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The NSA Is Viewed Favorably By Most Young People
cstacy writes: A poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that Snowden's revelations have not much changed the public's favorable view of the NSA. Younger people (under 30) tend to view the NSA favorably, compared to those 65 and older. 61% of people aged 18-29 viewed the NSA favorably, while 30% viewed the NSA unfavorably and 9% had no opinion. 55% of people aged 30-49 viewed the NSA favorably. At the 65+ age bracket, only 40% of people viewed the NSA favorably.
In other news, Satan is viewed positively by those who have never heard of him...
...and you do, because they're reading everything... how would YOU respond?
Nowadays younger people - Internet generation - is less interested in news than older people. Or they just care less.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
What they meant is that they like casual sex. "No Strings Attached", usually abbreviated "nsa", is, at least according to wikipedia, "an expression for casual sex often used in personal ads."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I have found they exact opposite to be true when talking to people. Those between 18-30 mostly deeply disapprove of government spying, while the 30-45 demographic seem to split on the issue and the most of the people above 45 all seem to say that they aren't doing anything wrong so they have nothing to hide.
"In Soviet America, Passport Stamps You!"
young people say the 'right' thing to pollsters.
Maybe I missed it but how was the question phrased?
Bark less. Wag more.
They should have asked this way: "NSA is reading your WhatsApp, your phone calls and your mobile photos and making a copy of them. With that, it's building a database to determine if you *might* be criminal and make you disappear. What do you think of NSA?"
Is it that those folks hate the IRS or our tax structure?
I can understand conservative's (Tea Party types) dislike - it was pretty damning the selective enforcement of tax laws against conservative organizations, but the rest? Do they know the difference or are they using the IRS as the goat for our byzantine tax structure?
It's like how comments get mod'ed down not because of their value but because the mod disagrees with it.
And as far as the EPA is concerned, everything that I have seen that they have done has protected my health. Or as I like to explain to my fellow peons, if Big Corp poisons you, you can maybe sue, but good luck suing to get your life back.
A billion dollars doesn't compensate me for the loss of life and limb.
When I see this horseshit of a kidney is worth so many hundreds of thousands of dollars, I just shake my head in the stupidity of it all. My kidneys are priceless to me. All the money in the World won't compensate me for the 4x a week dialysis, loss of health and loss of physical ability.
Human health comes first, our environment, and corporate profits come last.
I think our system is totally ass-backwards. When a business can say that their business will be harmed if people's health is considered and get precedence, I think WTF is wrong with you people?!
Everybody likes softball, don't they?
https://www.playnsa.com/
Sheeples will like something when they are told by someone that that something is good
Most of the younger generations have been brought up without any struggle - everything has been provided for, from physical things such as housing, food, schooling to virtual things like voting rights, it's all there
Unlike generation of yore who had to fight the system in order to get something - the young uns don't need to
They are content, and content people can easily turned into sheeples
Cause I support that.
I for one was not surprised by Snowden's findings. It merely confirmed what most people already figured NSA does. It spies on people. That is what they are supposed to do. If you think other spy agencies do not do that, then I have a bridge in NY to sell you.
The NSA is supposed to spy on other countries, not on American citizens.
Perhaps your brain is too weak to understand the importance of the above distinction.
I think the distinction that riles everybody up is that they spy on _everybody_. Not just the terrorists, foreign governments and the like. When you start spying on your all of your own citizens you've gone from being a spy organization to being one step away from the Stasi/Secret Police.
Younger people don't have the life experience to realize the implications of encroaching states, making the idea of 'lets all work together towards the radiant future a powerful lure. They were brought up in the most recent iterations of the pro-state propaganda in the public schools and universities which encourage and value individual achievement a lot less than just a few generations ago. Those in previous generations who grew up with one system and watched their kids go through the other realize what was sacrificed.
Anecdotally, I think that younger people ARE aware and disapprove but I think they're less likely to do anything about it.
