I’m alive. Nice to meet you.
I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance.
It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others.
I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled.
But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target.
If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?
Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business?
Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to?
I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does.
All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?