I'm curious why you feel the need to respond to every thread (falsely) repeating that most Americans don't mind being the target of surveillance. What motivates this?
I read a bunch of people on Twitter and I was realizing just recently that almost all of them are people who are extremely suspicious of state power, extremely antiauthoritarian, and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to learn more about electronic surveillance and thwart it. These attitudes feel normal and familiar to me, but I don't even have to look very far on Twitter to find people who are harshly criticizing them.
So one thing I've been thinking is that privacy advocates, rather than assuming that all programmers share our values, should be trying to figure out why some communities of programmers came to value privacy (and be skeptical of state power) so much, and whether there are paths to spreading those values in other communities.
I know that there are IT events at which people think electronic surveillance is OK and even make a living doing it. The obvious example is surveillance trade shows like ISS World (which folks have systematically taken to calling the "Wiretappers' Ball"), but even attending mainstream and broad-interest security events like the RSA Conference, a lot of the people in the "IT security" industry are selling things that are aimed at monitoring: mostly for corporate networks and at least partly in the IDS sense, but in any case figuring out how to capture and analyze lots of network traffic, and often explicitly viewing end-to-end crypto as a threat.
Somebody is working for the companies that exhibit at ISS World. Somebody is working for VUPen and Hacking Team and Packet Forensics. Furthermore, some of those somebodies feel that their work is intellectually interesting and even in a classic hacker spirit because they work hard figuring out how systems work.
I'm happy stigmatizing that work (and I hope that people come to feel uncomfortable about working to enable surveillance!) but I don't think we can deny that there are lots of geeks out there who are doing that work, and who are often even happy and excited about it.
In technical threads, rayiner often makes useful and informative comments, so he's not like this all the time.
Seriously, though, nobody likes it when someone claims to speak for them but is really espousing his or her own views. People on HN have a real problem taking up the mantle of speaking for the public at large, when in reality they're often espousing quite minority views.
He's obviously not repeating his views enough given how greatly your paraphrase misinterprets his speech.
He's saying "A", which you think is indistinguishable from "B" (what you've declared what he's saying). But "A" is not the same as "B": A willingness to accept NSA activities on the public Internet in general is not the same as a willingness to being the target of surveillance personally.
Of that subset, there are a variety of factors in play. They may believe that they are keeping the nation safe from terrorists or nefarious plots. They may be right. They might accept that some sacrifices are often made in trade for peace, security, and/or safety. They may believe that the features they're implementing aren't intended to be used against a non-specific populace. They may believe that these features are intended to be used only when activated as the result of a warrant, or in furtherance of a specific investigation, not en masse surveillance.
In some, maybe all of these cases, they may even be right.
I think you're casting those people in the same category of people who understand that they're building a tool to enslave the populace, and don't care, because they're either a) in on the joke, or b) getting paid for it. For sure, both categories of people exist, and I think you're trying to suggest that there are very few of the latter type (the completely amoral) than there are of the freedom-loving Americans who don't want enslavement, but there's a space in the middle for the former type (that believe in the mission, or believe in the constraints they were probably told exist), and Rayiner is simply suggesting that space is larger than you suspect.
I don't have any hard numbers on the matter at all, so I don't pretend to be authoritative, but having been a defense contractor, and helped to build a form of surveillance (though, in my case, it would have had to be narrowly targeted by necessity), I can say that I was at one point in the camp that believes law enforcement needs the tools to be effective. I have since defected to the "I weight the fourth amendment rights of Americans greater than the needs of law enforcement" camp, but as there is a large and thriving defense industry, clearly, not everybody has.
No, that's the thing. His repeated claim is that the majority of all Americans don't mind what the NSA are doing.