The question then is what will this data be used for if it is not usable/used for its intended purpose? I can think of nothing good, and this is the reason for those rights in the first place. To prevent tyranny.
Silence is a state of mime.
They just understand that there is no such thing as privacy on a party line like the internet. So if it wasn't the NSA it would be someone else. At least the NSA isn't inserting their adds in their data stream the way companies like Comcast does
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
I would like to see this broken up into much more revealing demographics than the basic age range cited in the article. At the same time, most people in the "age range demographic" cited don't know much of what's going on in the world around them past a Facebook posting, or so I have inferred. Those I have met in that age range that do have a clue overwhelmingly disapproved of NSA activities.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
How much of this is a reflection of "I trust the government, if my guy is in charge. I don't trust the government if the other guy is in charge."
The Patriot Act is probably a great example of this. How many people flipped positions on whether the Patriot Act was a good thing or a bad thing when Bush left office and Obama became president?
From what I can see, consistency of thought and philosophy seems rather rare in American politics. Too many people are partisan whores who always agree with their party and always disagree with the other party.
To enure the poll is not generating misleading data, the people being polled should have to be questioned to see if they know the difference between NASA and NSA. If so, then it should be determined if they have ever heard of the Constitution or not.
Apparently he is alive but has run out of secret documents to publish. I worry if that means that we will quickly forget him in the next couple of years and NSA continues operations with free hands.
IFTFY: The NSA Is Viewed Favorably By Most Young People Who Answered Their Phone And Participated In Our Annoying Survey
I for one was not surprised by Snowden's findings. It merely confirmed what most people already figured NSA does. It spies on people. That is what they are supposed to do. If you think other spy agencies do not do that, then I have a bridge in NY to sell you.
The NSA is supposed to spy on other countries, not on American citizens.
Perhaps your brain is too weak to understand the importance of the above distinction.
I seem to recall a line in an oath people take when serving the very same country that the NSA protects.
Say something along the lines of against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
We all likely can agree that there is an considerable issue of overreach to still address, but perhaps it is your brain that is failing to comprehend this , or perhaps is clouded in ignorance in believing the NSA only peers outward towards others.
So havn't everyone stopped and thought about it?
Isn't these illegal methods the nsa are using an act of terrorism against its own population?
To like someone who greatly hurts and violate you and your freedom of speech...
There must be something severely wrong with peoples mentality to actively submitting to abuse.
So the more educated you are the more likely you have an unfavorable view of the NSA. Seems about right. There are some examples of young people asking the right questions: https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Have gnu, will travel.
Why something is looking bad, wrong, negative, harmful or just plain dangerous? We know stories that we can match in a similar pattern that ends well or bad for the ones we could indentify with. We could not even identify a trend, a pattern or a situation if we don't have a name or a story behind that pattern. How much of those new generations read/watched 1984, brave new world, or countless movies, books and other kind of stories where the kind of acts that do the NSA ends badly for most?
Also, the bias supporting directly or indirectly latests government policies is obviously very present in newer movies, and almost a coincidence in older movies. Watch "The last mimzy" or "Predestination", based on great science fiction stories, get rotten to the core by that kind of modification. And superhero movies are having somewhat present that something is rotten in the higher level of government and corporations, and they get caught, and stopped, so the ones remaining in the real life must be the good ones, no?
With older generations is hard to subvert the stories they had all their lives, but with newer ones, with old stories losing visibility, is a somewhat easy task. From there to history rewritting there is a short path, and from there on we will always had been in war against Eastasia.
I understand a fear to speak negatively about them when you know they are listening.
Apparently, sanity *is* statistical...
And I don't care if the NSA's computers scanned the data and flagged some Americans who were plotting some evil act.
Now, if the NSA was abusing the data for LOVEINT or personal spying on people they know, yes, that is a problem. It is even worse if they are tipping off the police to non-violent crimes or dirt on politicians. But, just because they scanned the e-mail I sent last week to my Mom, doesn't mean that one person should be able to give away all the details to foreign intelligence and the real terrorists to learn how to get around the system.
pew research centre polled NSA employees under 30.... ;)
So sick of Slashdot posters railing on the NSA. Face it /.'ers you are in the minority.
