6 ms·

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the S

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things. It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out! Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.

derg 5y ago
Honestly it could also be it's just hard to fathom the breadth and scale. Easier to imagine someone opening your mail or tapping your phone or otherwise physically interacting with things you own over the government intercepting a request to post a picture to facebook, for instance. I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.
thanatos519 5y ago
Maybe 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman will help you fathom it; here's the forward: https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170foreword.html https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170forew...
tsimionescu 5y ago
I think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being on matters of strategy (e.g. "The US should have retreated from Vietnam earlier", not "there was no defensible reason for the war in Vietnam, it was just a blatant display of imperialism"). And I'm not talking about Fox (who pride themselves on such views), but even the most liberal papers or news channels. Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.
- maybelsyrup 5y ago
  I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    This video of CNN host Brian Williams referring to 'The Beauty of our Weapons' has stuck with me as one of the most bizarre examples of the prevailing pro-war attitude in the 'left press': https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420 https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420
    - decasteve 5y ago
      I vowed never to watch CNN again after exclaiming how excited they were to be going back to Iraq for the 2nd war.
    - maybelsyrup 5y ago
      Good lord man, I thought I'd seen some bad stuff coming out of that guy but that's pretty obsequious
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      That's quite on-the-nose considering Cohen has said that the song was about extremism in general and terrorism specifically.
- lettergram 5y ago
  The people who started these programs are now contributors to CNN and MSNBC after trump fired them....
treis 5y ago
> Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  Here's one negative thing you can now associate with mass surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
  - treis 5y ago
    I don't see that as a clearly negative thing. At worst it's controversial and theoretically could lead to negative things. But I don't see any concrete harm to associate with that practice.
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree A justice system that contradicts itself like that can't be just.
  - jackpirate 5y ago
    The problem is that most ordinary people view that as a positive, not a negative.
    - pope_meat 5y ago
      Sigh. What is the road to hell paved with? That's right, good intentions. See you in hell, folks, when the laws change and your perfectly legal existence up until that point becomes a problem to the state, and then the good cops will break a few little constitutional protections to build a parallel case against you...which of course, ordinary people view as a positive, not a negative. Sometimes I think I should run away to another place that isn't turning in to a fascists police state, but then I realize ordinary scared people act predictably, so I guess I welcome our fascist overlords, hand me an arm band, let's clean up these streets of the checks notes trash. lots of sarcasm included for free.
sneak 5y ago
I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life. They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists. It's a lack of imagination, really. The Long Now.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life. I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves. As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general. Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government. There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful. Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target. That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Corporate data collection doesn’t generally send the police or military to your house when you sufficiently challenge the status quo. Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data. Experian doesn’t have a torture chamber. The Chicago PD and the CIA do.
austincheney 5y ago
That is why I find most interesting about social media generally. Many people seem to care about government mass data collection all the while voluntarily and intentionally providing to private companies from which the government purchases it. Having your cake and eating it too.
cronix 5y ago
I think part of the reason, maybe by design, is it took 7 years to be ruled illegal. I'm actually surprised it didn't take longer. A lot happens in 7 years. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowden-nsa-surveillance-guardian-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
There's a chance that it's actually not that huge of a deal? We like to be dramatic here like the sky is falling.
nxc18 5y ago
I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal. Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies. Alexa, play Despacito.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Something I've noticed is that some people have a very emotional tie to privacy while most people don't. When my oldest daughter learned about Alexa (I think she was 13ish at the time), her response was "So it's always listening, and connected to Amazon? Who would ever want that?" While most of the rest of my family ranged from ambivalent to uncaring about the privacy issue.
decasteve 5y ago
Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too: We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost. I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.
nr2x 5y ago
Here's a good behavioral experiment that shows surveillance can reduce people's comfort speaking online. Likewise, if people are afraid to speak up, you aren't hearing it. http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-Mass-Communication-Quarterly-2016-Stoycheff-1077699016630255.pdf http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-...
godelski 5y ago
I think what confuses me most is that one side of the political isle says their major concern is big government and them taking away rights. Yet these people are the hardest to convince to use services like Signal, VPNs, or even basic privacy things like ad blockers (or pick your poison of basic privacy tools). Like if you don't want them to take your guns you should also be concerned about them spying on you. It has utterly surprised me how little they are. If we're going with the super inaccurate political compass I'd say it tends to be lower center and lower left that tend to care more about surveillance. I'm not sure why it isn't everyone that is afraid of the government. I just don't get it. Maybe someone can actually explain it to me, because my friends and family just say "what can I do" and "well I have nothing to hide."
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I've a theory that it might break down along 'faith in process' vs 'faith in community' - the types to hold on to their guns seem to generally imagine using them alongside a few people they trust very deeply on a personal level, while the types to care about privacy seem to imagine more that well-intentioned individuals can steer things into a better direction without ever building the sort of interpersonal trust a militia movement would require. The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah, this is fucked up. How can people not care about this stuff? It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.
jeffwass 5y ago
I reread 1984 several months back, my first time reading it since 8th grade, I believe. It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies
syshum 5y ago
People will always perfer the guided cage of illusory safety constructed by government over the messy unpredictable chaos of freedom.... how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty
- cloudfifty 5y ago
  Maybe, but you are not selling freedom. Your previous comments here make that abundantly clear. People are smarter than you seem to think. They know that for the vast majority, Propertarianism in practice means subservience to the propertied. That's not a rejection of freedom, but rather a defense of what's still left of it.

