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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger. It was a huge shame, but a cultural sign that the US is descending into a surveillance hell hole and people are ok with that. As someone who was (and still is) vehemently against PRISM and NSLs and all that, it was hard to come to terms with. I'm going to keep building things that circumvent the "empire" and hope people start caring eventually.

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> and people are ok with that

I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.

There's also a vast amount of people that were just too young to be aware of Snowden's revelations. These people are now primarily on TikTok what not, and I doubt there's much in those feeds to bring them to light while directly feeding the beast of data hoarding.

> I've seen no evidence of this

Over 99% of Americans point a camera at themselves while they take a shit.

And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.

Very doubtful they've not considered it. When I go to coffee shops, I see maybe a quarter-to-half the laptops have a shade over the webcam. But when I see people using their phones, I've never once seen them use a shade, piece of tape, or post-it note.

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.

But do you think they're taking a measured inventory of the possible consequences, both personal and societal, and saying, "No, I don't value that" ?

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?

I don't even have a cell phone! I have a Libreboot-ed X200 running a 100%-libre distribution of GNU/Linux. My MAC address is randomized every hour. I pulled the OnStar fuse from my car 10 years ago. I run my own email server, and use E2E encryption when my recipient knows how. I use Tor and VPNs. My home phone number is public and posted to my website, and I can't control who has it anyway.

If people had a better work/life balance, perhaps more would have the mental bandwidth to jump through an Olympic gold winning amount of hoops like you did.

The rest would probably use the extra free time to raise their kids/be with family.

It might seem like the Olympics when it's all put together like that, but it's really just one thing at a time, and none of them required any kind of real effort. They were just choices. When it was time to buy a new laptop, I picked the one that had my interests. When it was time to upgrade my OS, I chose the one that respected me. When my cell phone contract was due to be renewed, I said, "no thank you," and bought a VoIP base station instead. I understood how my car, and reportage of my driving habits, were connected to the outside world and I severed that connection by pulling a simple fuse.

If people only did one change per year, even that would be enough to change the winds pushing our mass surveillance.

The cover over the webcam might not be for security per se. It could be they don't want anyone at work - or home? - to accidentally see where they are. If you cover the camera you don't have to worry any such accidents.

My gut says that for most people is the reason.

When I explain to anyone about privacy and some service/products answer usually is 'yeah but it is more convenient so...'

Snowden couldn't convince people that the privacy he was talking about meant a limit on government power. Not sensitive data. And honestly, nobody cares about anyone taking a shit.

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.

Best comment I've seen on hn, maybe ever. Perfect refutation, comic, on point.

I've seen no evidence people aren't ok with that. Most people around me didn't care about the Snowden revelations. It was only tech people who tightened up security.

This is my experience as well. I talked to a LOT of people after the Snowden debacle (techies and otherwise) and the general attitude was "so what? they aren't using the information for anything bad!" or "I have nothing to hide!" (in this thread, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594775)

I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.

> 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.

But what is the "enormous sleeping dragon" my mom, dad, little sister, and teenage cousins need to understand? - and, even once it's patently clear, does it with certainly not result in another "...and???"

Not true at all. I'm a tech person, understand it all and the implications, and I'm not being a doomer about it.

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.

But won't you think of the children!

(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. ..."

>> and people are ok with that

> 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

Maybe you missed this article where a many of the replies say they are fine with facial scanning at airports. Digital rights removal is the slow boiling frog.

"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 people are ok with that.

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.

> it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.

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...

There was something substantially new after Snowden though - prior to his leaks if you pointed out what the US government was likely up to people would laugh at the idea and ask for more sources. Afterwards they tended just accept it.

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.

> There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.

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's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...

You are dense. Imagine a government authorizes 10B for a bridge and then in 5 years a bridge shows up.

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...

>You are dense.

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/Project_SHAMROCK

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.

>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.

Weird take. You have all these aspersions to cast on me and saying I'm trying to "sway public opinion by minimizing" when I'm literally telling one person to learn more about these subjects so they'll be less ignorant.

>These aren't new issues. The obsession with Snowden as a messianic figure

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?

Over ten years ago I wrote about the root of the problem: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

And here is a libertarian solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

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