Will any of this really make any difference? I feel that, in the long run, it won't.
Edit: And to further clarify my question (since I'm being down-voted for a very legitimate question)... I know a lot of smart people and none of them (as in 0 of them) seem to take any notice to these conversations. There is a lot of apathy towards mass surveillance.
Sure, the conversation comes up a lot on HN but HN is not a very good sample of the general public.
It's making a difference. Maybe not the difference we all want, but the Snowden Leaks have made the National Surveillance Agency a worldwide topic of conversation.
Surveillance was sold to the public under vague terms: "we only use it to catch terrorists", "it's for your safety", "nobody's reading your email", "if you're innocent, you have nothing to worry about" ... and now there's solid evidence that these are all lies, and have been lies for a long time.
The man-on-the-street might be OK with surveillance to catch terr'ists, but they're not OK with a more personal form of surveillance, where someone, somewhere, might be looking at them at some point.
So our job is to continue to have these conversations about what kind of surveillance is actually happening, and what the implications are. New Zealand has been politically apathetic about surveillance so far; tonight's event might begin to change that tide.
And even in my small town, working with a lot of people who know only a little bit about computers, we've gotten a lot of unprompted questions about surveillance, and who to trust, and what to avoid. We've seen a number of customers that are moving, bit by bit, away from Google products, because they now perceive "Google = surveillance". Again, unprompted -- we don't nudge people in one way or another on this stuff.
Talk to more folks. I guarantee you'll find other people that are talking about it.
I think a large amount of people don't understand the full extent more than intellectually. They are aware that it is happening but it doesn't have real context. They aren't aware that their position is tracked or logged, their porn habits monitored and that their is a subset of the population that has become wildly powerful and extremely clandestine. However, people are taking note. People like Ladar Levinson and others. They are combatting this with technology. This is also happening live in NZ right before an election, people will have more information to make that decision. So things are changing at their usual pace: slowly. Hopefully for the better.
I think base instincts and interests override any interest in acting. It's easier to pull up your favourite porn and hope no one cares or pays your actions any attention than it is to speak up and be seen as that guy walking against the crowd.
I also think "I've got nothing to hide" is overwhelmingly more popular than people understanding the slippery slopes involved.
I upvoted you because I believe this is a very valid question. In the really long term, none of it will make a difference. In the short term it will probably also not make a difference but I have some hope that there will be a major review of what we've done wrong historically at some point and then maybe this will carry some weight.
For sure there is plenty that - when looked at through the lens of history - will come back to haunt our future collective selves and that we will feel needs to be dealt with if we are to progress as humanity.
On that scale by the way (in my opinion) these are very minor issues.
An attitude? This stuff seems to happen again and again throughout history. Me asking this may bring root cause problems to the conversation too.
You would think the world view of a large number of people would have changed considering things like the cold war with the U.S.S.R, Iran-Contra, Bay-of-Tonkin, etc. If it had, mass surveillance would be a lot more prevalent in every day communication.
All of what you list is about a generation or more away. I'm 39. I have some sort of relationship to the cold war and Iran-Contra. But I suspect I'm an outlier even in that respect, in that I was 15 when the SSSR finally collapsed, and I know most of my friends at school at that time had only a vague understanding of what was going on and rarely paid attention to politics. Most of them would probably not be able to explain anything about Iran-Contra. And for me as well, Bay-of-Tonkin is something out of the history books, that would have been covered in minutes (maybe it is given more attention in US schools) and never mentioned again.
Don't underestimate just how short lived collective memory is.
I'm from Norway. In 1996 massive illegal political surveillance was rolled up in Norway. The agency that is now the Police Security Service was found to have carried out extensive illegal phone taps and other surveillance for decades, primarily targeting the Norwegian left. It was all over the news, and included its fair share of scandals, such as when one of the members of parliament investigating the surveillance uncovered that he was being subjected to illegal surveillance during his work on investigating the illegal surveillance.
I personally know people who where subjected to it, one of whom security service staff would taunt in public about fights he'd had with his wife in his own home to make it clear to him they listened to everything they said.
Yet during debates about Snowden etc. in Norway now, this is rarely mentioned unless I bring it up, and most people seems shocked at the idea that something like this could happen in Norway - despite the extensive evidence that was uncovered of decades of surveillance like this that culminated in a system where people could even apply to get copies of their files, and a lot of people got a lot of files that showed a lot of completely ridiculous surveillance that served no real purpose.
Edit: And to further clarify my question (since I'm being down-voted for a very legitimate question)... I know a lot of smart people and none of them (as in 0 of them) seem to take any notice to these conversations. There is a lot of apathy towards mass surveillance.
Sure, the conversation comes up a lot on HN but HN is not a very good sample of the general public.