
The Outrage about PRISM spying is wearing off already - Baustin
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043777/the-outrage-about-prism-spying-is-wearing-off-already.html
======
neilk
This is from July 7th. Almost a month ago.

Maybe I suffer confirmation bias because I'm following the story, but it seems
to be picking up steam to me. A few days ago, the US House of Representatives
almost passed a law which would have curtailed the NSA's activities, and now
we have the XKeyScore revelations which are still playing out.

From the release of the Pentagon papers, to Nixon's resignation, took three
years. The incident which ultimately led to the president's resignation was a
side issue, buried in the back pages of the A section, for most of that time.

I'm not sure if the US government is still capable of policing itself in that
way. But however it plays out this isn't going to be over in a few weeks.

~~~
diminoten
Failing to pass the law but coming close to passing the law means literally
nothing. That is not a victory.

And have you talked to people outside of the Internet about it? _Plenty_ of
people didn't ever care, and are now upset with Snowden for even having leaked
what he did.

This is not going to "pick up steam" any more than it already has, short of
non-spying related leaks (Obama killed a guy with his laser vision, for
example).

~~~
neilk
I think you're being unnecessarily negative. I like the metaphor Wyden had:
"The side of transparency and openness is starting to put some points on the
board." All-or-nothing thinking is not helpful.

But you have a point. Snowden didn't come to the public with revelations about
how these programs were persecuting anybody in particular. So the objections
one might raise are more theoretical, about "turnkey tyranny", or that
panoptic surveillance is itself an offense against the people. I have a
feeling that if a more specific case came to light, it would change
everything.

~~~
diminoten
It's not all-or-nothing thinking re: failing to pass the law. A vote count's
closeness has very very little to do with how close the outcome actually was.
It literally means nothing that the vote count was so close.

I also don't think one case will do it. It'd have to be a trend (people
literally snatched up in the night), a policy shift ( _all_ copyright abuse
starts being enforced because now they have that data), or some kind of tragic
action leading to the deaths (yes deaths) of people on US soil.

~~~
neilk
You may be right. But in my opinion it's not the severity of the action that's
brought to light, it's who gets hurt. The elites of the US are usually fine
with extraconstitutional shenanigans and human rights violations when they
only affect foreigners, or relatively powerless people within the US.

When it affects the domestic balance of power, then you start to see elite
consensus building against it, and the wheels of reform start turning. This is
how a hotel break-in is more serious than a secret war in Indochina.

It's possible that US elites will perceive surveillance as a threat to
themselves. If they don't, you're probably right and then everyone just gets
used to it, and any reckoning is kicked down the road for a few more decades.

~~~
diminoten
No one's actually _gotten_ hurt because of the NSA's surveillance, so that's
the problem. All of these potential consequences are theoretical. We're trying
to string the NSA up on what amounts to pre-crime.

------
LoganCale
There is a follow up protest to Restore the 4th, 1984 Day, planned for this
upcoming Sunday, August 4. If there is one being held near you, please
consider attending. Keep checking if there isn't one nearby, as they have been
adding a few more locations in the past day.

[http://1984day.com/](http://1984day.com/)

~~~
jamesbritt
Do all of these rallies insist on using Facebook for organizing their privacy
protests?

The irony is stunning.

~~~
LoganCale
Yeah, I find it stupid as well. I have the Facebook domain blocked at the
/etc/hosts level and generally won't go there, period.

------
JonSkeptic
It's not surprising. The Zimmerman trial was an excellent distraction to get
everyone's mind off of privacy and on to racial divisiveness. Now that the
trial's long over, all that NSA stuff seems so distant in the memory of the
average American. It was a brilliant move by the administration.

~~~
JonFish85
Are you saying the Obama administration set up the Zimmerman trial just to
distract people from the NSA stuff?

~~~
smky80
No, the people who tell the Obama administration what to do, told the media to
make a circus out of the case.

~~~
adestefan
I can't tell if you actually believe this or if it's just sarcasm.

