I think Snowden was bang on when in 2013 he warned us of a last chance to fight for some basic digital privacy rights. I think there was a cultural window there which has now closed.
All the propagandists said he was a Russian asset, as if even if that were true, it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.
>Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger.
This is a great way of putting it.
There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.
There's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.
FISA [1] isn't a private law either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
Note: 2006 (Klien) predates 2013 (Snowden)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
Now instead, imagine in 1978 [1] a government authorizes "United States federal law that establishes procedures for the surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil" and in 2008 [2] amends it to not be a big deal if they're foreign or not and then 5 years later it turns out they're doing just that.
These bills are not secret. Were not secret. Have never been secret. It's not my fault you didn't read them but it doesn't make Snowden novel.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
Well, maybe you're one of those propagandists. If you can't attack the idea, attack the person, right?
Hand waves, nothing new to see here, carry on.
The bills aren't what were exposed, it was more the techniques and scope. Like PRISM and XKeyScore and circumventing laws by sharing intelligence on US citizens with allies who aren't restricted by US laws. Spying on allied governments, etc. You know, that stuff.
You should really click on the link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_and_Mitchell_defection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Et cetera. These aren't new issues. The obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure is unhelpful in contextualizing the information.
Damn the gall, give it a rest. Again, methods and scope. Which one of those exposes PRISM, XKeyScore and the NSA infiltrating Google servers? Which one of those exposes the companies that willingly "integrated" with the NSA?
Which of those exposes US government spying on allied governments, recording private conversations, etc?
Saying Snowden didn't reveal anything is a silly hill to die on. What is your prerogative in minimizing the exposure? Do you work for one of the companies implicated in participating in prism or something?
Microsoft joined PRISM on 9/11/2007 (fitting)
Yahoo joined PRISM on 3/12/08
Google joined PRISM on 1/4/09
Facebook joined PRISM on 6/3/09
YouTube joined PRISM on 9/24/10
Skype joined PRISM on 2/6/11
AOL joined PRISM on 3/11/11
Apple, the last holdout on the list, joined PRISM 10/12 (after Jobs died).
OP, this is why it seems nobody cares, there's plenty of people trying to sway public opinion on the matter by minimizing it. Nobody wants to believe their government would do things like this, so when someone offers that, "hey it's not so bad," they want to believe it. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe we weren't communicating well, but I felt you were certainly minimizing it by claiming what Snowden revealed weren't "new issues," which they certainly were, and anyone who thinks different has an "obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure," which is an attempt to discredit. Was that your objective?
Laws which the telecoms were knowingly and willfully breaking for years.
You do remember that Congress gave them retroactive immunity? [0][1] You do know that this was only granted because people COULD sue (and were suing) them because of the information made public by Snowden and others?
[0] <https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/retroactive-tele...>
[1] See Title II of the this bill <https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/6304>
There was a big cultural shift from the default assumption in polite company being "They're spying on Middle Easterners" to "they're spying on everyone, everywhere" when talking about US spying.
I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
Isn't that what I said? Mostly we're debating semantics. My deeper point is that it's counterproductive and borderline misanthropic to argue "People just don't care about evil being done!" whereas the argument that "People seriously have no idea yet what they're 'agreeing' to" opens the door to actual solutions, for one inclined to work on them.
Over 99% of Americans point a camera at themselves while they take a shit.
They use the front-facing camera of their phone so often that the temporary inconvenience of removing a shade outweighs the long-term inconvenience of malware snapping an exposing photo.
My gut says that for most people is the reason.
Extremely few decisions that people make are deeply calculated with cold logic. Most decisions are primarily unconscious, automatic, and emotional.
Example: A persons hears it's good to have a webcam cover, so they get one. Nobody mentions doing it for their phone, so they never even think about it. Then someday a friend does mention it, but that would be an inconvenient change, so the person's gut puts up resistance against considering it too strongly. They give in to their emotional response, instead of doing the hard work of changing their emotions based on the knowledge they have.
At no point in the above scenario would the person state "I don't think mass surveillance is a bad thing." For me, that's why I mean when I say people "aren't ok with it."
If one's definition of people being "ok with mass surveillance" just means they tolerate it, that they don't sufficiently resist it (and what level of resistance is sufficient? For a person with a webcam cover but no phone cam cover? Does adding a phone cam cover mean they've declared their opposition to mass surveillance?), then how can you say people aren't okay with literally everything evil or wrong? Most people just won't summon enough activation energy to fight any given injustice around them, no matter how egregious it is. That's not a reflection of their morals and values, it's a reflection of how fucking tired we all are.
I would challenge you to offer up in detail how strongly you have worked to resist mass surveillance in your life. You're logged in and posting on HN, so my guess is, you haven't worked hard enough at it according to someone's metric. Do you have a cover on your phone camera? Just the front one or both? Do you have a cover on the microphones? Do you let others add your number in their contacts or do you refuse to ever give out your real phone number?
The rest would probably use the extra free time to raise their kids/be with family.
If people only did one change per year, even that would be enough to change the winds pushing our mass surveillance.
You can advocate for limiting govt. power ("LGP") without leaking any NSA docs. I don't think a single story about "LGP" changed due to the leaks. Everyone knows the government can do a lot of violence on you. So it's very hard.
If you're a high drama personality, yeah you can conflate all these nuanced issues. You can make privacy mean whatever you want.
(EU is trying to implement chat control again...)
We need more real-world analogies... "see, this is like having a microphone recording everything you say in this bar"... "see, this is like someone ID-ing you infront of every store and recording what store you've visited, and then following you inside to see what products you look at. See, this is like someone looking at your clothes and then pasting on higer price tags on products. ..."
> I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
Isn't feeling powerless and being ok with it, ultimately the same thing: Complacency
The more people faff about and fight for privacy as a misguided absolute, the less discussions we can have about ethical, safe and managed uses of surveillance. Privacy advocates have this weird habit of thinking they speak for everyone, which they don't.
"Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41603698
The mentality of people in tech has drastically shifted into "o well... "
And here is a libertarian solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...