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So I guess the lesson is that if you want to have a bigger impact when you blow the whistle, you need hard documentation and evidence. You can't just tell the w

• wahsd 11y ago
  What is most worrisome is that even with all the overwhelming documentation, people, especially in the USA are largely ignoring it. Sure there are some that protest and there is much ado about the violations in European countries, but reality is that nothing substantial is happening beyond token and illusory reforms. It's almost as if someone discovered a time machine, went back in time, showed everyone the documented and recorded evidence that a totalitarian dictatorship was forming; and everyone simply shrugged and called you a witch. Unfortunately, humans are not really all that good at being preemptive. We are ultimately a rather stupid, reactionary life form that won't get it until after we have teetered on the edge of the abyss.
  • joesmo 11y ago
    And those of us who have lived under such a totalitarian state cower in fear both of the government and the idiots ignoring the warnings and thereby enabling the government's tyranny.
  • Cthulhu_ 11y ago
    It doesn't affect people directly, so people don't care. When Facebook started using people's faces on ads, people cared - it affected them. Now though, the NSA does sweeping data gathering, as do all the major internet companies - but they don't show you how they use it, so nobody feels like it's affecting them.
    • fweespeech 11y ago
      Did you see the John Oliver episode about dick pics? Oh, they care once they really understand. The problem is, most people, aren't really thinking that critically about it until it smacks them in the face at which point its (usually) too late.
      • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Interviewing people on the street is mostly a rhetorical (political) or comedic technique. Extrapolating anything serious from it is unwise at best. At the end of the day, John Oliver hosts a comedy show. Though it tends to be on the informative side, it still oversimplifies and exaggerates to get its effect. The more I've watched him, the more I've grown tired of his explicit style of "share a factoid before immediately following on with a forced pop culture reference" that summarizes his work. He seems to be becoming more popular as a research substitute, though.
        • fweespeech 11y ago
          > Extrapolating anything serious from it is unwise at best. I suppose but I've seen literally the exact same reaction when I've explained things like this to people in those sorts of terms vs. the terms the news uses. The problem is the "official research" doesn't explicitly state things like that but use it in terms vague enough people really don't believe/understand that the pics they send their lovers are being stored. > http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-government-surveillance-programs.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gover... Posing the question like that has serious biases because people really and genuinely do not understand the implications. We need official research that is clear, concise, and written in a manner where the connections are obvious. Official research that relies on statements/questions that are vague enough to be heavily biased by the sources of the media the person consumes is valueless, honestly.
        • wfo 11y ago
          He is the closest thing to journalism you can get on your television; the fact that he is becoming popular is encouraging. If nothing else, he is showing us that it is possible to discuss issues at length and in detail with facts and research and still keep an audience, hopefully we will see more shows follow this model instead of the standard news/journalism model which is setting two talking heads who know nothing in a boxing ring and asking them to scream at each other. edit: also, are you really surprised that a comedian is better at explaining important issues to ordinary people in a way they understand than a security researcher or academic? He wasn't attempting to take a sample, rather describe how the issue should be framed. I wouldn't take it as evidence of anything, but rather a heuristic for arguments with your less-privacy-conscious peers, and it's a pretty solid heuristic I think.
    • ptaffs 11y ago
      But it does affect people directly, through tax dollars, which is how I talk about it. Conversley, there must be a lot of jobs created by the program, jobs which would be lost if the program was cut.
  • brador 11y ago
    They're not ignoring it, they just don't know what to do.
  • happyscrappy 11y ago
    >showed everyone the documented and recorded evidence that a totalitarian dictatorship was forming This "dictatorship" involves virtually every country in the West cooperating. That narrative does not work very well so we concentrate on how evil the US is and ignore who is working with them. This line of thinking guarantees the status quo is safe.
  • magicmu 11y ago
    I don't think it's so much that we're not good at being preemptive, although that is probably a part of it. It seems that what is most inhibiting intelligent and passionate discourse about Western surveillance is misdirection. In the United States, one is taught to focus virtually entirely on making ends meet and achieving financial success -- anything other than the financial well-being of a person and that person's family is largely considered secondary. The effect of this is a population that suffers from the condition of caring a great deal about social issues, but not acting on their beliefs. I'm not sure how much this applies in Europe, but in the US I am faced time and time again with the sentiment that XYZ is "undeniably a bad thing, but there isn't much I can do about it." Complimenting this is the fact that many of the people who feel most passionately about these issues are also the people who realize that the consequences of our current political climate are severe, and will stay silent in order to avoid the traditional punishments of the state.
