Surveillance on the general public is bought by employers/businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA/FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom.
The USA has long aspired to be a place of outstanding liberty; to run your own business, to say what you want, to own what you want, and in a less corrupt landscape relative to the rest of the world. With its lead in citizen surveillance it is fast becoming the opposite.
The problem with the FBI/NSA mining their communication "for criminal activity" is that they probably don't do it exclusively for that. After Snowden we found out that sometimes NSA employees would use this snooping to stalk people they wanted to be in a relationship with, spy on their neighbors and other such unsavory things.
The other angle, besides just personal abuse (Ala loversgate), that far too many people fail to consider is this:
If the executive branch has such ubiquitous surveillance powers, given their history of manual blackmail and compromise operations, they are highly likely to seek to expand those blackmail style ops to a level heretofor impossible, essentially removing some of the last vestiges of the already under attack principle of seperation of powers and the checks and balances system which is a foundational part of the intended American political structure.
This happens yes. When I send my tax returns in the mail directly to the IRS, even if months late, the same week I start getting scam calls. So someone in the IRS sells that data. Though I doubt it is on an industrial scale, more like bad actors within these organizations, so a small percentage.
So I find articles about privacy that raise concerns about the NSA/FBI, have the effect of just deflecting and dampening where our concerns should be really focused.
Also we have already built and running mass-oppression infrastructure which could be used for incredibly evil things as soon as someone high up in the executive branch (or congress if they passed a law) said so. Makes us incredibly insecure in the event of a dictatorship-type overthrow
And even if it was solely for criminal activity it would still not be good. After all a lot of victimless "crimes" were, are, and will be illegal in a lot of countries.
I agree with most of the sentiment of your comment here,
however I do not think 90% is accurate. I have no polls to point to, but thinking about how certain demographics are seemingly deathly afraid of patrol police in general these days, and given that many people have some friend or family member that may be going through a bad phase, I think it would be more like 50% if you included something like "knowing that metadata from your phone and net devices can be used to spy on your friends and family, do you think it's no big deal if a long list of agencies has unfettered access to your data?
Something like that.
I agree that we need to educate people more about how things like jobs, loans, and other things can be affected by data trails easily gobbled up by many different apps and devices.
In my small amount of speaking to people, it seems to me that people older than 35 don't worry about hackers or fbk, or three letter agency spy on all their pics and messages. However most of them pause when I explain that apps like messenger can steal all of their kids' pics in the background, services like instagram sell me pics off their kids phones for a few cents, and there are some pervs at whichever agency and computer company that can access all of their kids stuff for example.
To me the biggest concern about recording and storing all this information is the ability of corps and guv agencies being able to rewind time and pressure would be powerful public figures or other people into doing shady things in order to keep that recorded data in cold storage and off the next leak that ends up in the wild and reported in whatever-news.
So there are many educational points with all this that people should be educated about.
When I mention that divorce lawyers may have a field day with the flirting pms / dms that their friends may have sent and that have been stored by zucks servers, I often get "wow never thought of that" - which of course could be used to change financial futures, kids custoday, etc.
Then of course the marketers using data to get you to do things, and banks selling your debit card data about sexual purchases and such. There are many important things to consider when it comes to privacy.
How meta data alone can be used to infer relationships and such can be damaging with serious legal consequences beyond the marketing sales.
If polls were run with a little info added about how data can be used. I would hope that less than 50% of people don't care.
