

Stop Watching Us Gathers Over 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance - sethbannon
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/13/stop-watching-us-a-group-opposed-to-nsa-surveillance-scorches-past-100000-signatures/

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dclowd9901
I guess I don't understand how government works.

If a significant portion of the electorate doesn't want something, how do they
keep the government from implementing it? Because it's certainly not by
voting. I'm dead serious. Why does a government do things that its people
don't want it to do?

~~~
enraged_camel
Contrary to popular belief, the American government does not actually
represent its people. It represents special interest groups, which is a
euphemism for "those who have money." Once your mind makes that paradigm
shift, everything becomes incredibly easy to understand.

The fact of the matter is that the seeming irrationality and inefficiency of
American government is a feature, rather than a bug. The inefficiency and
general waste in government affairs actually serve to obfuscate the real
functions and purpose of the state and makes reform vastly more complex and
costly than it otherwise would be. The example I like to give is the tax code.
The income tax started out as a tax on wealth and it used to be that only a
very small percentage of households paid anything. Over time though, the
burden of taxation shifted downward onto the middle class, while the elite
simultaneously found alternative means of storing their wealth to avoid
taxation almost completely. The problem is that the tax code is so complex now
that most people cannot even comprehend the amount of loopholes in it. The
only people who can are tax attorneys working for corporations and the ultra-
rich. This is what I mean by the inefficiency and general waste serves to
obfuscate the issue.

And the funny thing is, this is all working exactly as intended. The wealthy
tightly control the system and the rest of the population is too distracted
fighting for the crumbs to actually organize, form meaningful alliances and
fight to change the status quo. What they do instead is share news articles
and memes on Facebook and sign silly petitions on the Internet to be able to
pat themselves in the back for fighting the good fight. They just want to feel
good about themselves.

At the end of the day, this is because the vast majority of people don't
actually care about the events that happen around them. They care about their
self-perceived role in those events and their own feelings. You can actually
see this type of behavior in many different cases outside politics. Take
something as simple as exercise. A lot of people sign up for personal
trainers, not because they actually want to exercise correctly and lose
weight, but because _the act of making superficial effort (such as paying a
small amount of money) towards a goal is sufficient to make them feel good._
And if they fail at weight loss, they can tell themselves that, well, they at
least tried. Which is what the signers of this petition are going to tell
themselves when it accomplishes nothing.

~~~
res0nat0r
100k people who spent two seconds clicking on a link online are not
representative of 300 million population of the US.

~~~
nano111
since most people probably haven't heard about it, I would say it is..

~~~
diminoten
And you would be horribly, tragically, mistaken.

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spikels
Don't forget about the White House petition to pardon Snowden. It now has
70,229 signatures but needs 100,000 to get a response.

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-
snow...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-
snowden/Dp03vGYD)

~~~
res0nat0r
Pardon him from what? He hasn't been charged with a crime.

The temporary outrage of the internet over something they don't even have a
grasp on is why no one takes these petitions seriously.

~~~
nano111
resonator--

~~~
icebraining
Please stop, these posts only add noise.

~~~
nano111
If I could down-vote I would not be doing this...

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enraged_camel
I know cynicism is not very productive, but I have never understood the point
of petitions like this. Surely people know they are useless unless backed up
by billions of dollars of funding?

~~~
sinak
Just to clarify - this is not simply a petition. We're using a script that the
late Aaron Swartz wrote to deliver emails directly to Congress via the contact
us pages on legislator's websites. That means there'll be hundreds of
thousands of emails delivered to Congress in the coming days.

It's amazing how practical some of the things that Aaron worked on are.

~~~
brk
So then, it's easy for them to have a consistent block of text to filter on?

Is there any data that sending template emails works? It seems like its too
easy to write off as people investing minimal effort, and not sending a unique
message.

I honestly don't know,, but this does not feel 'effective' to me.

~~~
deepblueocean
I believe that the staffers of many elected representatives typically count
the number of constituents who were agitated enough even to send a form
letter.

Think of it like a poll. Would you make the claim that politicians are willing
to write off people who respond to polls just because they all answer the same
question or the question isn't somehow the "right" one? Probably not.

Of course, it's not a poll because people self-select. But even still, if the
report to the representative says "this week, we had 37 letters about gun
control and 43,742 about surveillance", well, it's clear what the politician
wants to say that he or she is doing something about when he or she next sees
a reporter.

~~~
Aloisius
Yet a phone call that takes a staffer's actual time probably is 1000x more
effective than a form email that are easily ignored because it requires so
little effort to actually generate.

If the most you can be bothered with is typing in your name and hitting send,
why would any Congress member even believe you'll bother to vote in the next
election? Or donate? Or convince other people to vote for their opponent?

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a3n
The NSA probably thinks that collecting everything and analyzing it later was
"a neat idea."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Cont...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North#Iran.E2.80.93Contra_affair)

~~~
marshray
I don't see the analogy with Iran-Contra.

~~~
a3n
Well it's a stretch I admit, but they probably really did think it was a "neat
idea," which was a phrase that Oliver North used (quoted in the link) to
describe his opinion of the arms for hostage deal that he was being
investigated for.

A more direct if mundane line is that Oliver North worked for/with John
Poindexter. Poindexter was allowed to resign in disgrace, North was fired.
Poindexter later worked for DARPA, where he proposed Total Information
Awareness, which was widely viewed with suspicion and back-burnered, and then
came back bit by bit as cynically predicted at the time.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter)

~~~
marshray
Oooh, and there was also the part where North "deleted" his emails and thought
they were, you know, actually gone? He lied to Congress and then the emails
were recovered from "backup tape".
[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html](http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/white_house_email/index.html)

I'd totally forgotten the Poindexter connection.

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jmomo
Comrades! Only enemies of the United States of America would ever sign a
petition like this, and thus so such enemies should be rightly targeted for
increased scrutiny given their increased risk of threat to the state.

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tn13
The only thing politicians really care about is their ability to get elected.
That is something we need to target in a threatening way.

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ianstallings
And all were immediately added to Main Core.

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joering2
So 100,000 people sleep better tonight. And if you ever read any of government
responses, you know nothing changed.

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Qantourisc
I'd say only 100,000 that's it? I'm rather disappointed. There are 316,037,000
in your country, that means 315,937,000 who don't give a fuck ? Note to self:
Never even set foot on USA soil.