    • ryandrake 11y ago
      Well, there really isn't anything effective that people can do about it without dire consequences. The only person who "did anything" about mass-surveillance is now exiled to Russia, likely for the rest of his life.
  • rayiner 11y ago
    You're leaving out a major piece of the analysis, which is making the conceptual leap from surveillance to totalitarianism. The real world is quite a bit more subtle than the Sci-Fi that makes that leap seem inevitable.
    • pyre 11y ago
      But it is inevitable. Even if it doesn't happen in the short-term, you're setting up a turn-key totalitarian state. All it takes is a major crisis, and the right leader to galvanize people behind the cause. Just look at how populate opinion has changed towards things like surveillance in response to the War on Terror.
      • rayiner 11y ago
        Surveillance is a red-herring in your hypothetical. If a major crisis allowed the right leader to institute a totalitarian government, it would be utterly trivial for that same regime to force Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon to implement a surveillance infrastructure, whether or not one was already in place. Totalitarianism begins and ends with control of the military. You can't be a despot without control of the military, and once you have that everything else is trivial.
• drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >you need hard documentation and evidence. How is anything Snowden released hard evidence? Every single thing Snowden released could have easily been faked. Hell, those powerpoints look fake. Who thought an intelligence agency would use something straight out of the world of TPS reporting and cookie-cutter presentation templates? Note, I'm not saying they're fake, but it would be trivial for someone to make this stuff if they wanted. So the argument that there's this overwhelming proof that the public can't ignore seems like weak sauce to me. The public isn't terribly interested in hard proof (or have the time/expertise to weigh claims), historically. If they were, we'd probably be a society of hard atheists scoffing at anything that can't be trivially proven in the lab. The real issue here is why certain things go viral and others don't. Snowden's fleeing was fairly dramatic and I'm assuming that helped get the ball rolling. The timed release aspect of his disclosures are fairly clever too. Frankly, I think Assange cut a path for him by normalizing this type of leak and the journalist/news system was ready for it. In the past, this system was too busy avoiding these issues, or worse, being a mouthpiece for the current administration (See the NYTimes' disgraceful Iraq pre-war reporting, repeating Bush admin propaganda without question.) Without the Assange/Manning path, the previous whistleblowers only received marginalized exposure. Now news managers realize how profitable leaks are especially with the White House not reciprocating with the 'blocking of access.' Obama's more liberal direction probably guarantees more leaks in his terms. We'll see how things are with the next POTUS. I suspect a GOP POTUS won't be as forgiving as the Bush administration has shown (Valerie Plame/Wilson affair for example).
  • bandrami 11y ago
    For all we know, Snowden is a CIA agent who's taking one for the team as part of the ongoing NSA/CIA turf war. Honestly I kind of lean that way -- he was a CIA direct hire before he was an NSA contractor.
    • bandrami 11y ago
      Hey downvoters, he actually was a CIA direct hire before he was an NSA contractor. Read the Guardian's profile of him.
• sremani 11y ago
  But you will charged with "treason" when you acquire hard evidence, since now a days, every thing is a "state secret".
  • x5n1 11y ago
    The only way to fight surveillance is to make all secrets of every state and every single individual on the planet public knowledge. Total surveillance of everybody at all times available to anyone who wants it. To completely destroy the concept of being alone. That way there is perfect alignment between elites, people, corporations, and governments as to their attitude and thereby policy toward surveillance. We need to hack this and make this a reality. Hackers of the world unite!
    • twobits 11y ago
      I totally agree with this. Privacy is a lost war. We have to turn this on its head. Seems paradoxical, but anyone who doesn't like the surveillance state, having lost the war for privacy, should be FOR surveillance and accessibility to it for all. Equalize the power.
    • aethertap 11y ago
      I think this would only work if everyone also had perfectly equal power to abuse the resulting information flood. In the U.S., it's common knowledge (or at the very least, common belief) that the majority of politicians are corrupt and routinely do things that would land the rest of us in prison. Despite that knowledge, we generally have no power to do anything meaningful about it because they make the rules. I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched and I'm subject to arbitrary action by people who have power. I think total surveillance, even if it includes the powerful few, would be a disaster for human rights and freedom in general. So what if the dictator is impeccable in his daily routine, if he's watching every move of a population and subjecting them to unequal treatment under the law?
      • x5n1 11y ago
        The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe.