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Comment by philangist | Hacker News Reader

I'm a coder and one of the young redditors/HN readers you're talking about (18 years old). I've grown up in a post-9/11 world so it can be sometimes hard for me to understand that there was a time that it wasn't assumed the government wasn't conducting mass surveillance. How do you approach the problem of making this a real issue for most people my age? And as technologists, how can we help develop solutions to intrusive government policies like this?

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Let me make it crazy for you. I remember a day when you didn't need ID to fly on an airplane, or a security badge to get into normal office buildings. And when the idea of having to insist on such was considered unamerican and a sign of a totalitarian state.

I'm 27. One of the few memories from my childhood that I cling most dearly to was when in 1994 I flew to the US from Austraila. The pilots invited my family and I up to the cockpit during the flight so I could see the controls of a 747.

This wasn't some uncommon special event either. It was part and parcel of doing an international flight as a kid.

That happend to a coworker of mine last summer where he got to take his kid into seeing the cockpit of the plane they were flying in.

Granted this plane wasn't bound for the US, but still I was very happy about that; the kid was happy.

People who grew up under relatively benign surveillance may not have the imagination or experience to see what happens when all that data is used maliciously. So you need to get people reading. Historical accounts. Recent experiences[1]. Fiction[2].

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie... [2]: http://www.randomhouse.com.au/books/claire-carmichael/incogn...

Very much this (awesome reddit comment too). In OP's generation there seems to be an "I don't read" mentality among some. I don't know how pervasive it is, I only have anecdotal evidence, but if it's a thing, it's bad news.

People who don't read extensively are much more susceptible to accepting their current reality, no matter how bad it may have become in even a single generation, because they have no frame of reference that extends beyond their own limited observations.

A similar analogy is Paul Graham's "Blub Paradox" [1] - programmers who program with "Blub", at low end of the language power scale, can't recognize more powerful languages up the scale b/c they have no frame of reference for identifying and understanding the features that make them better.

In both cases, it's all about realizing how limited and narrow your default frame of reference is, and expanding it by broad learning - spanning long time periods, or spanning the programming language scale, as the case may be.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Just to clarify: that wasn't me in the reddit comment.

I am in my early 40s, grew up in SEAsia and Australia. Although I enjoy relatively lack of surveillance in those area, I lived in a time where the cold war was occurring between East and West and just after the infamous FBI [1] surveillances. So surveillance has always been there.

I truly believe that our population were always under surveillance (either covertly or overtly), it just that in todays' technological landscape, the folks doing the surveying are easier to be caught out.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

The big deal is that honestly young people seem not to think twice about yielding up their personal information to the data maws (older, non-tech folks have the same issue, so let's not spin it as a purely generational problem!).

If you need to make it a "real issue", well, honestly, you lack a sufficiently cruel and malicious imagination--it should be self-evident that any sort of monitoring and data-mining (.gov or not) is very dangerous, and something which you should think very carefully about opting into.

We need to make this an issue for everyone, not merely millenials. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem like it's going to happen until there are more casualties in the privacy wars.

  | young people seem not to think twice about
  | yielding up their personal information

Young people don't think twice about a lot of stupid things. It's called being young and inexperienced.

Now now, let's not be too hard on the follies of youth--how do you think I learned C?

I never said it was a bad thing. Just a 'hallmark of youth.'

I don't know, I think twice about a lot of stuff I used to do more carelessly (I'm 21 now), but yielding my data isn't one of them. I just can't seem to bring myself to care if the NSA is reading my email. Perhaps part of that is that I can't recall any negative consequences of the government knowing who I'm calling, whereas I can remember negative consequences for, say, drinking too much.

> I just can't seem to bring myself to care if the NSA is reading my email

Most of us will skate through our entire lives and never need to care about this. The problem is, some small minority of us will need to care, indeed, it will be of life and death importance. Through your innocent lack of caring, you are enabling the persecution of the small subset of people who this will actually impact. Many of those people will be innocent, incidental bystanders who just happen to get caught up by the system. But some those people will be crucially important figures - the Assanges, the Nelson Mandela's, and so on. People who actually change history.

So my question to you is, how do we convince you, as a prototypical "young person", to care about something that has no immediate impact on you but might be crucially important to you or someone other than you many years from now? Do you have the capacity to do that at all? How do we invoke it?

Here's an example: Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime. Sometimes the conspiracy alone, that is just talking about breaking the law without ever doing it, is considered a crime.*

So an email suggesting something illegal with a reply agreeing can get you prosecuted and jailed. We all know how hard it is to understand tone from emails so even if you were joking you would have a hard time proving that in court. And if you weren't joking in the email but just imagining what might happen that can still be a prosecutable crime.

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Shabani

Let's try. Something like:

Some future event causes a dramatically change in your email `float meta_traffic_index' to trip a conditional threshold branching onto to why236(). If why236() conditionals returns indices within patterns statistically outlying, upgrades the colored code, larger font size label, and bar code, on your now growing hardcopy docket. Utah 24/7, dwells on your next expectation and every other why236() ORANGE profiles.

I don't blame them though, if you are lured into buying something like a smartphone, and want the convenience of say, using your addressbook across devices - than what options do you have?

I'm slightly older and a little paranoid - to the point I'm scared of even activating something like a Windows account on Windows 8 - because I'm not even aware what data will be exported from my computer.

So to a lot of people they trade privacy for convenience. Everybody else is doing it, so why not me?

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