derg 5y ago

Honestly it could also be it's just hard to fathom the breadth and scale. Easier to imagine someone opening your mail or tapping your phone or otherwise physically interacting with things you own over the government intercepting a request to post a picture to facebook, for instance. I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.

thanatos519 5y ago

Maybe 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman will help you fathom it; here's the forward: https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170foreword.html https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170forew...

tsimionescu 5y ago

I think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being on matters of strategy (e.g. "The US should have retreated from Vietnam earlier", not "there was no defensible reason for the war in Vietnam, it was just a blatant display of imperialism"). And I'm not talking about Fox (who pride themselves on such views), but even the most liberal papers or news channels. Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.

maybelsyrup 5y ago
I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  This video of CNN host Brian Williams referring to 'The Beauty of our Weapons' has stuck with me as one of the most bizarre examples of the prevailing pro-war attitude in the 'left press': https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420 https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420
  - decasteve 5y ago
    I vowed never to watch CNN again after exclaiming how excited they were to be going back to Iraq for the 2nd war.
  - maybelsyrup 5y ago
    Good lord man, I thought I'd seen some bad stuff coming out of that guy but that's pretty obsequious
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    That's quite on-the-nose considering Cohen has said that the song was about extremism in general and terrorism specifically.
lettergram 5y ago
The people who started these programs are now contributors to CNN and MSNBC after trump fired them....

treis 5y ago

> Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.

pope_meat 5y ago
Here's one negative thing you can now associate with mass surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- treis 5y ago
  I don't see that as a clearly negative thing. At worst it's controversial and theoretically could lead to negative things. But I don't see any concrete harm to associate with that practice.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree A justice system that contradicts itself like that can't be just.
- jackpirate 5y ago
  The problem is that most ordinary people view that as a positive, not a negative.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    Sigh. What is the road to hell paved with? That's right, good intentions. See you in hell, folks, when the laws change and your perfectly legal existence up until that point becomes a problem to the state, and then the good cops will break a few little constitutional protections to build a parallel case against you...which of course, ordinary people view as a positive, not a negative. Sometimes I think I should run away to another place that isn't turning in to a fascists police state, but then I realize ordinary scared people act predictably, so I guess I welcome our fascist overlords, hand me an arm band, let's clean up these streets of the checks notes trash. lots of sarcasm included for free.

sneak 5y ago

I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life. They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists. It's a lack of imagination, really. The Long Now.

nobody9999 5y ago
>I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life. I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves. As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general. Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government. There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful. Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target. That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.
- sneak 5y ago
  Corporate data collection doesn’t generally send the police or military to your house when you sufficiently challenge the status quo. Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data. Experian doesn’t have a torture chamber. The Chicago PD and the CIA do.

austincheney 5y ago

That is why I find most interesting about social media generally. Many people seem to care about government mass data collection all the while voluntarily and intentionally providing to private companies from which the government purchases it. Having your cake and eating it too.

cronix 5y ago

I think part of the reason, maybe by design, is it took 7 years to be ruled illegal. I'm actually surprised it didn't take longer. A lot happens in 7 years. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowden-nsa-surveillance-guardian-court-rules https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

There's a chance that it's actually not that huge of a deal? We like to be dramatic here like the sky is falling.

nxc18 5y ago

I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal. Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies. Alexa, play Despacito.

aidenn0 5y ago
Something I've noticed is that some people have a very emotional tie to privacy while most people don't. When my oldest daughter learned about Alexa (I think she was 13ish at the time), her response was "So it's always listening, and connected to Amazon? Who would ever want that?" While most of the rest of my family ranged from ambivalent to uncaring about the privacy issue.

decasteve 5y ago

Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too: We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost. I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.

nr2x 5y ago

Here's a good behavioral experiment that shows surveillance can reduce people's comfort speaking online. Likewise, if people are afraid to speak up, you aren't hearing it. http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-Mass-Communication-Quarterly-2016-Stoycheff-1077699016630255.pdf http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-...

godelski 5y ago

I think what confuses me most is that one side of the political isle says their major concern is big government and them taking away rights. Yet these people are the hardest to convince to use services like Signal, VPNs, or even basic privacy things like ad blockers (or pick your poison of basic privacy tools). Like if you don't want them to take your guns you should also be concerned about them spying on you. It has utterly surprised me how little they are. If we're going with the super inaccurate political compass I'd say it tends to be lower center and lower left that tend to care more about surveillance. I'm not sure why it isn't everyone that is afraid of the government. I just don't get it. Maybe someone can actually explain it to me, because my friends and family just say "what can I do" and "well I have nothing to hide."

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I've a theory that it might break down along 'faith in process' vs 'faith in community' - the types to hold on to their guns seem to generally imagine using them alongside a few people they trust very deeply on a personal level, while the types to care about privacy seem to imagine more that well-intentioned individuals can steer things into a better direction without ever building the sort of interpersonal trust a militia movement would require. The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yeah, this is fucked up. How can people not care about this stuff? It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.

jeffwass 5y ago

I reread 1984 several months back, my first time reading it since 8th grade, I believe. It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies

syshum 5y ago

People will always perfer the guided cage of illusory safety constructed by government over the messy unpredictable chaos of freedom.... how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty

cloudfifty 5y ago
Maybe, but you are not selling freedom. Your previous comments here make that abundantly clear. People are smarter than you seem to think. They know that for the vast majority, Propertarianism in practice means subservience to the propertied. That's not a rejection of freedom, but rather a defense of what's still left of it.