Comment Re:The Surveillance State is now official (Score 1) 510
I'm terribly afraid that the high-order bit ingrained in the human psyche is not liberty and fulfillment in life, but the assurance of safety at virtually any cost. Ask the average American if they would, if given the chance, immediately shut down all illegal surveillance by the NSA, and thereby increase their (vanishingly small) chances of dying in a terrorist attack by 1%. Who is going to check the box labelled, "increase my chances of dying" or "increase the chances of a pedophile molesting my kid"? Ratcheting up surveillance, if done right, doesn't immediately make life noticeably less comfortable. That's all you need to do to keep the majority from taking action.
Having lived in China for a year, I'm surprised at a few things. First, every day life feels pretty much free. Sure, you can't say whatever you want online, and don't have to look very far to find corruption and oppression that makes your blood boil. But this can be largely ignored and most people just go about their lives and don't spend too much energy brooding about how unfair everything is (and damn is it unfair). Plus I find that I'm happier the less political news I read, but that was true in the US too.
Second, I'm surprised at the degree to which people worship stability and safety and prosperity. You hear stories of (rich) people paying ridiculous amounts of money to feng shui practitioners to make sure their house has the best feng shui. People going to random temples to pray/burn incense/make donations, even though they don't believe in Buddhism. The degree to which people eschew "dangerous" activities like hiking (and then ride scooters the wrong way down the street without wearing helmets, nobody wears helmets here). The way people constantly say "careful!" or how pregnant women are treated like glass. The whole obsession with Chinese medicine and astrology and other pseudoscientific ways of supposedly gaining an edge over the natural world. But nauseatingly widespread superstition, an ill in its own right, isn't the point here: look past it to see that it's overwhelmingly employed in the protection of a person and his family, above all else.
Third, people, even some educated people who know about all the stuff you're not supposed to know here, sometimes partially buy the government line that it's only doing what is necessary for the protection and safety of society. This scares the hell out of me. It's true that all-out civil war would have a terrifyingly high human cost, so the government should try to avoid that. But as long as people buy the line about safety then liberty will continue to diminish with no end in sight.
It's true that Chinese, on average, seem to desire stability and safety more than westerners. But though the degree is different, the same tendencies are present in the west, and the politicians are using the same arguments. The way the UK and US governments have responded to Snowden is terribly chilling.
So, what can we hope for to reinvent America? A mass movement by the increasingly frustrated and desperate middle and lower classes? A few more Edward Snowdens to keep the heat on? I worry that it's already too late. Would the American Revolution still have gotten started if life under British rule didn't suck so much?
What we're lacking, then, is a powerful and widely understood answer to the question, "What is the danger of more surveillance?" Why does the line "only the criminals have something to fear" not immediately sound like propaganda to everyone in America?