The question was, literally,
They specifically not only reported on the "never heard of" part, and tried to differentiate between that and "I really couldn't say".
How you can be moderated as insightful is simply astonishing, considering that you will probably never consider any fact that doesn't already fit into your established worldview. I would have accepted "ignorant", "mindless", or "automaton". But insightful? No. You do not deserve the internet.
Most young people are brain dead sheep
Captcha: obscene.
This is the generation brought up on Always Connected.
Sooner or later they will learn to value their privacy when they start blocking people from seeing their statuses because they want some free time, then the arguments happen, then the friendships fail, then the hatred of Always Connected happens within them, and that breeds a hater of this new world we live in.
There are some benefits to the Always Connected world, huge benefits.
But whether or not these outweigh being spied on is up to the persons personal beliefs.
The bigger issue itself is corrupt legal systems that MAKE such spying scary for people because they begin to get paranoid over the smallest of things because their countries legal system looks like it came straight out of the dark ages. (some are literally still stuck in said dark ages)
Then their are the social stigmas attached to certain hobbies and activities.
Then there are the issues of insurance companies abusing said information. (but in most cases it is just assholes trying to defend their shitty driving, or similar scenarios)
And so on.
Society itself would need to change if everybody were to become accepting of a 100% transparent society.
For one, a lot of illegal shit right now would need to be made legal, period, no ifs or buts.
Which I have recently encountered in L.A. and Las Vegas metros, then God be merciful up on us, because these brainwashed empty heads have absolutely no earthly idea what is really going on behind U.S. borders and the rest of the world. U.S. TV is 24/7 full of entirely fictional shows, pseudo-news channels present inane childish and entirely unimportant, yet severely out-of-proportions overblown events, i.e.: dog saves owner from burning house, and even Discovery/History Chanel has completely devolved into mindless trash heap of gold miner / car chaser / auction dweller / storage forfeiture chaser / pawn owner - soulless, pointless, uninformative heap of nice camera moves, cuts and angles, but without any real or useful substance whatsoever. All that rules of TV are sports and tragic events. Not a single word about the outside world, unless it's a tragic event, again. A nation of young mindless drones, that's what the U.S. government craves. Orwell would be so proud of these new-found "proles."
B U L L $ H | T !!!!!
We don't have to endorse the privacy-violating things the NSA is up to in order to actually have a good opinion of THE WHOLE AGENCY. The NSA isn't just "a few oversteps that Snowden reveals piecemeal". The bulk of what they do is absolutely invaluable. A world with no NSA would be a worse one.
They are just naive. Young people have a natural trust for authority...it makes them feel secure. They will grow out of that delusion as they learn more facts.
Unfortunately, they can vote before then.
And the politicians using double and triple speak know terrorist can do the same making any communication looking like common conversation..
The Spying and lying through the main stream media is just a manipulation feedback loop of the Peoples employees of government manipulating the employers (the people) among the many other things the Employees of the people are doing against the Declaration of Independence. i.e. stealing the retirement funds of the employers (the people) funded by the employers (social security), illegally arming the police with military equipment (and having the employers. the people pay twice for the same equipment claimed to be "surplus") while trying to suppress the employers arms (anti-gun efforts) and more . Its time the people apply their rights and do their duty and instruct those working in the peoples business of government, how the funding (taxes) they are supplying is to be used.
Its simple to do, a form to allow the taxpayers, the funders of government, to say how their taxes are to be used and included in the tax returns for the tax processors to allocate the funds according to the taxpayers instructions. Also needed is teh government transparency information, what the government wants funding for so the people can each decided to fund or not. If the government doesn't say, they don't get.
If there is a problem with allocation then funds are placed in a credit union account till government supplies verified receipts in accord to teh allocated funds, for reimbursement.
