> Why, then, have so many people, both in the Congress and the public been shocked at the extent to which the NSA is snarfing up data?
Because people ignore what they're being told. Eschelon and Carnivore have been around for a LONG time so none of this should be shocking.
Carnivore was supposedly designed to be deployed against people who are suspects for a particular reason already. While some of the ECHELON satellite intercept hardware and the existence of the UKUSA agreement is known, exactly what is intercepted does not appear to have been ever leaked, and so the public have never had any reason based on mainstream media reports that they personally are being spied on.
Many people might be happy for a scheme that involves criminals being monitored, because they never think it will apply to them. But those same people will be angry when they hear definitive proof that a government is filing away data on them even though they didn't do anything wrong.
It mystifies me why everyone is so focused on PRISM, there is zero logical basis - and I'm starting to suspect it's intentional that the most innocuous program is taking up the majority of media time.
They want the US to be actively preventing the next Boston Marathon bombing or 9/11. And are more than happy to give up a small amount of their own privacy in order to do so.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-spying-p...
The thing is that these surveillance tools are never enough. They enhance them, and a terrorist act happens, and they start saying that they need more power to prevent something like that in the future. It's baloney.
The only way for them to prevent future crime is to turn the country into an Orwellian dystopia. The thing is that we don't even know how effective these surveillance programs are, since the gov't doesn't release any data. Any time questions of efficacy rise, 'they' say that these programs help catch terrorists, but they don't give any concrete data.
I for one am not all that upset about what these leaks have shown, and while I'd like for the companies who get ordered to hand over data to announce that they're doing so, I don't mind the actual transfer.
People just don't generally think in terms of, "Have Gmail/Facebook/HackerNews/Reddit, or have privacy."