This may have been implicit in your comment, but it's not just dismissive: it's actively counterproductive if your goal is increasing awareness of the real harms of indiscriminate surveillance.
In today's polarized political environment where terms like bot/shill/NPC are thrown around willy-nilly, implying that someone lacks agency over their views is a fantastic way of getting them to shut down and refuse to engage with you as anything but a tribal enemy.
That's a particular shame because opposition to indiscriminate surveillance has the potential to transcend partisan feuding, as exemplified by Schneier's careful selection of examples that have appeal across the spectrum. Sanctimonious sniping by tech elites at them darn brainwashed masses is one way to ensure that an anti-surveillance coalition of 2a defenders and immigration reformists remains a fantasy.
Note that I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime, but tone of messaging is everything.
They made up their mind to be okay with it a long time before that comment.
> I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime
No, it itself is bad for reasons that make other crimes and terrorism bad. It's a crime worse than terrorism, we're just too primitve to have it on the books yet. And plenty of entitites using surveillance also commit terrorism and other crimes, and are in bed with all sorts of people who do all sorts of things, as long as its useful. It's a great "tool" to fight activism of all sorts, and it's used for that.
Actually, I would say it's not even a tool, it's a weapon. I hope future historians will get a chuckle out of this, to me it's like people arguing about how useful a minigun is for hunting deer. As Hannah Arendt said, intellectuals are great with coming up with all sorts of high-fallutin, complicated explanations, they're the best at not seeing the obvious, not the quickest to understand. It really just boils down to this: when they came for X, Y and Z, it was more comfortable to rationalize that than to realize that they're going through the alphabet, backwards, and that all of us could have been born as anyone, and that even when they came for Z, they really came for you.
But you see, if people don't care about others, I also don't care about them. If X Y Z are not enough for someone, I'm not going to bend over backwards to explain to them them how they will also get affected at some point, how it already changed them, how ultimately, nobody gains from it, not even the very tippity-top, and so on.
If a kid kicks a dog, yes, you probably shouldn't descend on it with fury and preach to it for hours on end how horrible a person they are. But you also probably shouldn't just say "it's great you have this much energy, but check out this pillow". No, they hurt another being, they wouldn't want to be hurt that way themselves, it's not okay and they shouldn't do it again -- if there is no way to tell them that without them getting upset, let them get upset. Some things are simply too serious to be too soapy and sloppy about.
At this point, the sheer amount of crimes people have NOT cried bloody murder about, the rationalizations they already invested in, are enough to make people upset regardless of how nice you are. Nevermind personal choices, we are too many generations into too much bullshit for anyone to come away from a good, hard look unscathed. If they want to hold people who haven't even been born hostage with their petty selves, their fragile egos, their life choices that can't have been for nought, then they need to be overcome, not catered to.
The quality of seeds is not determined by how a rocky surface interacts with it, but what happens when there's fertile soil and some rain. Sometimes when the seeds are actually fine, but there's still a holdup, the soil might simply not be fertile, it might be rock. Maybe it needs more time and rain, but either way you don't wait around until something grows or doesn't. Instead you do rounds, and only after you've done at least one round can you even begin to justify focusing on the patches where nothing has grown. But instead, those patches actually demand a veto right, seeking to stop the whole thing even though the fault is with them.
If you get hung up on "brainwashed" you're simply not going by the strongest most possible interpretation, and take offense at a word people people use in casual conversation without a problem for decades. And that's not even getting into serious thinkers, or any of that.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
-- Hannah Arendt
Someone who not sometimes trembles to their core because of that, who never loses sleep because of the realization that right now, millions of people are in physical and/or psychological agony, which is carefully curated and hidden from sight -- how could I be moved in the least by them trembling over being called anything but innocent yet wise?
Let's say 5% of the people had no problem with being this "unflattering" because that's a near invisibly tiny thing compared to what others endure and what's at stake. Those, without interference from the rest, would probably achieve more than 30% who have the top priority to never be offended and never be sad.
How many women were suffragettes, how many weren't? This very notion that it all needs to be made inoffensive and smooth enough, until everybody can agree on it, itself may impede progress way more than people who are more blunt about it than you.
In today's polarized political environment where terms like bot/shill/NPC are thrown around willy-nilly, implying that someone lacks agency over their views is a fantastic way of getting them to shut down and refuse to engage with you as anything but a tribal enemy.
That's a particular shame because opposition to indiscriminate surveillance has the potential to transcend partisan feuding, as exemplified by Schneier's careful selection of examples that have appeal across the spectrum. Sanctimonious sniping by tech elites at them darn brainwashed masses is one way to ensure that an anti-surveillance coalition of 2a defenders and immigration reformists remains a fantasy.
Note that I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime, but tone of messaging is everything.