Ask Slashdot: Why Isn't There More Public Outrage About NSA Revelations? 610
Nerval's Lobster writes "This morning we discussed news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has siphoned up millions of online address books and contact lists. The Post drew its information from top-secret documents provided by government whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spent the summer feeding information about the NSA to a variety of news outlets. Snowden's documents (as outlined in The Guardian, Spiegel Online and other venues) have detailed a massive NSA program that's siphoning all sorts of personal information from a variety of sources — and yet the public seems to have greeted each new revelation with weakening outrage. Whereas the initial news reports about NSA splying in June kicked off a firestorm of controversy and discussion (aggravated by the drama of Snowden seeking asylum in pretty much any country that would have him), the unveiling of the NSA's Great Contact-List Caper has ranked below the news stories such as the government shutdown, negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, and invites for Apple's upcoming iPad event on aggregators such as Google News; it also didn't make much of a blip on Twitter and other online forums. There's the very real possibility that Americans, despite the assurances of government officials, are being monitored in a way that potentially violates their privacy. Surely that's an issue that concerns a great many individuals; and yet, as time goes by, it seems as if people are choosing to focus on other things. Are we suffering from 'surveillance fatigue?'"
"My life is not that interesting" syndrome... (Score:4, Informative)
My in-laws are in the camp that their lives aren't interesting so if some guy in the US wants to read my sis-in-law's text messages, who cares... Or find out what brand of tampons she buys... She figures it's better to be safe from "terrists" and lose a bit of insignificant privacy than the alternative... I'm a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid freak, to them, because I refuse to have a passport...
Is youse ignerent? (Score:2, Informative)