When this issue came out, I was really hoping that the people will rise and big changes will finally happen. But now I realize that it was just wishful thinking. For any real big positive changes to occur, there first needs to be a change at the root level, and by that I mean the way people think. The government doing this is a big problem, sure. But the majority of people don't even care, and that I think is a much bigger problem.
I wish the "nothing to hide" people would just actually stop and think outside their myopic b.s.
Look, from what I've been seeing in the last few days (mostly from talking to friends), the "nothing to hide" people are usually white, middle-upper class, and citizens of the USA.
But let's try this: get out of your privileged world for a moment and pretend, just for a second, that you are a Middle-Eastern American. This is where shit gets pretty real.
Why? Because the reality is that with every email, telephone conversation, and internet search you ever commit to - you will pretty much always be censoring yourself in the back of your mind if the government may misinterpret what you are doing. One search term, one "trigger word" on a phone call, and you could be finding yourself having to defend yourself against some very serious allegations.
This is why PRISM is a completely INSANE breach of freedoms. Given that so much of human communication is now conveyed electronically, this is such a huge loss of freedom for those who are being racially and religiously profiled.
FYI, I'm a white dude. But if I had to seriously self-censor every every email, phone call, and text I wrote for fear of persecution - the US would feel to me like Syria with MTV.
People will only rise up and get upset when they're denied their status quos.
Let's talk about it economically. To effect real change, there would have to be a huge shift in the number of upset and angry people. So one or two of a few things would have to happen:
1) right now, most people are working from paycheck to paycheck. They have no buffer, no savings, no freedom from their day job. In fact, they are sacrificing more and more basics just to have the privilege of a job. How do you expect them to find the time to rally?
2) Probably near half the people in the US believe they have nothing to hide and thus shouldn't care about these issues. Something very significant would have to happen to many of them to get them to take action on it. Just by the nature of intelligence, this is likely outside the realm of reality.
3) what's left after throwing all your time and energy at your work and dealing with torturous bureaucracies? Whatever it is that makes life worth living. Your family, entertainment, food; whatever it is, a person just wants to enjoy these things for the little time they have on this planet. When trying to wrangle an entrenched insititution like the US government seems like it would take an entire lifetime to make happen, people evaluate their lives and make that calculus. Most find its just not worth it.
I don't really know what the answer is except to say that for anything to happen, probably at least two of those three things have to affect most people in a negative way.
a majority of people know more about what is happening on the jersey shore than they know about prism - that is the real problem - its cool to be ignorant and apathetic these days
