Majority of Americans OK With Warrantless Internet Surveillance (ap.org)

An anonymous reader writes: A new poll conducted by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research gathered opinions on the U.S. government's surveillance of internet communications. The poll found that a majority of Americans, 56%, were in favor of warrantless surveillance. 28% explicitly opposed it. 67% of Republicans and 55% of Democrats supported the warrantless surveillance, while only 40% of Independents supported it. Americans under 30 supported warrantless surveillance much less than older Americans. Further, "The poll finds that for most Americans, safety concerns trump civil liberties at least some of the time. More than half — 54 percent — say it's sometimes necessary for the government to sacrifice freedoms to fight terrorism, while 45 percent think that's not necessary. On a more general level, 42 percent say it's more important for the government to ensure Americans' safety than to protect citizens' rights, while 27 percent think rights are more important and 31 percent rate both equally."

Comments

Tyranny

[belrick]

If only the US had some set of rules, encoded in a founding and fundamental document of some-sort, that limited the ability of the majority to commit tyranny on the minority through unfair legislation or otherwise.

USA entering a brave new age of stupidity

[ickleberry]

The fact that Trump is even a candidate has made me give up hope on that country for the forseeable future.

*Everyone must have a job even if the things you're good at have been replaced by bots or outsourced to the Chinese. If you don't have a job you are derided as a scumbag

*Tremendous poverty, everyone brushes it under the table because everybody is so opposed to the idea of people getting a free lunch

*Nobody wants to give up driving their big automatic pickup to work, even if it can be proven they are causing global warming.

*Nobody wants to give up their silly pea-shooter in case of Government aggression even if the government has much better toys that would make very light work of someone toting the said pea-shooter

*Nobody complains about the government pissing away trillions of the aforementioned toys while people starve and die of curable illnesses.

Article is light on critical details.

[BitterOak]

I actually read the article and it is missing some key details, such as what is meant exactly by "Internet Surveillance". Do they mean simply looking at what's on the public Internet for suspicious activity, etc., or do they mean the power to compel service providers, ISPs, etc., to turn over private customer information or private data? There's a difference between looking at someone's public tweets, and reading their private e-mail messages. Was this distinction made clear in the poll questions when the surveys were taken? It's possible that the people who responded to the polling questions didn't really know what they were answering.