On a tangent--I have to say, this has been a weird era.
It was started by a small group of people who decided to kick Americans into a state of fear and panic--Bin Laden et al--and they succeeded, wildly. And it might be ended by one man, who decided to kick Americans into a state of suspicion that their fear and panic has been used against them.
It feels a bit mythical, individual heroes and villains swaying the fates of nations like this. Politics isn't supposed to be this neat and tidy, is it? Things like this are only supposed to exist when you revise history to make the lines less muddy. And yet, here we are.
With Snowden, things have been getting more and more absurd and someone was bound to point it out with credible evidence sooner or later.
Politics isn't supposed to be this neat and tidy, is it? Things like this are only supposed to exist when you revise history to make the lines less muddy.
World War I was set off by one guy assassinating one other guy. But, it wouldn't have really mattered if everyone wasn't already this -->.<-- close to breaking out in war anyway.
Politics isn't neat and tidy, and there will always be events that hit at the right time to have outsized effects. And a lot of times, those events will have some visible individual playing a key role.
The only difference between this and me saying I'm going to stop using email and drop off the internet would be that my statement won't generate several threads on HN. It would, however, have the same effect. Those that already know will ask why, and the rest of the world will go on oblivious.
I'll take you up on that bet, assuming you believe it's going to get better. I believe the only way you'll win it is if you mean looking very different to include worse instead of the implied better you wrote.
The majority don't care. Of the minority that even pay attention to it, most of them support it to catch the evil terrorists.
Expecting the public to be instantly outraged by an injustice is like expecting customers to instantly understand your startup. Sure, your product is awesome, your ideas are great, and you know how to execute. But you still have a long uphill slog ahead of you before people will start giving you money. The vast majority of your market will only buy once they see lots of other people buying.
Similarly, the average person will only get upset about the NSA when they see lots of other people getting upset. A successful political movement involves winning over one influencer at a time, as the evidence slowly builds up. The Watergate scandals took a good two years to play out. Successful anti-war movements have sometimes taken half a decade.
Politics has a surprising amount of momentum. If you want to change something, you may need to spend years exerting a relatively tiny force on a huge object. And like a startup, you need to lay lots of groundwork so that you can take advantage of lucky opportunities.
Edit: grammar
First, Snowden steals his information from a Microsoft Sharepoint server? What are classified documents doing on a Sharepoint server? What is a Sharepoint server doing inside the network boundary at NSA?
Next, they blew the recovery. If they negotiated with Snowden when he was in Hong Kong, they could have had him stand trial in Hawaii and won easily. Or alternatively, they could have done nothing and waited for Snowden to settle down anonymously in some Hong Kong apartment and arranged for an extraordinary rendition, most likely with the tacit blessing of Hong Kong authorities.
Instead we've had this wild goose chase across the world, including the surreal scene of Snowden stuck in the Moscow International Airport, with Vladimir Putin claiming that Moscow Airport isn't part of Russia.
Now, they're going to harass a journalist? The US press, which normally handles national security issues in close consultation with US authorities, is clearly spooked, with front page stories in both WSJ and NYT. There's an old adage: never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.
The general public, which didn't care, is now bombarded by increasingly fantastical news stories with just enough entertainment juice to keep them interesting: super-spies reading your email, a lone hacker with a model for a girlfriend fleeing Hawaii to galavant around the world, and the invincible United States seemingly flummoxed at every turn.
Not to put too fine of a point on it, but what the fuck guys? Have we really never considered how to exfil someone from a hostile nation?
Is this really the best our intelligence community can do? If so, the real danger is less 1984 and more kindergarten cops. Maybe the story is more complex from the inside, but if not, this is being botched from end to end.
The recovery efforts for Snowden are probably coming out of White House, DoD CSS, CIA, and FBI. Not wild about their performance here.
While I see some raised awareness, most of the change I'm seeing is that the raised awareness is making the government more successful in intimidating those who aren't actively supporting the status quo into hiding under a rock and not engaging in (or facilitating) mass communication.
While this might be a momentary transition on the way to actual positive change, I think it is naively optimistic to assume that it must be a sign that positive change is in progress.
By using the passive voice, who are you suggesting comes along to "Secure" the internet? Surely not the same government that brought us the NSA?