------
regis
I am still outraged but I don't know what to do about it. I don't think the
restore the 4th/1984 day stuff is the right way to go about it. That is a
great way to spread a message but has about a 0% chance of shutting down the
NSA etc...

This stuff has recently caused me to fall into a bit of depression because I
feel totally helpless.

Does anyone else feel this way? What could we do?

~~~
verandaguy
The distressing part about all this is that there is, in fact, very little to
be done about this. For now, the best thing anyone can do is to keep the issue
from dying. Raise awareness. Find reliable data to back up claims against
PRISM and XKeyscore (data of which, I'm sure there are respectable amounts).
The more people know, the more can be done about the issue. Protests,
speeches, walkouts, boycotts, and, should worse come to worse, riots can be
organized. Maybe more people working on the projects can be convinced to
defect or sabotage the project.

Just fight to keep this relevant.

~~~
regis
Definitely.... However, I have been working to keeping this subject alive but
at a certain point people don't want to hear it and even more disturbingly
I've found that many people don't think that our government would really do
something like that even after reading about it.

------
ck2
The way the average american thinks, if the police slowly came every other day
and disappeared one of your neighbors, they'd shrug it off and say "oh well
what can you do, we need to be safe".

Until it was their turn and there was no one to protest.

This is why we still have the TSA grabbing your genitals and the NSA grabbing
everything else. "oh well what can you do, we need to be safe".

Meanwhile congresspeople would write in exemptions for themselves and figure
out how to do insider trading to profit from the activity (btw, they gave
themselves back the right to do the insider trading).

~~~
regis
Whenever I fly I request a hand screening and it seems that more often than
not the person screening me is more uncomfortable than I am. In the past I
have literally walked a TSA employee through the procedure because he was to
shy to touch me like he was "required" to.

It's not only passengers who struggle with this stuff but also the employees
of the companies that require this kind of behavior.

~~~
MattBearman
I flew out of Newark twice last month, and both times I was the only person
who requested a hand screening, and both times the TSA employee doing the
screening just seemed pissed off with me for making them do it.

It does seem that sadly most people will just accept what ever ridiculous
rules are forced upon them,

------
aleprok
I would right away move from Google, Microsoft, Apple, products if I had good
alternatives.

Basically I do not use any Apple products, but Skype is the only Microsoft
thing I use.

Duck Duck Go as search engine works, but still I like my personalized search
results, they get me faster where I want to go. Though my search results
should be secure and not spied upon. Duck Duck Go is also missing image search
and some other problems like 25 Mb / 25 MB does not give me 0.125, but instead
Provincial Trunk Highway 25, Brandon, Manitoba

Then comes the problem of phone operation systems. Ubuntu Unity, Firefox OS
could be nice, but they are long way to come here. Only mobile operation
system options for me are iOS, Android or that damn Windows currently.

It's pretty damn hard to stop using Facebook, Google+ or Twitter just for the
reason of spying, because everyone of your friends is in one of them.

If I decide to stop using these systems where I can be spied upon I most
likely will lose ability to contact most of my friends who are not technically
skilled to use something like torchat or does not care that much to learn to
use it.

If I leave these systems I can no longer easily inform my friends about the
dangers of the systems they are using.

Thing is walled gardens are walled gardens and they are hard to compete with.
Do I wait that people create better and secure services or go offline and
never come back?

------
pearjuice
Like any other outrage in the past few decades. We have become soft and there
is nothing you can do about it. Instead of writing intellectual comments on
the matter, we should go down the street, burn some tires, overthrow the
government; stuff like that. Yet here I am,thinking that no one will be brave
enough to initialize or follow me if I would. They made us soft and we obeyed.
Don't tell me there is a civilized road to solving this because the stakes are
way too high for anyone to turn in what we have become.

~~~
astrodust
Americans don't know outrage. They've been trained from a young age to be
apathetic and those that have the audacity to fight back have been
systematically beaten down.

When's the last time they've had to mobilize the National Guard because there
was a protest?

The entire American economy could collapse because of a giant banking scandal
and people wouldn't even raise a fist in anger.