There is no need to spy on the employers, as the employers will set the budgets and this way the representatives will actually know what to do to represent the people. And the People will become participants rather than subjects.
This is a republic, not a democracy but democracy is only to be a supplement of the republic. However two universities (Princeton being one of them) have technically determined the government is functioning as an Oligarchy. Now read the Declaration of Independence for the instructions the founders wrote for what the people are to do about this distortion and abuse of bad business of letting the peoples employees run the funding of the peoples business of government bank account.,
The more experience you have the more you realize what a slimy agency the NSA is. Makes sense.
Extending your point, as far as we can tell, the data collection hasn't seemed to stop any terrorist attack at all. Why should we support it if it doesn't even fulfill its offered justification? If they were truly saving lives every day, I could support metadata collection, but it doesn't seem to be worth the expense and effort, let alone the problematic invasion of privacy.
Even the author of the patriot act opposes it. It's time to let it go.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Obama is also seen very favourably by young monkeys.
Thats funny, I thought the Republicans hated him with a bloody passion! ZING!
Seems reasonable to me.
Facebook: If you click here, for playing farmville and getting up-to date advertisements around the world and hearing which of your friends prepares pizza right now, you give us all your data. We will sell it or not, as we see fit, ask you about it or not, as we see fit, change the rules at any time, as we see fit, and if you dont disagree immeduatly, we will make an effort to protect our interest by just giving you enough privacy not to run away.
NSA: To stop terrorists killing you all, we need to log all data of you which we can get.
Yes, if you give me the choice if the ratio of loss of privacy to gained comfort/security is better for Facebook or the NSA, i choose the NSA.
That oath is to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic!
What the fuck do you think a "domestic enemy of the Constitution" looks like? Look for the suits with an American flag lapel pins. That's where they hide.
I expect than anyone looking at the complete article, with all of the various tables and breakdowns will find at least one item that shocks them. In my case, two examples:
- 45% of Americans view the IRS positively, vs. 48% negatively. To me, this is shocking, because I know that the IRS is a power unto itself. If someone in the IRS decides they want to nail you, you are nailed. Appeal to a court? Sure, but only a court run by the IRS. They can empty your bank accounts, repossess your house, all without any review by any external party. Why anyone would trust an agency with this much power, or view it in a positive light is beyond me.
- More Democrats than Republicans view the DoD positively. Huh?
For me, many of the results are pretty surprising. The point of my comment here: I'll bet that's true for you too. We all live in echo chambers, mostly reading articles that reinforce our beliefs and talking with people who think much the same as we do. Really kind of scary, if you think about it...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
"the data collection hasn't seemed to stop any terrorist attack at all": And you know this how?
He was, in fact, very popular in Germany in the 1930s.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Nevermind all the "smart" people behind great human endeavors like WWI, austerity, or the invasion of Iraq. Nevermind the circular that the poor should surrender their voting rights to elitists, when they are poor because of elitist policies to begin with.
If you're a neofeudalist, sure. Why don't you repeal the 20th Century and go back to only white male property owners having the vote, while you're at it?
My father is distrustful towards the government even though he is liberal and not a tea party guy who hates them based on idealogical grounds.
The government forced his friends in highschool to be killed in Vietnam against their will. He had a baby and went to school and they ripped his family apart and sent him to fight in a war he didn't believe in based on lies by Henry Kissenger, LBJ, and Nixon.
To this day he keeps a photocopy of his discharge papers from the military. He said enjoy what you have because what you have can be taken from you by the second!
So ... NSA spying, making up lies with the Iraq war with weapons of mass destruction, and this intrusion etc. To my Dad this is scary stuff complete with a mass with the younger generation reading this who can be fooled by propaganda easier.
In the 1950s he was spoonfed propaganda too about those evil scary communistis hiding under the bed. Younger folks do not understand these concepts or have lived in fear of "What if they draft me next?"
http://saveie6.com/
All email, social media, banking and consumer purchases take place over SSL connections, and have for a long time. So the "party line" stuff is a non-starter.
