is not going to happen again. What little countries might do, here and there, does not matter.
I normally wouldn't bother replying to a comment made more than a few days ago, because I know it's Slashdot -- and people often don't even bother to look back at what's said about an "old" discussion topic.
But I have to think you've got blinders on or live under a rock if you "see absolutely no evidence" of things headed the wrong way in this country. Well over 1 *trillion* dollars of debt owed to other nations and climbing every day, and you don't see how that might pose problems??
The NSA spying thing is not anywhere near my biggest concern -- but it's a symptom of the larger problem. When your Federal govt. is this broke and is essentially putting the nation in the pawn shop to keep pretending it's solvent, it's ludicrous to keep fiunding a massive spy operation that works INSIDE our own borders!
As for our government being "freer and fairer than in previous generations", I'm guessing you're largely referring to issues such as allowing women to vote, freeing the slaves, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Those are all big steps forward -- but they're swirled into a massive "stew" of little steps backward. Our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, for example? Under attack ALL the time, with legislation which chisels away at it with exception after exception. Where I live, it's against the law for me to even try to resell "high capacity magazines" for rifles (such as the plastic clips that hold 20 or 25 bullets in them). My dad used to own a bunch of these things, and guess what? He wasn't some terrorist or serial killer, solider of fortune, or any of that. He just liked collecting guns and occasionally going to the indoor shooting range with his buddies. It was convenient not to have to reload so often.
We also live in a country where today, it's almost impossible to do a financial transaction of any size without it being reported, logged and tracked. It used to be if you saved up the cash, it was no big deal to go buy a used car with it. These days, you have to fill out special forms and it gets reported -- and who knows? Someone might even come knocking on your door asking a bunch of questions. It sure wasn't like that in previous generations.