"Honestly, the majority of the population doesn't care about the government email tracking or what-have-you. A very vocal minority seems to care"
I keep hearing it's supposedly a minority, but everyone I speak to has concerns about the general issue. While my circles are biased I actually haven't met a "think of the children/terrorists" person in my life, only pundits in national papers and a seeming (biased sample again) minority of people on the Internet support the anti-privacy position.
With regard to more concrete evidence there is a much larger group in the opinion polls that see Snowden and his actions favourably than otherwise.[1] I also highly doubt the recent vote on limiting the NSA would have been only narrowly in favour of the status quo, 205 to 217, if it was a minority concern.[2] Congress members are well aware of public opinion, or alternatively the opinion of their backers.[3]
I genuinely don't care about US / UK government agencies slurping my data. I wish it actually did something to lower crime[1], and I wish it wasn't so expensive, and I wish the money went to other places, but I don't care about the privacy violation of my email being on more than one cache.
I am much more concerned about other privacy breaches that I'm subjected to.
People talk about the "decrypt your data or go to jail" parts of RIPA, and while that is worrying I'm a lot more worried about the other sections of RIPA which have been abused and caused actual harm to people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...)
With regard to more concrete evidence there is a much larger group in the opinion polls that see Snowden and his actions favourably than otherwise.[1] I also highly doubt the recent vote on limiting the NSA would have been only narrowly in favour of the status quo, 205 to 217, if it was a minority concern.[2] Congress members are well aware of public opinion, or alternatively the opinion of their backers.[3]
[1]http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-security-po... [2]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/congress-nearly-s... [3]http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/money-nsa-vote/