Comment by jakewalker
12 years ago
If that graphic - that taunting smiley face, drawn when it was assumed that no one was watching - isn't enough to outrage the general public, I don't know what it will take. This is not super technical - it's easily explained and should be easily understood by the masses. And it should cause outrage.
You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. Most people do not actually care about their privacy. Even if everyone had the technical chops needed to understand what has been happening, most people never spend much time contemplating the importance of privacy rights.
> people do not actually care about their privacy
This is 100% accurate, I've attempted to aggressively promote privacy tools well before the NSA/Snowden stuff among the people I know. They still don't care to use simple things like OTR with IM. They might use it for one week, and switch back.
Journalists/tech sites love making this seem like the biggest deal in society right now, but hardly the case in reality.
I'm not sure if it's an intellectual/knowledge gap (lack of technical knowledge), laziness, lack of good design in crypto tools, or just generally not caring about their privacy (until it becomes to hit them in the face).
I think it is part of a more general problem: people do not spend much time thinking about the importance of any of their rights. Nobody wants to hear that a terrorist attack was successful or that a criminal walked free for the sake of their civil rights -- rights are abstract, terrorists and criminals are threats to our children and whatnot. Look at what people say about free speech rights, how quickly everyone parrots the quote about shouting fire in a crowded theater (most people have never bothered to look into the Schenck case, they just know that one phrase). People have even managed to say that habeas corpus rights are problematic.
Privacy rights are too abstract for most people to bother with. After all, they have nothing to hide, only criminals and terrorists would bother hiding anything (or so the thinking goes).
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If tools for private communiation weren't 10-20 years behind sending digital postcards on facebook.com, I'd use them more consistently too. I am tech savy yet most crypto tools don't seem to be made for me.
I have seen OTR fail in the most colorful ways, with and without error messages, and mostly with cryptic error messages. I have seen half a dozen IM clients forget messages, forget alerts, fail to deliver messages, disable alerts for other clients, mess up their contact list, mess up the service's contact list and mess up contact groups. Needless to say my experience didn't last more than a week.
I think it has to do with "privacy" being a general word that means many things; some of which people care about, some they don't. As much as I hate how politicials/lobbyists/etc. do this, I think a better way to get people to respond and care about the issue it to label it differently. For example, instead of saying "privacy", say "your credit card and bank info is compromised/stolen". Or that your "identity / SSN is at risk". Or perhaps that all your "passwords are leaked". Yes, this is less accurate and is a fear mongering tactic, but it is done to death in the US government with effective results.
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> You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down.
No better way to state it. Our government is fucking us with our pants on but we're too distracted (by people getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to throw a fucking ball around) to care.
Why the contempt for professional sports?
Given that geeks are more likely to fix this stuff, why not talk about blocking hacker news, twitch.tv and reddit? What about political sites Politico, Huffington Post, Slate, that treat politics like sports -- who "won the morning", who's going to win Iowa in 2016, etc., deserve a lot more blame for peoples' political ignorance and apathy than a site that treats sports like sports.
It's a quintessentially American view, though -- my pleasures are above reproach, while yours mark you as a cretin. Nobody who likes things you don't like could be smart!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
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I bet if ESPN and shows like American Idol, etc. were knocked offline until we got our government back on track things would get done pretty fast.
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You know what would outrage the public? Having any of this affect them directly in any tangible way. It doesn't. So they don't care.
People deal with risk every single day in various forms. How can you expect a person to care about the risks a lack of privacy theoretically provides, when they're already not caring about the risks texting and driving pose? It takes laws to get people to stop texting while driving, and even then they don't really stop.
It should, but it probably won't.
But the smiley is particularly infuriating, because it embodies the mindset behind this domestic spying: "we're better than you, we're smarter than you, and you can't do a damn thing about it, peons."
>"we're better than you, we're smarter than you, and you can't do a damn thing about it, peons."
What if that is actually true? I know it's a repulsive angle to think about, but is it possible? Maybe we've hit on a fundamental flaw in democracy and democratic-like political systems here. Maybe Plato was more correct than we'd like to think.
Personally, I don't read that much into it. I see it as: some geek is proud of this technical accomplishment (in an a-moral way). Perhaps he/she even gets a kick about "getting away with something naughty"...
(I do find it sickeningly arrogant, though.)
If people were going to get outraged about that, they would have burned the country to the ground when they learned that several NSA operations were given Civil War battles for codenames. You know, the only war where Americans have ever been our own enemy.
Where you see a taunting smiley, I see a developer who's just happy to have made a breakthrough on his project.
His abhorrent project. This is not something to be proud of. Being a professional means answering to a set of ethics before acting like a kindergartner who's proud of his macaroni picture.
Right, but obviously his ethics and your ethics do not match.
Makes me think about the guys who built the atomic bomb -- people doing [potentially] amoral things because they find the problems they're solving more fascinating than the practical implications.
I actually assumed and tried to verify really hard that that was the original slide and not "artists concept". I just can't believe someone would present that. Beyond the hubris (which is literally unbelievable ref first sentence for my disbelief), it's just unprofessional and childish.