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Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things.

It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!

Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.

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I think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being on matters of strategy (e.g. "The US should have retreated from Vietnam earlier", not "there was no defensible reason for the war in Vietnam, it was just a blatant display of imperialism"). And I'm not talking about Fox (who pride themselves on such views), but even the most liberal papers or news channels.

Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.

I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.

This video of CNN host Brian Williams referring to 'The Beauty of our Weapons' has stuck with me as one of the most bizarre examples of the prevailing pro-war attitude in the 'left press':

https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420

I vowed never to watch CNN again after exclaiming how excited they were to be going back to Iraq for the 2nd war.

Good lord man, I thought I'd seen some bad stuff coming out of that guy but that's pretty obsequious

That's quite on-the-nose considering Cohen has said that the song was about extremism in general and terrorism specifically.

The people who started these programs are now contributors to CNN and MSNBC after trump fired them....

I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.

They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists.

It's a lack of imagination, really. The Long Now.

>I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.

I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves.

As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general.

Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government.

There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful.

Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target.

That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.

Corporate data collection doesn’t generally send the police or military to your house when you sufficiently challenge the status quo.

Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.

Experian doesn’t have a torture chamber. The Chicago PD and the CIA do.

>Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.

And that makes it perfectly fine for corporations to do so? Because they can't rough you up or arrest you?

Please.

As I said:

  ...complaining about big, bad government (which
  isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the 
  larger issue)

My point (apparently, I wasn't explicit enough) was that it's not just governments that are the issue. What's more, if there were appropriate restrictions on collecting and monetizing peoples' data, in this case the DoD would have nothing to buy.

It's much easier (at least in the US) to restrain the Federal government than hundreds (thousands?) of corporations, regardless of their monopoly on the use of force.

Railing against the government for compromising the privacy of its citizens is absolutely appropriate. That said, there is the much, much more widespread issue of corporate surveillance that should also be addressed.

There’s a big difference between being under surveillance because people want to manipulate you into giving them money, and being under surveillance so that you can be kidnapped at gunpoint to stop you from whatever it was you were doing (even if it is all legal).

Corporate surveillance is bad, sure. But, even when maximally bad, it doesn’t pose that grave a threat to a society’s correct functioning.

When the state gets to use it for what is called “law enforcement” (qualified because, for example, the aforementioned CIA torture prisons, and MLK Jr was targeted thus by the FBI, and sent threatening letters by them as a result) the maximum danger from misuse is a grave risk to a free society.

>Corporate surveillance is bad, sure. But, even when maximally bad, it doesn’t pose that grave a threat to a society’s correct functioning.

Except it does. Especially in this case, since the government purchased the data collected via corporate surveillance. Or did you miss that part?

If the data hadn't been collected via corporate surveillance,the DoD would have nothing to buy, would they?

We can vote out of government those who would allow violations of our privacy (whether or not we do so is a different, but equally important discussion). We cannot do so with corporations.

Given the circumstance in this case (the DoD purchasing this data from private corporations rather than collecting it independently), including corporate surveillance in the discussion is critically important.

When one's paycheck depends on a not understanding certain things, it's often difficult to get that person to understand those things. Some food for thought, friend.

> We can vote out of government those who would allow violations of our privacy (whether or not we do so is a different, but equally important discussion).

I think this is an illusion. There is ~no one to vote for that supports rolling back US government bulk surveillance.

I don't like it but it really is just the govt adapting to the new connected landscape.

I think this might be overly pessimistic. imo more people care about their privacy but feel powerless to affect change than don't really care about it at all

Not caring about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say.

While I agree that the major reasons for being anti-surveillance is because of the long game, can we not also complain about our tax dollars being wasted in the short term?

Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too:

We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.

I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.

> Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance.

I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.

Here's one negative thing you can now associate with mass surveillance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

I don't see that as a clearly negative thing. At worst it's controversial and theoretically could lead to negative things. But I don't see any concrete harm to associate with that practice.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

A justice system that contradicts itself like that can't be just.

The problem is that most ordinary people view that as a positive, not a negative.

