Americans Don't Care About Domestic Spying ? 485
S1mmo+61 writes "Salon is analyzing a Time Magazine article today, a piece that essentially claims Americans do not care about the domestic spying. The analysis of the Time magazine piece (which is longer than the article itself) is interesting, if only as a quick history of domestic spying in the last eight years. 'Time claims that "nobody cares" about the Government's increased spying powers and that "polling consistently supports that conclusion." They don't cite a single poll because that assertion is blatantly false. Just this weekend, a new poll released by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University proves that exactly the opposite is true. That poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is "very secretive" has doubled in the last two years alone (to 44%)'"
I actually agree with the article. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that's a completely shortsighted and borderline insane viewpoint, but it's the one I most frequently encounter with most Americans.
The problem isn't that we're all being watched, (Score:5, Interesting)
The lack of transparency is at the heart of any problem we have with surveilance.
Better question: (Score:2, Interesting)
Polls will give you any answer you want (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do you agree that it is OK to mistakenly execute an innocent person?"
alternatively they could ask:
"Should serial killers remain a burden on the tax payer for the entirity of their natural lives?"
People also habitually exagerate and lie when responding to surveys, and I know professional pollsters should be able to weed this out but they have often failed. A survey on food habits asked people to keep a record of all ingredients used over a period of many weeks. To make the lives of the participants easier, if a ready prepared meal was eaten then they could just keep the packaging. The survey found that the consumption of ready meals was much higher than any one ever thought...
Re:It is all about how you ask the question (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a great thing but I'm expecting propaganda to fight back in the new medium of information dissemination, first by trying to control it, and then by trying to dominate on its indexing and resources...
Wag the Dog (Score:5, Interesting)
When the first vote came up to congress on 13-Feb-2008, the only thing covered on every news channel was the baseball steroids scandal. There was no mention of the congressional debate or vote.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/151-Wag-The-Dog.html [hackerfactor.com]
When the revised bill came up to congress on 14-March-2008, it was not covered by the mass media. Instead, they repeatedly covered a "captured Al Qaeda leader"... who isn't a leader, wasn't captured recently, and isn't even missed by Al Qaeda.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/164-No-Respect.html [hackerfactor.com]
If more people knew about the domestic spying bill, more people would be mad. And if more people knew about the government's manipulation of the mass media, more people would be furious.
Did anybody read the second link by Greenwald? (Score:2, Interesting)
He basically says that Time lied . Yep. So, in other words most Americans care about the Bush administration's illegal wiretaps and Time is making up data to support an opposite conclusion.
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing.
So, you think it's "shortsighted and borderline insane" to believe no-one cares? There's no evidence that there should be a reason to care.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Those who fail to learn the lessons of history. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Because people inevitable fail to learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat it endlessly."
What Should We Expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the popular media, you might get the impression that the people don't care that our government is at war with our country. But then, that may just be the media pushing its preference for a stable tapestry on which to paint transient images of sex scandals. Those people who supposedly don't care have also been giving tens of millions of dollars a month, in individual amounts betraying the fact that they are not members of the ruling class and in numbers demonstrating an extraordinarily broad base, to one presidential candidate who does not represent business as usual.
If you look to establishment journalism for serious critique of the establishment, should you really be surprised if what you find is not truth, but spurious defense?
Re:Polls will give you any answer you want (Score:5, Interesting)
Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."
Re:Wag the Dog (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:3, Interesting)
As children we are told, over and over, that there are "bad people" and "good people". Bad people do bad things, and good people do good things. If you're good you can't do bad things, and if you're bad you can't do good things. It's all very simple. It's also quite obviously completely wrong.
The trouble is, secretly in their heads, a lot of people never, ever, get over this viewpoint. Ever.
Criminals are bad. Terrorists are bad. Therefore they cannot do good things and deserve to be punished. By contrast, "we" are good. We don't do bad things. Therefore, this law will not affect us. We have nothing "bad" to hide because we are "good". I assure you that many, many, people of quite advanced years and experience think like this.
There's also an element of Schadenfreude to it all. Secretly a lot of people really enjoy seeing others punished and/or humiliated. I don't mean from a sense of justice. I mean they actually enjoy watching/hearing about "bad" humans getting "punished", ostracized, or especially maltreated by "good" people, i.e. authority figures. A lot of people support waterboarding because it is torture, and for no other reason. The same element that sells celebrity gossip magazines is behind it too. I suspect many people support these laws in the hope neighbors they dislike will have embarrassing private details discovered and published.
