>PS - It's defeatist to say the following: "internet protests will never change anything in Washington."
Don't be an idiot. It's defeatist to say that we can never change anything to rid ourselves of oppression. It's perfectly valid to say that online petitions and online protests are relatively useless because usually it follows from that that there are more effective alternatives.
>You're right. Raising awareness is a waste of time
Raising awareness to what end? Things get done by doing, not by talking about doing. What you are doing is raising awareness about raising awareness. Your endgame is for everyone to be aware that nobody is protecting their freedom of speech. Your efforts are to keep a conversation alive, not the freedoms that the conversation is about.
Raising awareness is only the goal when what you really want is to be included in a conversation in order to identify with a social circle.
Raising awareness is a side effect of when you be an example by doing what you believe in.
Doing requires critical mass. One person picketing outside the NSA HQ won't do jack shit. In order to achieve critical mass, enough people need to be aware a problem exists in the first place.
This issue needs to be battled legally, politically, socially (protest), and privately (apps that encrypt everything). Because the NSA spying is so pervasive and the general populace is so apathetic, we need to push on all fronts to make any difference at all.
Something that battles on the political front ("call your reps") is far from useless. It both makes people aware of the issue (or reminds them that, hey, it's still going on) and puts political pressure on reps to fix it (or at least support it less).
I appreciate your point of view, but you can't "do" alone. You need others to stand with you, and that's where "talking" comes in.
>One person picketing outside the NSA HQ won't do jack shit.
Seven billion people picketing outside of the NSA HQ won't do jack shit either, except that nobody will be doing anything interesting enough to warrant being spied on by the NSA. Picketing is not what I am talking about.
However, one person using technology that respects their privacy does do jack shit. It respects their privacy.
>This issue needs to be battled legally, politically, socially (protest), and privately (apps that encrypt everything).
Not really.
If an animal's relationship to me is that it wants to eat me, and if I don't want it to, then I protect myself from being eaten by it by making it impossible for it to eat me. I don't take it to court. I don't talk to a politician about it. I don't rally in public with others who similarly would prefer to not get eaten. I do the thing I need to do to protect my interests and the interest of those around me.
The NSA's relationship to me is to invade my privacy. Preventing them from doing that, by using technology responsibly, is sufficient. Even if we could cause the NSA to disband through social means, we wouldn't stop using SSL. Our predator wouldn't be the NSA in that case, it would be a script kiddie. And then we would have to protest the script kiddies. I hope you can see how absurd of a solution this looks.
People who don't want to get sick from germs do not protest germs. They wash their hands.
>I appreciate your point of view, but you can't "do" alone.
That's a bit of a simplification. When I brush my teeth, I am often doing something else as well. So it doesn't end up costing me 4 minutes of my free time every day.
I use a "dental device" on those nights that I remember to place it in my mouth, and typically I just give it a soak in some water with one of those denture cleaning tablets thrown in. Couldn't be much easier to clean.
My assumption is that cleaning this device would be the same.
The bit on the yield is a little thin. The other day I noticed that generators have a `send` and `throw` method which provide interesting ways for controlling flow.
