NSA App Ideas To Popularize Spying and Big Data 78
reifman writes "Perhaps the reason the NSA's surveillance programs are so unpopular with Americans is that we haven't seen any of the potential consumer benefits that spying and big data can provide. Here are ten ideas for the productization and monetization of the NSA's spying infrastructure to inspire Americans to consider the bright side of the dark arts." In case anyone doesn't notice, these suggestions (at least most of them) are presented tongue-in-cheek; a truly secure email system, though, is another story.
Learned helplessness (Score:5, Interesting)
Joe Sixpack and Lisa Liberal don't seem to care.
Some people have been studying the phenomenon of "upheval" in it's generic form. It's spawned a lot of studies/papers and even popular books, viz: The Tipping Point [google.com].
The overall summary is that you can't just point out how bad something is, you have to give people an action they can take to help fix the problem.
There is widespread distrust, anger, and annoyance at the NSA due to the revelations. There's no public outrage because there's really nothing anyone can do. "Joe Sixpack" has no actions to take: voting doesn't help, writing congresscritters doesn't help, even public mass demonstrations don't seem to help. What you are seeing is Learned Helplessness [wikipedia.org]: an animal doesn't take actions to help themselves, because they're convinced that the actions will have no effect.
Consider the recent history of cell phones or music distribution: people were complaining that cell phones were a walled ecology with no innovation and poor functionality. You had to get carrier approval to run a program on a cell phone, and they would only allow the simplest, meager functionality. You were lucky if your carrier allowed you to have tetris.
People complained that if you wanted music, you had to purchase a physical CD, for an ensemble collection and for an exorbitant fee. Usually you had to purchase an entire CD for a single song you liked.
As soon as an option was given, people flocked to the new systems in droves, uptake was very fast.
Make secure E-mail easy to use with trivial installation and the situation will change overnight. There will be a flood of new users.
Everyone hates the situation, but for most people there's nothing they can do about it.
Really dude? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this is satire, but fuck you
Dude, really?
Check out John Cleese's lecture on creativity [youtube.com].
Then tell me if you're one of the people who believe in absolute solemnity for certain subjects, that they cannot be joked about in any way.
By way of illustration, here's a parody of torture [youtube.com].