Who. Who else has the budget AND the physical proximity to the bulk of the fiber (which runs through the US) to do a "full take" of what people do online.
The IMPERIUM has their lackey statistics orgs. Just like they have CNN and Fox to inflame the masses about Iran and leave them in the dark about the Saudi Slavekeepers.
I suspect that a large number of the people polled got the NSA confused with NASA. That might have something to do with it.
...a Very Dangerous Person.
Expect Black Helo Show Of Force flights over your living quarters very soon.
Those folks are now behind all the criminal things the IMPERIUM pulls off.
Iraq for starters.
All their Maoism and dope usage just displays their corruption and these days they cheer when Lockheed makes a new war happen.
Obviously because they would have been bragging about it. The national insecurity state constantly releases top secret info for PR purposes when it would be calling for another 30 year sentence for a whisteblower if he were to publish the same information.
So, yeah, if mass warrantless wiretapping had actually been used to prevent an actual attack, you would have actually heard about it.
FUCK YOU ELECTRO-TSHEKA !
That oath is to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic!
What the fuck do you think a "domestic enemy of the Constitution" looks like? Look for the suits with an American flag lapel pins. That's where they hide.
So you think people who sometimes wear suits are evil, and people who wear lapel flags sometimes are evil. Would it surprise you to learn that the person who posted the article exactly matches your description?
"the data collection hasn't seemed to stop any terrorist attack at all": And you know this how?
Because when the Senate brought the leaders of the NSA into a classified session to ask them about it, the NSA was unable to provide a single example?
The problem is that they interviewed a self-selected group of security-unaware idiots.
Only idiots, and old people who don't know any better, answer telephone surveys from perfect strangers anymore.
These days, it's either marketing people using the excuse of a survey to speak to you, and reselling that information they gather from you to others, or it's "You're windows PC is infected" social engineering scammers, or identity theft criminals trying to get personal identifiable information from you. You don't want to say anything to them, because the next time they call you (or an accomplice of theirs calls you), they'll use whatever previous information you told them to try and make you fall for a new scam (you or anyone else living in your household).
The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted January 7-11, 2015 among a national sample of 1,504 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (528 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 976 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 563 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see http://people-press.org/method...
All this shows is that the average young person doesn't know the difference between NASA and NSA.
...that which can be explained by pandering.
Mainly by Slashdot.
From TFA.
Favorability ratings for the National Security Agency (NSA) have changed little since the fall of 2013
Except...
Back then unfavorable/favorable/don't know ratio was 35/54/11.
Now it is 37/51/12.
With a +/- 2.9 percentage points error, sample-wise. Or +/- 4.1 form-wise.
Going all the way up to +/- 8.8 for "Form 1" republicans.
Which tells us that in those year and a half, unfavorable/favorable ratio has shifted towards unfavorable.
And it may be up to 5 percentage points. That's 1 in 20.
Also, comparison of data shows that U/F ratio has slipped across the board towards unfavorable.
NASA, VA and CDC have dropped by 2, 13 and 9 points.
Department of Veterans Affairs has dropped by 13 points.
Distrust towards federal government has risen across the board.
The other thing is, survey was AIMED at younger people.
Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.
Add to that how
Among those with less education, favorable opinions of the NSA outnumber unfavorable views.
And you get results of a pole where few older, better educated or simply suspicious about the federal government in general, shift the ratio towards unfavorable on their end.
While a greater majority (about the third of surveyed population was deliberately chosen among the younger adults) of younger population is picked from the less educated.
Causing the 65+ group to be deliberately a LOT smaller, more extremist and opinionated, get-off-my-lawn group, than the artificially inflated 18-29 group.
And it is kinda important to keep that artificial inflation in mind, as "unfavorable" opinion of NSA rises with the level of education.
