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?'"
ICANN and ARIN are kicking the US off.
That's not fatigue.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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!
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!
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.)
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.
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.
We don't really repeat mistakes, as there's always been a large contingent that will protect wealth at all possible costs-- and defend their methods of creating it. I don't deny anyone a reasonable profit, but what's reasonable depends on which side of have's/have-nots you might rest on.
Small problem; wealth inequity in this country has never been this bad, not by a long shot. We've had a middle class since the post-industrial labor reforms of the 1930s. Prior to that, it was a clusterfuck as we moved from an agricultural to industrial society, which is to be expected. However, we don't have one anymore; we have the poor, and the super rich. The line separating those two is getting thinner every year.
So no, it is no longer a question of which "side" you're on. If you think this is still about politics, you haven't been keeping up. And to bring this home; This is the reason why nobody gives a fuck about the NSA.
They're too damn busy trying to stay alive to care about something as esoteric as civil liberties. When you're starving, you don't care about freedom -- you care about bread. And anyone who has some is your friend. Make the people starve, and they'll tolerate any amount of tyranny... so long as the tyrant keeps giving out bread crumbs.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
Every one of the 9/11 terrorists fit a profile that should have sounded alarm bells at the border.
I hate to break it to you, but half the male muslims in the world meet the same profile. And the vast majority of them don't try and crash airplanes into buildings.
But that's beside the point - I didn't any of it was a good idea. Only that it's not surprising.
Russian operatives were far more successful, some escaping detection for multiple decades.
Yes, but spies are professionals.
And enough Al Qaeda operatives have escaped detection to cause quite a lot of trouble (including incidentally in Russia, which unlike the US, has internal border controls as well).
t is always about politics because
Sorry, I disagree; Firstly, the only time an argument using the word "always" is right is with the statement "Using the word always always makes the statement wrong." Black and white thinking is such a cliche, yet it crops up everywhere. Now, the rebuttal: Those who have the gold, make the rules. Politics and economics are dance partners. My personal opinion is that economics leads most of the time, but sometimes politics leads economics as well. But there's no causal link between the two. They influence each other, but they are separate entities.
As for why this country got to this point regarding wealth inequity, and why our government is so inept, it's not what anyone thinks. It's not the fault of the democrats, or the republicans. It's actually the structure of our government itself. We've been fucked by our own Constitution! But this is not so obvious to anyone...
You see, it very often is the case that one party controls the house, and another the senate. And this results in frequent stalemates because the majorities for each were elected by the voters. They can both legitimately claim to be representing voter interests by not yielding. Now in most other representational democracies, the controlling party can't be blocked or stalemated like this; If such a stalemate does arise, a new vote is forced and a new plurality is elected into office.
Corporations and wealthy individuals don't get stalemated; They can't be jammed up or delayed. They can bring the full measure of their wealth down and will always move faster and more effectively than government control can, simply because the next stalemate is never more than a few months away. Our wealth inequity problem is tied to the Constitution itself. Is it possible for us to fix this? Yes. Has any country with such a problem ever managed to? No.
But I challenge your assertion that this wealth inequity problem is growing worldwide. It happens to be the case that our corporations have so much wealth that they can co-opt smaller governments, but the problem started here -- if those corporations and their process is moving out into other countries now, they're bringing our problems to them. It's not a problem that's happening concurrently across the globe.. it's spreading like an infection with the origination point here. And it can only get a foothold in certain markets, certain places, and in certain situations. And when those corporations are found and weeded out, the problem will slowly cure itself in the affected areas because in most countries, the problem is not structural.
Wealth inequity can occur as a byproduct of the boom/bust cycle of capitalism; but it doesn't become an unregulated positive feedback loop anywhere else but here, because nowhere else are you going to find a combination of an investment-based economy, a culture of debit amongst the general population, a government incapable of responding effectively to changes in economic circumstances, and an almost total absence of inheritance tax due to the pre-emption of governments worldwide that are being used to shelter large amounts of wealth in exchange for a pittance and their sovereignty to protect the wealthy citizen from his/her own government's attempt to return a portion of that wealth back into circulation.
It's a perfect storm, economically speaking -- and I can describe the entire problem using economics. There is no need to step outside into the sphere of politics. It happens to be that economics and politics are in bed with each other about as often as a Republican is caught in the men's room insisting he's not gay... but that doesn't mean they're the same thing, or that one always leads and the other follows.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"wealth inequity in this country has never been this bad, not by a long shot"
This is not really accurate. Study the late 19th century and early 20th century where every major industry was a monopoly ruled by just a few people siphoning off the profits for themselves. At the time there was no such thing as workers rights or a mandatory minimum wage and certainly nothing about prohibiting monopolies. Banks operated without any form of oversight from the government. Protectionism and tariffs on imports combined with the Foreign Policy of the day helped usher in the Great Depression. All the outrage today about the governments surveillance programs and accusations of rights violations are nothing when compared against past actions. Two of the best Presidents in US history blatantly and knowingly ignored the constitution when they perceived the country was in danger and they could not trust the Legislators to make the right decisions. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imprisoned journalists publishing any thing negative about how the Union and Lincoln was handling the civil war. He actually tried to argue that they were disclosing secret information that could potentially be used by the Confederates. Sound familiar? FDR blatantly ignored Congress as well as the majority of US citizens when he came up with ways to bypass the Neutrality Act with the lend lease program and the gradual expansion of the area the US claimed as territorial waters to try and protect shipping to Europe during WW2. Congress passed a law forbidding the government from using wire taps when FDR wanted to monitor suspected Nazi agents operating in the US. The day Congress voted to prohibit this FDR wrote a Presidential order and delivered to the Justice Department telling them to ignore the law passed in Congress and proceed with the taps. The only reason these two presidents were not impeached was because they were both successful in the end.
"I hate to break it to you, but half the male muslims in the world meet the same profile. And the vast majority of them don't try and crash airplanes into buildings."
No, they don't. Half the male muslims in the world did not have known suspicious connections, engage in known suspicious activities, etc. These guys WERE flagged by other agencies, but the word apparently didn't get around.
They were hardly your "average" guys.
I agree. The real firestorm was when Fox News was stoking Tea Party fear of Obama spying on Americans. It was so effective, Fox News had to stop for fear of actually forcing the Tea Party congressmen to vote against continuing surveillance, which as you know, they didn't do - our Tea Party Freedom Fighters voted to continue with zero change, right along with everyone else in congress.
The outrage might be stronger here on slashdot, but most of us haven't heard a single new revelation, only confirmations. On the plus side, my wife and friends no longer think I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist for believing many of the leaks posted here on slashdot over the years.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
In Germany, the whole radical Right is infiltrated by the Verfassungsschutz (the german secret service for the interior affairs), so much, that legal means against an extreme right wing political party (the NPD) was impossible because there was no way to discern anymore which of the party's questionable actions were actually grown out of the party's radical members, and which of them were initiated by infiltrators trying to get street cred within the party.
But nevertheless, a chain of ten deadly terroristic attacks including one against two policemen remained unresolved and mysterious, until two members of the terroristic group committed suicide and the third one blew up their headquarters.