The Guardian writes an expose on what should be the greatest political scandal of our lifetime- the fact that low level contractors and government employees can access all of our chat history, emails and browsing history.
The response? No one on social media is really discussing it, CNN America only has a passing mention of it on their front page (buried near the bottom) and America goes on with its day.
What does it take to get American's outraged about something?
- Stanley Kubrick http://youtu.be/xa-KBqOFgDQ?t=51m30s
It's worth noting that this was in the context of nothing less than the atom bomb.
Suggest that professional game players should take sensible safety precautions.
sex
That, or an inside trading potential example.
Money or sex is something everyone understands.
I would argue that half of the country only gets fired up about something when they're told to do so by the party they vote for, the same one that dictates what they believe on any given issue. That's why it hurts that there is a Democrat in the Presidency right now, it has silenced a lot of the supposed civil rights advocates on the left.
Americans can get outraged just fine. The problem is that many people just don't understand exactly what's going on. They're either not very technical, and/or don't understand through the context of history, the ramifications of mass state surveillance.
This highlights the problem with our news-as-entertainment media model. It gives us what the country wants (sensationalism, excitement), not what the country needs (facts, context). Until not-for-profit media organizations can give the private news industry (in particular: CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS) some legitimate competition, we'll be stuck in this cycle.
He should have led with this leak.