It's making a difference. Maybe not the difference we all want, but the Snowden Leaks have made the National Surveillance Agency a worldwide topic of conversati

It's making a difference. Maybe not the difference we all want, but the Snowden Leaks have made the National Surveillance Agency a worldwide topic of conversation. Surveillance was sold to the public under vague terms: "we only use it to catch terrorists", "it's for your safety", "nobody's reading your email", "if you're innocent, you have nothing to worry about" ... and now there's solid evidence that these are all lies, and have been lies for a long time. The man-on-the-street might be OK with surveillance to catch terr'ists, but they're not OK with a more personal form of surveillance, where someone, somewhere, might be looking at them at some point. So our job is to continue to have these conversations about what kind of surveillance is actually happening, and what the implications are. New Zealand has been politically apathetic about surveillance so far; tonight's event might begin to change that tide. And even in my small town, working with a lot of people who know only a little bit about computers, we've gotten a lot of unprompted questions about surveillance, and who to trust, and what to avoid. We've seen a number of customers that are moving, bit by bit, away from Google products, because they now perceive "Google = surveillance". Again, unprompted -- we don't nudge people in one way or another on this stuff. Talk to more folks. I guarantee you'll find other people that are talking about it.