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.
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.