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Comment by mcdougle | Hacker News Reader

Did you see the episode of John Oliver's show recently about the subject? Oliver went out and asked people about it, and the general response was "Who is Edward Snowden? Didn't he release some documents that compromised the safety of the U.S.?" and "NSA? Privacy? Meh."

On HN and Reddit, there's plenty of knowledge of the subject because that's the kind of stuff we're interested in and concerned about. But most of society apparently couldn't care less.

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I keep seeing this John Oliver segment brought up in threads related to Snowden & the NSA - it's a comedy show! While interesting, it is not statistically significant proof that "most of society apparently couldn't care less." 0.33% of the US is more than 1 million people. They show ~8 tourists in Times Square on a cold morning in April.

Additionally, being able to identify Snowden is not necessarily indicative of public awareness and concern around issues of civil liberty, privacy, etc. When you do go looking for these numbers they of course vary wildly based on the poll source, questions asked, etc. As a quick example, these two pew reports[1][2] can be interpreted pretty differently.

Does anybody know of any great analysis that's been done in this space?

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/nsa-opinion/country/unit... [2] http://www.people-press.org/question-search/?qid=1858375&pid...

True. But his bit follows pretty closely with what I've experienced (and I've heard others say the same). My friends within the tech sphere pretty much all understand the issue and have an opinion on it. For the most part, my friends outside of the tech sphere generally don't care -- the ones that do are usually pretty into current events and generally know more about what's going on in the world than I do.

I know that's still not statistically significant, but I haven't really seen much analysis on it, so I go with what I've got.

I still frequently hear the "I'm not doing anything wrong, what do I care if they're recording me?" argument.

For those people I love this quote from Snowden himself:

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say" [0]

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/just_days_left_...

I hadn't heard that before. That's a really good quote/counter-argument

Shrug, that "most of society" is getting integrated more with sites like Reddit etc. Exposure to previously not-discussed knowledge is increasing, and people's diet of the mainstream media is (very slowly) weakening.

True, but I think even most who read things like Reddit don't necessarily follow the main stuff that's posted. Reddit's kind of a mixed bag of information, and people go there for all sorts of stuff. I know I generally skip over a lot of the stuff on the front page, even if it might be a big deal, if it doesn't look particularly interesting to me.

When I said HN and Reddit I should've said the more technical crowd.

Sadly no idea who John Oliver is until you mentioned him (English man living in Switzerland).

Quite sad that a lot of Americans don't know who Snowden is, I think most Europeans do (in a completely unscientific anecdata kind of way, you understand..)

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