Of course the surveillance is about control... It seems so obvious to me that I don't even give it much thought, but I think there are far too many variables affecting the current state of affairs, regarding the NSA, surveillance, etc. It wasn't just one event, one government administration, one legislative change or one technological advancement that got us into this mess. Several factors have converged to create the current police state, but I ask: Why are people suddenly so upset about finding out that the NSA has found an efficient means to surveil the populous when so many organizations have been doing this for years?
Nobody was getting upset when Google was reading your emails; Facebook was reading your private messages; Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile were tracking your calls and geo-locations... All for the sake of more efficiently marketing to you. Advertisement is just another form of control. They don't tell you or force you to do or not do something, they just efficiently convince people to part with their money and make those people think that it was their own idea to do so all along.
All these concerns come down to whether we collectively think these practices are right or wrong, and it is becoming more difficult to make these judgements without a bias and it's difficult to continually evaluate whether your bias has been externally affected by these business practices.
The reason why nothing is truly being done about this massive theft of privacy is because people are complacent with the idea. We can't truly get upset that our governments are taking away our privacy when we have been giving it away to private corporations and religious organizations for so long.
Completely agree. It's hard to care about privacy when we get so much in return for surrendering it. Things don't cost money anymore, instead they cost our private lives. This is a bargain we've been making for a long time, and people are subconsciously aware of it. I think this plays a huge role into why people don't care about the NSA in general...every fucking other organization is spying on them too, what's one more??
I'm convinced the way to combat it is to provide services people use that are convenient and respect privacy. Not via easily-broken promises (Privacy Policy!!) but by enforcing privacy in the client. If cloud services only store encrypted data, you get the convenience and the privacy without compromise.
Once more companies make this shift, I think you'll see people realizing they don't mind spending a few bucks (hell they spend it on new apps all the time) to not have a million anal probes jammed into their private lives 24/7.
Nobody was getting upset when Google was reading your emails; Facebook was reading your private messages; Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile were tracking your calls and geo-locations... All for the sake of more efficiently marketing to you. Advertisement is just another form of control. They don't tell you or force you to do or not do something, they just efficiently convince people to part with their money and make those people think that it was their own idea to do so all along.
All these concerns come down to whether we collectively think these practices are right or wrong, and it is becoming more difficult to make these judgements without a bias and it's difficult to continually evaluate whether your bias has been externally affected by these business practices.
The reason why nothing is truly being done about this massive theft of privacy is because people are complacent with the idea. We can't truly get upset that our governments are taking away our privacy when we have been giving it away to private corporations and religious organizations for so long.