Comment by graedus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graedus | Hacker News Reader

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> Your points are well-taken, but in a democracy it's a hard argument to make to say: "people don't really think what they think they think because of the media."

It's not that hard an argument -- there have been probably hundreds of studies on the influence of media on people's opinions and resulting actions. Why do you think advertising is a nearly half-trillion dollar industry worldwide? It's a significant chunk of GDP in the US and UK, for example, and not without reason: advertising through various media consistently makes a measurable impact on the buying patterns of consumers, and it's not exactly a huge leap to apply this to politics[0].

That point aside, I appreciate the insight, and I think you're on the right track as far as thinking about how to make the issues more concrete to people in a personal way.

The other, perhaps over-broad human nature question is how to get people care about this shit even if it truly only affects "others" - people of other countries, other social classes, other races and other religions. There are middle-aged, upper class voting people, white ones even, who care deeply that their government detains and tortures mulsim men in secret and not-so-secret prisons without trial, who care if activists are targeted for intimidation or treated similarly to terrorists, who can look at history and see that pervasive surveillance without meaningful oversight is always, always abused at some point and who aren't so scared of terrorism that they vote all their own rights away in order to feel safe. That is a much harder battle.

[0] http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...

> see that pervasive surveillance without meaningful oversight is always, always abused at some point

I think that being more specific and using more examples would help a lot here. It's one thing to say "this will be abused" in some sort of abstract way. It's another to point to specific detailed examples of abuse (either here or in other similar societies).

I'll take it as a given at this point that a bunch of my emails and phone calls are sitting on an NSA hard drive somewhere. How is that going to come back to haunt me?

Keep in mind that the guys on the other side of the argument are using this as a specific negative outcome: http://derecjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Twin-Towers...

That's your competition.

The thing is, the details of the 9/11 attacks were known to the government well before and were ignored or discounted. That actually argues the point that SIGINT like that of PRISM and XKEYSCORE is incredibly dangerous if it is seen as a panacea to the problem of human failure. Our signals intelligence is still susceptible to the vagaries of the humans on the receiving end.

You are entirely correct. We need visceral examples. Even if they don't affect regular people directly they need to be the kind of thing that people instinctively recoil from. Emotion and vividness trump logical reasoning when it comes to swaying the masses, so we need vivid examples that make an emotional impact in order to win the public debate. I joke with friends that the NSA will be canceled overnight if we can just prove that they have been killing (american) babies.

The best example I've been able to find is the FBI's attempt to blackmail Martin Luther King into silence (actually suicide) by recording what was apparently a sexual peccadillo. It is a very concrete example of how surveillance can damage the fabric of society.

http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-bl...

More recently, but much less vivid, is the example of the NSA snooping through Bill Clinton's email. If a former president is considered enough of a threat to record his email then something must be wrong.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/pinwale/

It is also looking like the NSA->DEA->IRS flow of information might be a useful example simply because nobody like the IRS.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/irs-manual-dea-inte...

> Emotion and vividness trump logical reasoning when it comes to swaying the masses

See, you're going in the wrong direction right of the bat. The people that disagree with you aren't stupid. A lot of them are smarter than you are. They just have different values than you do. Speaking down to them will never work.

I don't know what to say to that - you provided a very vivid and emotionally-laden photo as what the "other side" was using to justify their position and now you say that the other side is not using vividness and emotion to make their point? What is your point?

That photo is a reminder if actual real problems, and quite big ones at that. It is not a mere play to emotion over logical reasoning.

Sorry, I've found that arguments based on actual real problems don't resonate. Pointing out that bees kill more people each year in the US than terrorists, that the average american has 150x more chance of being killed by lightning than by a terrorist attack -- these straightforward statistical analyses don't convince because they aren't personal the way that photo is - practically everyone in the country spent weeks looking at versions of that photo. It just isn't the same.

> Sorry, I've found that arguments based on actual real problems don't resonate. Pointing out that bees kill more people each year in the US than terrorists

That's because this is a bad argument. Terrorism is about far more than just the number of fatalities.

Yeah, it is about the emotional reaction that causes self-inflicted wounds far greater than the original attack. Which is why I'm talking about finding arguments that are also emotionally compelling.

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