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Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

I think anigbrowl's post is itself a perfect example of the myopic and trivial mindset you explained in your OP. Let me live my life of narcissistic hedonism, or else fuck you! The government is taking away my liberties? I don't care, and that's equally valid as caring, gosh darn it! I like playing the cello!

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Or maybe, just maybe, people process the information they get about what the government is doing, and reasonably conclude that they're okay with it? Maybe it's possible for reasonable people to not believe that the NSA capturing information that even low-level IT people at AT&T have access to is not some grievous "taking away" of their liberties?

I have a lot of things on my plate (job, baby, etc), but I've though about the NSA spying, and guess what: I'm okay with it! After the Guardian walked back its initial claims and we saw what the NSA was actually up to, it amounted to:

1) FISC warrants to gather call detail records at Verizon;

2) A mechanism for Google, Facebook, etc, to easily transfer customer data to the government pursuant to valid legal processes.

It looks to me like the government took care to structure the scheme to stay within the bounds of the law, both statutory and Constitutional.

Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now. And I didn't come to these conclusions because I don't have the "mental bandwidth" to juggle work and kids and also evaluate what I think about my government's actions.

>>Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now.

The part where your analogy breaks down is that not having universal healthcare or reforms to federal educational funding are not things that infringe on people's freedoms.

Sez you. Someone that's in ill-health for lack of affordable medical attention or unable to exploit their academic potential due to financial insecurity is facing considerable restrictions on their freedom. Equally, it can be argued that a Verizon customer whose call metadata ends up in an NSA database is not actually impacted by that data collection unless s/he had a burning urge to start calling 1-800-ALQAEDA.

All that call data could be misused for oppressive purposes. But you haven't offered any evidence that it is, other than your apparent conviction that all government ultimately ends up as tyrannical and oppressive, a conviction which I absolutely do not share.

Are you kidding me? Not having access to guaranteed-issue health care makes it impossible for many families to start companies and keeps them chained to full-time jobs just so they can be assured that they won't be bankrupted if they get appendicitis.

I don't think keeping the government from seeing information that low-level IT people at AT&T or Facebok can see is, in Ben Franklin's terminology, "essential liberty." Indeed, I'm far more concerned about what kind of protections exist to keep my bank or my credit card company or my health insurance provider from seeing that information (i.e. none).

err, the point of the OP was that people are too concerned with their own lives to be involved in politics. He wasn't claiming that it was an inferior mindset (myopic, trivial, narcissistic, apathetic), so he wasn't describing people like anigbrowl.

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