As far as I can tell from mainstream journalism here in Australia, that's the top priority for most people. It doesn't matter if the brown people are immigrants, refugees, terrorists or locals.
I'm an Australian who lives/works overseas but spends quite a bit of time in Australia, and it's quite sickening to return every 6 months to a more polarised, racist, and terrified public -- and it's sure as hell not Al Qaeda, Daesh or any other external group that's causing the problems, it's the mainstream media.
Last week New Zealand re-elected their head office just days after government spying came to light. The majority of voters don't care. To quote another reddit thread:
> The big reveal was actually that New Zealand was conducting mass surveillance of its population when it's PM and gov't promised it wasn't.[1]
Last year New Zealand was voted 'freest country.'[2]
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2gf9p3/the_kim_do...
[2] http://www.fraserinstitute.org/research-news/news/display.as...
It's complicated.
Mr. Snowden and Mr. Greenwald released proof about plans for mass surveillance, but most voters were satisfied with Prime Minister Key's explanation that the plans were not implemented. If the mass surveillance system was implemented, there wasn't any evidence provided from Mr. Snowden's cache of documents.
And, like you said, the majority of voters didn't care.
You can watch the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKSDmwKcFQA
I don't think what Snowden and the PM were saying were so incompatible - it's a word game. Sir Bruce Ferguson (ex head of the GCSB) said on RNZ that surveillance is an agent actively looking at data, so "mass surveillance" would be agents actively looking at 4.4M peoples' data. Clearly that's not happening, so John Key can claim that there's no mass surveillance here with no conflict. Snowden said he routinely saw New Zealanders' data, but the Americans can collect all that data with impunity since we're all filthy foreigners to them - there was no evidence presented that it's the GCSB actually collecting it.
This is why surveillance, like tax, needs international laws these days - domestic law is mostly irrelevant unless you're the US. In our case the US can collect our data with no issues since basically all our internet goes through there, and we can just ask them for it if we want it. Everyone can say they're not doing any wrong with no fear of contradiction, and everyone is happy.
Except us, of course, because, you know, we're being constantly monitored.
The word game is two sides of a coin.
But of course, it's another example of how the law lags way behind on tech matters - within 5 or 10 years an agent having to actually look at the data will be totally anachronistic. Algorithms can already find patterns more readily than humans can in many cases.
"Key Activities in Progress: Access ... New Zealand: Partner cable access program achieves phase 1"
"New Zealand: GCSB's cable access program SPEARGUN phase 1; awaiting new GCSB Act expected July 2013; first metadata probe mid 2013."
Yeah if you play word games the NSA isn't 'collecting' everything either. Since 'collecting' means a human inspecting the content.
Mass collection and permanent storage, automated reasoning and algorithmic processing for keywords/content/intentionality IS surveillance or at least that's a useful definition, anyway.
Then even if you do care, what can you realistically do?