We are told that we live in an "advanced", "civilized" society, where people have abandoned brutal, cruel, petty and bigoted ways of life. That's a crock. The only thing that has happened is that it has become taboo to support such things in public life.
Re:Retort (Score:5, Interesting)
She would not agree and even went so far as to say that all porn should be filtered on the Internet. She was of the impression that filtering content from the internet was for the greater good of society. She would not budge.
I got frustrated. She can not be the only person that thinks that way. If you believe that, then it is likely that you believe that spying on the public to catch "bad guys" is good as well. After all, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so go ahead".
Part of freedom is freedom to break the law. After you have broken the law, you should lose some of your freedoms, but until you do, you should be assumed to be as pure as an angel.
Re:More people vote for "dancing with stars" than (Score:4, Interesting)
The downside is that the Millenials don't really care. They're more amused than outraged. They think you can't change it, because the system is too far gone, too corrupt, whatever.
Also, it's not "cool" to be all that involved. It's okay to have an opinion that so-and-so is an idiot, but to get really pissed off, go to rallies, and be a real-life activist loses the cool-points you garnered as a laid-back, amusingly cynical do-nothing.
It's hard to be a concerned American right now. We're realizing that American's don't actually have an innate moral sense. The indifference to wiretapping is the least alarming of the current apathies. Wasn't torture wrong, just last week or so? What happened to that?
Now there are entire movie franchises (Saw, Hostel) where our best and brightest go to watch torture FOR AMUSEMENT. For you Jack Bauer fans (torturer par excellance) there is even a guide to Christian living written in the context of that show--Jack Baeur is Having a Bad Day, or something like that.
I have to explain to my kids why I won't rent them these movies, and how they have influenced military members serving at Abu Ghraib, etc. I miss the days when the "moral issue" consisted of explaining to your daughter why she shouldn't show her boobs to the world. Now our culture is to the point where we have to "have a dialog" about torture. Thank you, John Yoo.
Re:Those who fail to learn the lessons of history. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone posted below, the reason that people are so gung-ho on surveillance is that there is this notion of good people vs bad people that is started in childhood, and which never really goes away. Not to mention that everyone thinks that only bad people (however they are defined) have bad things happen to them as a result of something as neutral as surveillance.
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:5, Interesting)
You always did.
However, I find it interesting you didn't include your real name, address, and phone number, DL#, SSN, etc.
Who do you work for? Can we get that address as well, and your boss's and coworker's names?
Married/Single? Can we get your wife's maiden name, and your kids' names?
I saw posts in your history that were both "pro-nuclear" and denigrating to environmentalists... we'll make sure the info gets passed on to the ELF and Green Peace.
You also had a story about interactions with the police, hopefully with the above info nobody lets the "dick" cop know you're spreading one-sided denigrating information about him.
You had a post critical of preferential network treatment... which means they are using some of your private information to make decisions about you, why are you worried about it in such a small place, but not in general?
I also notice your reputation outside of SlashDot isn't all that good either... "The last I saw, UbuntuDupe's karma was so bad that he posts at -1", "UbuntuDupe would have been torn to shreds in some other community support forums (for good reason)", etc. Guess I shouldn't even bother responding =-)
If you were applying for a job under me, how comfortable would you be letting me link your real identity to your online one? With your reputation for trollishness, I wouldn't want you in my org. Or more specifically, our legal department wouldn't want you, as you'd be far too much of a proven liability to our image.
Would the gov't want any of these for nefarious purposes? technically no.
But, the gov't is full of people, and you never know when one of those people will decide to use your information improperly. (They may not be targeting you, your data just might have been randomly picked... then again, maybe someone up there thinks you're a troll and need some punishin')
Re:Wag the Dog (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Missing the point... (Score:3, Interesting)
But just out of wondering... why hasn't anyone mentioned Godwin's law? I'd love to point out that it does not apply in this case, for the simple reason that government spying on its citizens was one of the characteristic marks of the Nazis. Oh, and so was propaganda.
And the soviets, too. (Hayak, Road to Serfdom).
And the British, and now the Americans (also Hayak, but forecast).
Re:Retort (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody cares until its their business being snooped.
So the lesson here is use an emotional metric. Ask them why they spent three hours on the phone with their mistress/lover discussing whether or not "this feels wrong", or, why they felt a need to buy a 50 count box of Preparation H at the Kroger on the corner of West and Spring the other day, or, why they felt a need to withdraw $1000 dollars from their checking account on a Friday night at around 11:53 P.M. and who was that woman standing next to them at the ATM on 5th and Pine?