Sigh.

What is the road to hell paved with?

That's right, good intentions.

See you in hell, folks, when the laws change and your perfectly legal existence up until that point becomes a problem to the state, and then the good cops will break a few little constitutional protections to build a parallel case against you...which of course, ordinary people view as a positive, not a negative.

Sometimes I think I should run away to another place that isn't turning in to a fascists police state, but then I realize ordinary scared people act predictably, so I guess I welcome our fascist overlords, hand me an arm band, let's clean up these streets of the checks notes trash.

lots of sarcasm included for free.

I don't think most people think of that as negative. I believe most people would read that Wikipedia article, and think "great, law enforcement sometimes gets hamstrung in how it can collect evidence, and this lets them get the bad guys even when the legal process makes it difficult".

The bit that you seem to have missed in the parent post is that most people will not consider something bad unless that bad thing has directly negatively impacted them. Some people will go further and make excuses for the bad thing, even when it has negatively impacted them: "yeah, it's really bad that I got falsely accused because of this bad thing, but I think it's still a useful tool, and law enforcement just needs to be more careful using it so they only snare the real bad guys".

Most people seem to have no opinion on mass surveillance, or a positive one. They've done nothing bad, so they have nothing to hide, right? And even when someone gets caught up in it by mistake, the error rate is low enough such that we'll never get mass denouncements from regular people.

> At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

Maybe 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman will help you fathom it; here's the forward:

https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170forew...

Yeah, this is fucked up. How can people not care about this stuff?

It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.

Honestly it could also be it's just hard to fathom the breadth and scale. Easier to imagine someone opening your mail or tapping your phone or otherwise physically interacting with things you own over the government intercepting a request to post a picture to facebook, for instance.

I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.

Here's a good behavioral experiment that shows surveillance can reduce people's comfort speaking online. Likewise, if people are afraid to speak up, you aren't hearing it.

http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-...

That is why I find most interesting about social media generally. Many people seem to care about government mass data collection all the while voluntarily and intentionally providing to private companies from which the government purchases it. Having your cake and eating it too.

I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies.

Alexa, play Despacito.

Something I've noticed is that some people have a very emotional tie to privacy while most people don't. When my oldest daughter learned about Alexa (I think she was 13ish at the time), her response was "So it's always listening, and connected to Amazon? Who would ever want that?" While most of the rest of my family ranged from ambivalent to uncaring about the privacy issue.

There's a chance that it's actually not that huge of a deal? We like to be dramatic here like the sky is falling.

I think part of the reason, maybe by design, is it took 7 years to be ruled illegal. I'm actually surprised it didn't take longer. A lot happens in 7 years.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...

People will always perfer the guided cage of illusory safety constructed by government over the messy unpredictable chaos of freedom....

how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty

Maybe, but you are not selling freedom. Your previous comments here make that abundantly clear. People are smarter than you seem to think. They know that for the vast majority, Propertarianism in practice means subservience to the propertied. That's not a rejection of freedom, but rather a defense of what's still left of it.

I think what confuses me most is that one side of the political isle says their major concern is big government and them taking away rights. Yet these people are the hardest to convince to use services like Signal, VPNs, or even basic privacy things like ad blockers (or pick your poison of basic privacy tools). Like if you don't want them to take your guns you should also be concerned about them spying on you. It has utterly surprised me how little they are. If we're going with the super inaccurate political compass I'd say it tends to be lower center and lower left that tend to care more about surveillance. I'm not sure why it isn't everyone that is afraid of the government. I just don't get it. Maybe someone can actually explain it to me, because my friends and family just say "what can I do" and "well I have nothing to hide."

I've a theory that it might break down along 'faith in process' vs 'faith in community' - the types to hold on to their guns seem to generally imagine using them alongside a few people they trust very deeply on a personal level, while the types to care about privacy seem to imagine more that well-intentioned individuals can steer things into a better direction without ever building the sort of interpersonal trust a militia movement would require.

The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.

I reread 1984 several months back, my first time reading it since 8th grade, I believe.

It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies

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