Favorable / Unfavorable / Other/Don't Know
Post-grad: 45 / 43 / 12
College grad: 53 / 39 / 8
Some college: 53 / 37 / 11
HS or less: 51 / 36 / 13
Post-grads have almost exactly the same opinion of NSA as 50-64-year-olds - i.e. 45 / 45 / 10.
It ain't the stupidity, disinterest NOR shrewdness of the youth.
It's the EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE.
"If well informed" is simply another way of saying educated.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I know because I added the word 'seemed.' Which means, "so it appears to me." When I add that, I'm always right. :)
More seriously: no data has been released to indicate that their surveillance tactics are useful. If they want to convince me, as a voter, to continue supporting those tactics, then they need to convince me.
They have other options, of course; if they can convince enough of the other 300 million people, then my single vote against them doesn't matter. It only matters when joined by many who agree with me. But there are a lot of people who do agree with me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Perhaps it's more that they've heard of the NSA, heard the Snowden leaks and decided to rate the NSA favorably because they know they're being watched.
What in the actual fuck? I can't even wrap my mind around these results. Dems are like 60 percent ok? I'd liken to see how the questions were worded: "Given the prevalence of terrorism and child molesters, should we be able to gather intelligence on terrorism and child molesters via the NSA? (Keep in mind your responses are logged and associated with you social security number)"
The results don't paint as rosy a picture. The sample size is ridiculously small. Also, these were conducted OVER THE PHONE for the tinfoil hatters. There were only 4 response choices besides never heard of: very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, and very unfavorable. I think people tend to have an upward bias when those are the responses and speaking to someone in person. If you throw out mostly favorable as being a copout, the responses are overwhelmingly negative.
By "public", Pew research means "Americans".
Ask anyone outside your 5% of the world and you won't find much support for NSA.
The repercussions of NSA policies are global - thus, the polls should also be global.
It's called push-polling depending on how the question was phrased .. A more relevant question would be - why does the government need to spy on its own people in order to protect then from the 'terrorists'?
"Overall, do you approve or disapprove of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts?" Poll Data
"the use of leading questions to skew an opinion survey"
Nevermind all the "smart" people behind great human endeavors like WWI, austerity, or the invasion of Iraq. Nevermind the circular that the poor should surrender their voting rights to elitists, when they are poor because of elitist policies to begin with.
If you're a neofeudalist, sure. Why don't you repeal the 20th Century and go back to only white male property owners having the vote, while you're at it?
I think you missed my point. I don't object to people voting: young, old, rich, poor, white, black, brown, yellow, red, green, and blue. I object to ignorant people voting. I object to stupid people voting. I even stated that I will defend their right to vote; but encouraging someone who is stupid or ignorant to vote, that's just stupid.
I love space research.
We know that when schools, who have control of children for more waking hours of the day than their parents, push an agenda it will work. This was demonstrated very well a few decades back by a certain German regime (not named here because I'm not trying to invoke Godwin in an otherwise excellent example) that brainwashed all its nation's youth to believe in their national security apparatus to such an extreme that many of them turned in their own parents for even commenting against government policy. The US school system is currently almost entirely populated by teachers who are on the extreme left of the Democrat party by virtue of being in one of the two national teachers' unions which are both firmly aligned with the Democrats. This rabid alignment was on full display when the teachers of Wisconsin behaved like pack animals as they fought their Governor over the outrageous ideas he pushed that teachers should contribute to their own retirement funds like everybody else, government should not be the dues collector for the unions, and people ought to be free to teach without being forced into union membership; they flooded into Madison with fake doctors' excuses, used kids from their classes as political props, broke into buildings and occupied them like a bunch of college hippies, and called for the murder of the governor. Texas is the only state I can think of at the moment (I think there might be a couple more) where teachers are not required to be in one of those unions as a condition of having a job. The natural result is that most teachers in the US are teaching from a pro-big-government perspective and very few kids have ever read or been taught about vital American things like our founders' debates over the size and power of government as presented in "The Federalist Papers" and "The Anti-Federalist Papers" etc. The young people I know seem entirely unaware of any of this history, which American schools used to teach as a rather baseic element of civics, and therefore only seem to worry about the reach of government when it might stop them playing a movie or some music.