Ask these kinds of questions, explaining that all the information came from readily available sources, and I guarantee you'll see some outrage.
Re:Retort (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you realize that you've just damned your argument?
So what you're saying is that "your generation" perceives the government as being the bad Big Brother. Ironically you don't seem to realize this meta point as you slide immediately from "haven't changed in fact" to "Its turned into".
No it hasn't; instead your negative perspective has overwhelmed reality and distorted it.
That is democracy. Such a discrepancy is almost surely a consequence of living in a republic and not in a totalitarian state that has brainwashed us to all have identical goals. I suspect you're experiencing Confirmation Bias and Selection Effect: surrounding yourself with like-minded people and restricting your reading to partisan sites.
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:3, Interesting)
What if Huckabee needed his own scapegoat?
What if he decided that the LDS church needed to be "watched"?
Suddenly a little over a million phones are tapped in the name of national security and all legal thanks to the patriot act...
Re:I actually agree with the article. (Score:3, Interesting)
The first incident is pretty bad. I've seen cops acting like that and it's pretty easy to believe that's how it actually happened. But it's hard to judge the second story without more information. It's possible they were searching for a car that looked like yours or searching for a man that fit your description. It really sucks, but unless you have a reason to believe they are harassing you or this is standard procedure in your city, I'd give the benefit of the doubt to the police.
In the city I live the police give you a little card with their name and police department contact info on it every time they pull you over. I'm not sure if this is a law or just PD policy, but it's a great idea. It lets you avoid the *extremely* awkward and tense exchange where you have to ask the officer's name or ID#.
Re:Wag the Dog (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Retort (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll go one better. I have a poll--perhaps unscientific in that its participants were self-selected, but the sample size is orders of magnitude larger than all the other polls put together--that says Americans indeed do not give a rats patootie about domestic spying and if they do care, it's in support of it for the sake of security.
It's the 2004 election.
Re:Both the article and it's criticism are correct (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not that the American people are stupid, as peoples go. It's that we're as vulnerable to fuzzy thinking and misinformation as anybody else.
The problem isn't that there is proof that the Executive branch has been spying on Americans -- at least if we're not counting the by now well documented fact of FBI use of national security letters; or the fact that NSA domestic surveillance program which supposedly was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks actually started the previous February. You also have to discount the now well documented fact that the NSA has a data mining program that tracks every number you dial, or are called from, and how long you talk. Let's stipulate for the moment that these sorts of things only concern the "tinfoil hat" crowd -- your open minded way of asserting people who disagree with you must be mentally deficient.
The problem is that "take our word for it" isn't a good enough answer in a constitutional system. It's certainly not the way our Constitution was written. We may or may not like this, depending on who is in power in each branch, but the Executive Branch's powers are supposed to be exercised with Congressional oversight. Even his war fighting powers -- or perhaps especially his war fighting powers.
Putting restraints on executive power isn't something done out of theoretical view of what unrestrained governments could hypothetically do. It's based on hard won,real world experience of what people with power do when nobody can restrain them. The outliers -- who may at times be admittedly a bit paranoid -- play an important role in our society. You may lose patience with them; and they may get attention at times for all the wrong reasons. But if they didn't get attention for the wrong reasons, they'd never get attention for the right one either, which is that nobody is supposed to have unlimited authority to decide for the American people what is in their best interest. Every decision, even if it is not of a nature that is publishable in the short term, is supposed to be subject to independent scrutiny.
Re:Retort (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retort (Score:5, Interesting)
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
Widespread spying has an extremely corrosive effect on good government but most people don't realize that or are to indifferent to care. As with Nixon and Hoover it almost inevitably is used to find dirt on people. In the case of politicians that dirt is then used against them to make them vote the way the people who have the dirt on them want them to vote, or to drive them out of office. Spying is almost inevitably used to destroy Democracy, that is why its bad. In the case of vocal opponents and protesters its used to silence them and lock them up. Widespread spying is a great way to find little indiscretions like drug use, infidelity, sexual indiscretions and tax evasion.
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report). The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts. All politicians are especially closely monitored. It is quite possible some powerful people decided to destroy Spitzer because of his crusade against the thieves on Wall Street who have been quite obviously stealing this country in to poverty. You have to wonder if Spitzer had his money in a bank where the bankers decided to retaliate for his crusades against Wall Street.
Spitzer's a Democratic Governor (Score:2, Interesting)
You think they replaced all those US Attorneys for nothing?