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Comment by wahsd | Hacker News Reader

What is most worrisome is that even with all the overwhelming documentation, people, especially in the USA are largely ignoring it. Sure there are some that protest and there is much ado about the violations in European countries, but reality is that nothing substantial is happening beyond token and illusory reforms.

It's almost as if someone discovered a time machine, went back in time, showed everyone the documented and recorded evidence that a totalitarian dictatorship was forming; and everyone simply shrugged and called you a witch.

Unfortunately, humans are not really all that good at being preemptive. We are ultimately a rather stupid, reactionary life form that won't get it until after we have teetered on the edge of the abyss.

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It doesn't affect people directly, so people don't care. When Facebook started using people's faces on ads, people cared - it affected them. Now though, the NSA does sweeping data gathering, as do all the major internet companies - but they don't show you how they use it, so nobody feels like it's affecting them.

Did you see the John Oliver episode about dick pics?

Oh, they care once they really understand. The problem is, most people, aren't really thinking that critically about it until it smacks them in the face at which point its (usually) too late.

Interviewing people on the street is mostly a rhetorical (political) or comedic technique. Extrapolating anything serious from it is unwise at best.

At the end of the day, John Oliver hosts a comedy show. Though it tends to be on the informative side, it still oversimplifies and exaggerates to get its effect. The more I've watched him, the more I've grown tired of his explicit style of "share a factoid before immediately following on with a forced pop culture reference" that summarizes his work.

He seems to be becoming more popular as a research substitute, though.

> Extrapolating anything serious from it is unwise at best.

I suppose but I've seen literally the exact same reaction when I've explained things like this to people in those sorts of terms vs. the terms the news uses.

The problem is the "official research" doesn't explicitly state things like that but use it in terms vague enough people really don't believe/understand that the pics they send their lovers are being stored.

> http://www.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gover...

Posing the question like that has serious biases because people really and genuinely do not understand the implications.

We need official research that is clear, concise, and written in a manner where the connections are obvious. Official research that relies on statements/questions that are vague enough to be heavily biased by the sources of the media the person consumes is valueless, honestly.

He is the closest thing to journalism you can get on your television; the fact that he is becoming popular is encouraging. If nothing else, he is showing us that it is possible to discuss issues at length and in detail with facts and research and still keep an audience, hopefully we will see more shows follow this model instead of the standard news/journalism model which is setting two talking heads who know nothing in a boxing ring and asking them to scream at each other.

edit: also, are you really surprised that a comedian is better at explaining important issues to ordinary people in a way they understand than a security researcher or academic? He wasn't attempting to take a sample, rather describe how the issue should be framed. I wouldn't take it as evidence of anything, but rather a heuristic for arguments with your less-privacy-conscious peers, and it's a pretty solid heuristic I think.

But it does affect people directly, through tax dollars, which is how I talk about it. Conversley, there must be a lot of jobs created by the program, jobs which would be lost if the program was cut.

And those of us who have lived under such a totalitarian state cower in fear both of the government and the idiots ignoring the warnings and thereby enabling the government's tyranny.

I don't think it's so much that we're not good at being preemptive, although that is probably a part of it. It seems that what is most inhibiting intelligent and passionate discourse about Western surveillance is misdirection. In the United States, one is taught to focus virtually entirely on making ends meet and achieving financial success -- anything other than the financial well-being of a person and that person's family is largely considered secondary. The effect of this is a population that suffers from the condition of caring a great deal about social issues, but not acting on their beliefs. I'm not sure how much this applies in Europe, but in the US I am faced time and time again with the sentiment that XYZ is "undeniably a bad thing, but there isn't much I can do about it." Complimenting this is the fact that many of the people who feel most passionately about these issues are also the people who realize that the consequences of our current political climate are severe, and will stay silent in order to avoid the traditional punishments of the state.

Well, there really isn't anything effective that people can do about it without dire consequences. The only person who "did anything" about mass-surveillance is now exiled to Russia, likely for the rest of his life.

They're not ignoring it, they just don't know what to do.

You're leaving out a major piece of the analysis, which is making the conceptual leap from surveillance to totalitarianism. The real world is quite a bit more subtle than the Sci-Fi that makes that leap seem inevitable.

But it is inevitable. Even if it doesn't happen in the short-term, you're setting up a turn-key totalitarian state. All it takes is a major crisis, and the right leader to galvanize people behind the cause. Just look at how populate opinion has changed towards things like surveillance in response to the War on Terror.

Surveillance is a red-herring in your hypothetical. If a major crisis allowed the right leader to institute a totalitarian government, it would be utterly trivial for that same regime to force Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon to implement a surveillance infrastructure, whether or not one was already in place.

Totalitarianism begins and ends with control of the military. You can't be a despot without control of the military, and once you have that everything else is trivial.

>showed everyone the documented and recorded evidence that a totalitarian dictatorship was forming

This "dictatorship" involves virtually every country in the West cooperating. That narrative does not work very well so we concentrate on how evil the US is and ignore who is working with them. This line of thinking guarantees the status quo is safe.

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