The other problem is that most younger people have been raised in the phony world of "free on the internet", where they get "free" e-mail, "free" facebook pages, "free" google searches, "free" YouTube videos and so-on (ALL "free as-in beer") all in-exchange for throwing away any concept of privacy. With the advent of "selfies", "twerking" and all the rest, the ideas of privacy, modesty, personal dignity, and so-on are all fading very fast in a way that also benefits big government and its dreams of total universal snooping.
If you have kids and you genuinely care for them, it's time to dust-off some old books and teach them WHY these things are bad and all the other things the super-state-worshipping schools no longer do before it's too late - the alternative is to condemn them and their kids to an Orwellian future of Big Brotherism.
Hey, you kids, GIT OFF MY LAWN!
Eh? 30% unfavourable vs 60% favourable, and in other age groups it gets worse for the NSA... this is HUGE, and the spin on this story is so strong it has picked up the Slashdot community and thrown it off its feet due to the gyroscopic force!
There was a time when these number would have been much better for the NSA... things are going downhill fast, and even in this age cohort two in three is the best they can manage.
This would suggest a decline in intelligence and an increase in statism, which seem to hand in hand. It's no wonder that the Federal Government wants so much control over "education". It takes a lot to produce subsequent generations of morons that will willing forgoe their fundamental rights in order to avoid confronting the facts that they are being conditioned for a new soft slavery.
No one actually believes these numbers are an accurate representation of public opinion.... right?
We know its you.
You might watch The Imitation Game to learn why they can't tell you. In particular, the scene where Hut 8 has decrypted a naval message directing a wolfpack at a convoy carrying civilians. They decide they can't warn the convoy, because it would tell the Germans that Enigma had been broken.
In reality, that scene probably never happened. Decisions about whether to use the information in Enigma messages were made at a much higher level. But the point--that releasing information can tell the enemy how much of their traffic you can read--holds. And you can read plenty of other instances where the Allies had to either ignore information in decoded Enigma messages, or do something to make a plausible cover story for how they learned something.
And in the present, there are lots of news reports about assassinations of Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc. operatives, most recently Abu Malik. He probably wasn't teaching high school chemistry classes.
That might have been true of the collection of phone logs (metadata, not the actual calls), which I believe is the case you're referring to. You have seen photos of the Fort Meade parking lots. Do you think all those people are processing metadata?
I don't care. At this point I don't want my government going around killing people without giving justifications, because it will be abused. The risk could be worth it in times of extreme danger, America isn't under a huge threat right now, the risk of dying from terrorists is lower than the threat from our government.
Furthermore, whatever efforts the covert operations are doing have been horribly outweighed by Obama's poor policy, with terrorists controlling entire countries in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. If he's going to fight a war, he should fight the public war, not pretend that it ended while fighting a covert war on the side.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
All email, social media, banking and consumer purchases take place over SSL connections, and have for a long time. So the "party line" stuff is a non-starter.
So you use gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, or corporate mail ? You don't think the providers don't or can't parse that ? It's not your mail it's theirs after all.
You don't think the credit card companies don't record and share information with the credit reporting agencies ?
Who. Who else has the budget AND the physical proximity to the bulk of the fiber (which runs through the US) to do a "full take" of what people do online.
Oh I don't know, maybe the people selling you your net access ?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
...and stop embarrassing yourself.
Yes, we all know Google data mines Gmail for marketing purposes.
Can backbone providers like CenturyLink read that email? No.
Can your local ISP read that email? No.
Can your neighbor, if he uses the same ISP? No.
Even if you are using unencrypted wifi? Still no.
Not. A. Party. Line.
Clown shoes: still on. Of course your ISP (what Verizon and AT&T are when using a smartphone for net access) can see what sites you are going to. Are you amazed that Amazon has your home address after you've had something shipped to it?
