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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Well, we know that mass surveillance has been installed in the USA, we have detailed proof of it, and this hasn't change a thing. They are still under mass surveillance.

And people are still carrying trackers in their pocker. They put cameras in the front door bell, always online microphones with speech analysis in their living room, give all their life records, textual or in images, to giants companies that have demonstrated the ability to store and analyse that forever.

People don't use more free software. They look at you like you are mad if you don't want to install whatsapp. Even in HN we have people still wondering why we should use Firefox.

Why would we be judging Australians as "complacent" ? Humanity is complacent.

I've been told the boiling frog is a myth, but I'm pretty sure frogs are talking about boiling humans as a telling metaphore.

View on HN

This literally is the divide between HN types and everyday individuals.

The latter pays little attention because they generally do not care whilst HN will debate and suggest endless fixes to the problem - which are always technically more difficult or cumbersome. This is why people buy Apple products on each iteration, religiously for some, because they want it to work, be pretty and the desire of everyone.

The UK has been well known for their love of CCTV and yet crimes still go unpunished and people don't get caught.

I wouldn't say ordinary people "do not care". To some extent, even ordinary people know that the mega tech empires concentrate too much power and data. Popular media hasn't completely failed to report on stuff like FB fiascos, privacy leaks and so on. Many more people are aware than HNers might imagine. But viable solutions are not there. As you point out, alternatives are workable only to the technically inclined, which means they might as well not exist. To be sure there are alternatives which swap one silo for another, but truly private options are too cumbersome to make inroads into mainstream, and they never will, if they continue to remain so fiddly. Of course the other side of this is legislation and regulations but even here the transnational nature of these corps allow them to work around even progressive national laws, and the latter are rare enough, with most politicians bought off one way or another.

While it's definitely true that humanity is complacent overall (clearly), there are some very important differences between the US and Australia.

Australia has actually moved on ending secure encryption for example. That's not yet the case in the US and it's questionable whether the authorities will be able to (they already would have, if they could have), overcoming the significant constitutional hurdles.

There is no need to end encryption in the USA, because the way they collect the data works around the problem entirely.

With secret subpoenas, gag orders and programs like PRISM, they get what they need directly from the source. Either from the services hosting the data, or the devices producing/receiving the data.

The data is never collected while in transit, when it's encrypted. They got the keys for the servers, and back-doors to our devices. They don't care about encryption at all.

Once again, freedom is not a technical problem:

https://xkcd.com/538/

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