Comment by unyttigfjelltol
2 years ago
Thirty years ago, one perceived element of moral superiority in the West was revelations of the extensive internal surveillance in places like East Germany and own-spying. There used to be news items and documentaries mocking this behavior and intimating how backward and uncouth those governments were to stoop to furiously wiretapping irrelevant private conversations.
So, whether the world has changed enough to justify it, people still do care and when adequately informed about some magistrate furiously eavesdropping on private matters, people universally recognize this is antisocial bizarre conduct.
It is my opinion that people do not about privacy as much as they did in your mention Cold War-era times (or the tail end of it, anyway). They've been shown how easy it is to trade their privacy for considerable convenience and now they're in so deep that the idea of our governments tracking us seems remarkably mundane. Normalization is a helluva drug.
Great point. Convenience plays a hell of a role in a lot of society's issues. I go back to a song by Deee-lite where she sings "Convenience is the enemy" - I've always thought that was pretty pertinent in a lot of ways, this is just one more example.
Meh, collecting information is different from acting on it. My underdtaning, which could be wrong, was that people legitimately lived in fear of getting found out by the stazi. There isn’t a good reason to fear the NSA based on current actions, that I’m aware of anyway.
I’m afraid the NSA regularly funnels information to the FBI and other domestic policing entities, and this has been widely documented [1]. The government even deigned to declassify proceedings from their special secret (!) court that decry the practice where NSA gives illegally-obtained surveillance to the FBI, which then manufactures a reason to go after someone using a technique known as “parallel construction,” concealing the surveillance source(s).
[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...