~~~
pearjuice
The best part being these downvotes only proving the point.

~~~
res0nat0r
People aren't protesting because like the article says...they really don't
care. NSA spying doesn't directly affect them in any tangible way, so there is
no reason for the average person to be upset. If people were being physically
yanked from their homes and interrogated related to NSA spying intel, then it
might be a different story I believe.

------
mladenkovacevic
For the average citizen it's all about reward and risk. A large population of
the US is middle class and the risk of being detained, alienated or whatnot is
far greater than the reward of complete liberty. And besides the surface
illusion of liberty seems to be doing an alright job anyways.

Now if the majority of US population sinks into poverty then the elite will
have something to worry about. A far more likely scenario for the near future
is that smaller countries become affected by citizen outrage, at which point
they cut US political and economic influence out of their governments'
decisions. You know how America imposes sanctions on Cuba? Well imagine that a
large portion of the world imposes sanctions on the US. That might have some
meaningful effect although an ongoing relationship with China alone might be
enough to keep the US going for a while.

------
tehwalrus
Elected officials don't have a reason to action _any_ concern unless you're
willing to change your vote over it (indeed, if _lots_ of people are willing
to change _all their votes_ over it.)[1]

Something like PRISM doesn't even get the requisite majority support (well, it
does for email, not for phone records), let alone high enough priority to make
people vote for some third "privacy party" candidate in the next presidential
election, or to vote out legislators based on their support for it. It doesn't
stand a chance of being changed.

(except by a ruling that it breaches the 4th, which is rather unlikely,
sadly.)

[1] example from the UK; leaving the EU (most people would say yes, but
wouldn't change their vote over it). House of Lords reform, too. If we ever
get a referendum on either, boom!

------
wonderzombie
Most people in the US probably assume that:

* the agencies performing surveillance by and large have good intentions

* surveillance has or will have no practical impact on their lives, because

* _they 're_ not doing anything wrong, so they're probably fine, and anyway

* they can't really do anything about it.

As for the first, it reminds me of this Onion article: "Smart, Qualified
People Behind The Scenes Keeping America Safe: 'We Don't Exist'"[0]. We have
ordinary people, people with flaws and cognitive biases. They're hyper-
sensitized to threats, convinced we're all in imminent danger unless we
institute mass surveillance For Our Own Good. This is essentially a flawed
premise (the road to hell, etc).

The second is more or less correct. It makes no difference in one's daily
life.

In the third, I chose the word "wrong" deliberately. Most people incorrectly
assume they've not done anything _illegal_ , but most people don't have
nefarious plans and therefore assume they've nothing to worry about.

The third is also more or less correct, but it's a flawed premise that you,
personally, have to be able to do something about it.

I really think more people should be educated along the lines of "Don't Talk
to the Cops"[1]. Even if you have no nefarious plans, the justice system's
incentives are all aligned against you; they want convictions, not the truth.
The adversarial nature of the system is predicated on you _not_ being
thoughtlessly compliant.

[0]: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/smart-qualified-people-
behi...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/smart-qualified-people-behind-the-
scenes-keeping-a,17954/) [1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik).

edited: formatting. wish I knew how to do bulleted lists.

------
codersquare
i haven't lived in America long enough, I'm Asian. I lived in Australia for
long enough to know what democracy feels like, at least on the surface.

But this incident is really something that I can't comprehend. What's
happening to all those crouching potential heroes in American movies? The only
hero I've seen so far is Snowden. Where have all those American brave cowboys
gone? Where has the American dream gone? The dream of liberty, freedom, of a
Fair country?

Haven't lived in America myself, but from the self-confident, open-minded
Americans I met, from Hollywood movies, I just can't understand why people are
kinda OK with this incident. Why are people so tolerant to such a pretty big
lie.

------
mathattack
I think privacy is already gone. I remember Geraldo Rivera going on a "Privacy
is gone forever" rant after 9/11, and I was ashamed to admit that I actually
agreed with him.

------
tshtf
Not sure why this article has been flagged, but here's an anecdotal
counterpoint. I run a public XMPP server listed on [1], and since the PRISM
revelations the number of new user registrations has increased significantly.
I've seen no sign so far of a downturn in new registrations.

[1] [http://xmpp.net/](http://xmpp.net/)

------
null_ptr
_" There's some hard evidence that all this privacy stuff just doesn't alarm
us all that much."_

I wish all these articles would stop the reinforcement of apathy in every
spying article's opening paragraph. It sets the tone for the entire piece.

------
arh68
Wow, what a crap article. I've got a more to-the-point headline, if Mr.
Vaughan-Nichols has trouble coming up with another: "World Doesn't Stop On A
Dime To Fix Problems: Must Mean Nobody Cares". Classic spin-down.

------
hankScorpi0
Why is this surprising? This happens with every single item of news worth
getting up in arms about. You are just seeing the receding area under the bell
curve of social interest...

------
motters
Relax. The Party is everything, knows everything. There are no spies, only
brave members of the inner committee doing their duty for the empire.

------
hoggle
FYI this entry was just still among the top 30 stories on HN and is currently
listed at #169. Can somebody explain this please?

------
rasur
*The Outrage in the USA about PRISM spying is wearing off already.

The rest of the world however..

------
rambojohnson
says "PC World" ...

------
VladRussian2
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, accpetance

------
northwest
_" [...] the ten most searched terms, according to Google Trends, were: iOS7,
PS4, Tim Tebow, Mac Pro, Kingdom Hearts, Miami Heat, IGN, Chad Johnson, NBA
Playoffs, and the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference ( WWDC)."_

Probably the most important cause of this is the fact that the mass media are
tightly controlled by a couple of extremely rich people. And they don't like
change as they fear the loss of power. The current system works very much in
their favor.

Free and unbiased media is the basis for democracy.

