Comment by orthecreedence 10 months ago
Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger. It was a huge shame, but a cultural sign that the US is descending into a surveillance hell hole and people are ok with that. As someone who was (and still is) vehemently against PRISM and NSLs and all that, it was hard to come to terms with. I'm going to keep building things that circumvent the "empire" and hope people start caring eventually.
There's also a vast amount of people that were just too young to be aware of Snowden's revelations. These people are now primarily on TikTok what not, and I doubt there's much in those feeds to bring them to light while directly feeding the beast of data hoarding.
> I've seen no evidence of this
Over 99% of Americans point a camera at themselves while they take a shit.
And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.
Very doubtful they've not considered it. When I go to coffee shops, I see maybe a quarter-to-half the laptops have a shade over the webcam. But when I see people using their phones, I've never once seen them use a shade, piece of tape, or post-it note.
They use the front-facing camera of their phone so often that the temporary inconvenience of removing a shade outweighs the long-term inconvenience of malware snapping an exposing photo.
Snowden couldn't convince people that the privacy he was talking about meant a limit on government power. Not sensitive data. And honestly, nobody cares about anyone taking a shit.
You can advocate for limiting govt. power ("LGP") without leaking any NSA docs. I don't think a single story about "LGP" changed due to the leaks. Everyone knows the government can do a lot of violence on you. So it's very hard.
If you're a high drama personality, yeah you can conflate all these nuanced issues. You can make privacy mean whatever you want.
This is my experience as well. I talked to a LOT of people after the Snowden debacle (techies and otherwise) and the general attitude was "so what? they aren't using the information for anything bad!" or "I have nothing to hide!" (in this thread, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594775)
I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
> I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
Isn't that what I said? Mostly we're debating semantics. My deeper point is that it's counterproductive and borderline misanthropic to argue "People just don't care about evil being done!" whereas the argument that "People seriously have no idea yet what they're 'agreeing' to" opens the door to actual solutions, for one inclined to work on them.
Not true at all. I'm a tech person, understand it all and the implications, and I'm not being a doomer about it.
The more people faff about and fight for privacy as a misguided absolute, the less discussions we can have about ethical, safe and managed uses of surveillance. Privacy advocates have this weird habit of thinking they speak for everyone, which they don't.
But won't you think of the children!
(EU is trying to implement chat control again...)
We need more real-world analogies... "see, this is like having a microphone recording everything you say in this bar"... "see, this is like someone ID-ing you infront of every store and recording what store you've visited, and then following you inside to see what products you look at. See, this is like someone looking at your clothes and then pasting on higer price tags on products. ..."
>> and people are ok with that
> I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
Isn't feeling powerless and being ok with it, ultimately the same thing: Complacency
Maybe you missed this article where a many of the replies say they are fine with facial scanning at airports. Digital rights removal is the slow boiling frog.
"Federal civil rights watchdog sounds alarm over Feds use of facial recognition"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41603698
The mentality of people in tech has drastically shifted into "o well... "
>and people are ok with that.
All the propagandists said he was a Russian asset, as if even if that were true, it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.
>Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger.
This is a great way of putting it.
> it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.
There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.
There's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.
FISA [1] isn't a private law either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
Note: 2006 (Klien) predates 2013 (Snowden)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
There was something substantially new after Snowden though - prior to his leaks if you pointed out what the US government was likely up to people would laugh at the idea and ask for more sources. Afterwards they tended just accept it.
There was a big cultural shift from the default assumption in polite company being "They're spying on Middle Easterners" to "they're spying on everyone, everywhere" when talking about US spying.
> There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.
Laws which the telecoms were knowingly and willfully breaking for years.
You do remember that Congress gave them retroactive immunity? [0][1] You do know that this was only granted because people COULD sue (and were suing) them because of the information made public by Snowden and others?
[0] <https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/retroactive-tele...>
[1] See Title II of the this bill <https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/6304>
>There's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
You are dense. Imagine a government authorizes 10B for a bridge and then in 5 years a bridge shows up.
Now instead, imagine in 1978 [1] a government authorizes "United States federal law that establishes procedures for the surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil" and in 2008 [2] amends it to not be a big deal if they're foreign or not and then 5 years later it turns out they're doing just that.
These bills are not secret. Were not secret. Have never been secret. It's not my fault you didn't read them but it doesn't make Snowden novel.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
Over ten years ago I wrote about the root of the problem: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
And here is a libertarian solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
> and people are ok with that
I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.