That's not even remotely close to tapping, storing, and analyzing 100% of your electronic communications, for years if not decades at a time.
I got your point just fine. You don't want the "wrong" sort of people to vote, which is inherently elitist. As Jenny McCarthy hasn't had to shop at a Wal-Mart for 20 years, that leaves the victims of elitism as the targets for your elitism.
The poor and uneducated wont be allowed to vote, which will help to ensure that they remain poor and uneducated, and thus unable to vote. It's a vicious cycle, which takes time to perfect.
That's because google doesn't sell information to people, that Verizon, ATT, Comcast don't sell information about you, that's because there aren't businesses that collect detailed information about you and sell them to anyone who looks.
Oh wait, there are all those things.
Be pleased, it takes a special kind of person to think speaking in pig latin makes their conversation private.
...because they know better than to give an unfavorable opinion of the NSA over the phone when they know the NSA is listening. People 60 and over just don't give a f---. Normally I think Pew Group has really good studies, but I think this one might be pretty skewed given that it's conducted over a medium that is not anonymizing.
It takes years to understand why your rights are so important. When I was in my 20's I was too busy enjoying my freedom before I really understood what it was. An interpretation of these statistics could also mean "Most people get wiser as they get older" or perhaps people take their freedom more seriously as they gather responsibilities no matter what age they are.
These agencies invert the rights model and that perverts western democracy's ability to self repair. The largest problem with a surveilance society is the dubious exchange of freedom for perceived security stagnates a societies ability to critically examine itself and, evolve behaviour to improve itself.
Government should be a foundation upon which the people of a country build and shape a society. When the organs of government interfere with the functioning of a democracy, it isn't a democracy anymore. The greater the power the greater the oversight should be because no one should be above the law.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Its a very common, but false assumption that young people are always more progressive than their parents, but that's just not true. In Europe in the 80ies for example, it became normal for young couples to move in together without getting married, or just getting an informal civil marriage signed at city hall. Women in the workforce albecame the norm and not the exception. Fast forward to the 2000's and all of a sudden there's a huge spike in church marriages, and a rise in young women leaving the workforce in order to become part- or full time homemakers. In the Muslim world, the generation of young people who grew up in the 80ies and 90ies were also far more religious than their parents generation, who generally speaking were much more secular than you see even today. (If you look at a picture from Kabul or Beirut in the 60ies or early 70ies, and compare it with a picture from today, it's hard to find any women wearing a hijab then. Let alone the burqa that are common in Kabul today.) And in a similar socio-psychological shift in the US, young people who grew up in a world that has both an Internet and a war on terror, have a more positive view of the NSA than those who didn't. At least you can appreciate the delightful irony at people in their thirties shaking their head and complaining about young people these days!
Study finds young people see the world differently than folks in their 30ies and 40ies! Older folks respond with disbelief&outrage! Convinced young people are stupid or easily manipulated! EXTRA! EXTRA! WATCH HISTORY REPEATING!
The time has come for ./ to stop bashing the government and NSA.
... but, did the study control for those who might opine that the NSA was cool because they heard that's where Snowden's from?
Idiot!
Younger people are easier to indoctrinate. Older people understand that self-interest is what drives the business of government, not altruism or even idealism.
This has to be bullshit. There's no way that out of all of my friends, even my friends of friends and facebook friends, I've never heard of anyone sticking up for the NSA. I dont think it's just a vocal minority either, there's been a lot of hate directed towards the NSA in various forms from passive aggressive references to the NSA listening in on our conversations ("NSA pls dont FBI me") to outright disparaging rants on facebook where people are posting it for anyone and everyone to see.
"Anonymous" survey at work not anonymous after all.
Morale of the story... always respond favorably to all surveys.
I hearby affiirm my support for and fondness of the NSA.
if it were Bush's NSA, or the parties reversed, the under-30 crowd would be rioting in the streets. #Occupy wouldn't be about wealth but privacy, and campuses nationwide would be filled with calls for "action".