~~~
JonFish85
Another way to look at it would be to say that people care about things that
directly affect them. The NSA stuff isn't something that really affects
anyone's day-to-day life, whereas in the US there are just HUGE portions of
the country that play PS4, watch sports, buy phones, etc. No conspiracy theory
necessary.

~~~
northwest
> No conspiracy theory necessary.

This is a saddening statement. What I'm saying has nothing to do with
conspiracy. (When I say "controlled by a couple of extremely rich people", "a
couple" might even be "a few hundred", but that's still "a couple".)

~~~
rayiner
You suggested that a few rich people control the media and tell people what to
care about. That's pretty much the definition of conspiracy theory.

Alternate hypothesis: you're in a tiny minority of people who think the
internet is really important. Like, foundation of society important, as
opposed to a convenient place to buy shit and message your friends and look up
the release date of the latest Madden game. Surveillance of the internet seems
more important to you than it does to other people, and you can't understand
why and have to resort to an explanation involving the shadowy elite.

------
GhotiFish

      But do you really care? Or are you more like my dogs, who 
      can be distracted at any moment by a rustling in the 
      leaves. "Oh, look, a squirrel!" their alert little faces 
      seem to say.
    

mmm hmm... Is all Stevens work this misdirected?

------
EGreg
The problem of centralization, and its solution:

[http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21](http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21)

------
rorrr2
Outrage is useless. Protests won't stop shit. Did they stop the wars? Nope.

It's what you do with that situation is important.

I'd say an independent party should use privacy as an opportunity, a platform,
name the responsible for the spying. Name the politicians who voted for it,
name the judges to let it happen.

Another good thing that will come out of it is the awareness of the
encryption. More people will start using it. Assuming NSA doesn't have a
magical anti-crypto algorithms, and it's a pretty solid assumption, NSA can
spend trillions of dollars on hardware and still not be able to decrypt just
one message.

~~~
northwest
> Outrage is useless. Protests won't stop shit.

I don't see it that way, b/c this is just 1 out of tons of measures that will
be needed. Each measure will stimulate other measures, it's an interactive
thing.

