Is there something special about "newness" when determining what our response should be to a particular "bad thing" (generically: evil)?
It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".
My take is this: just because some humans who were born before me were unable to recognize, or if they were, oppose, a particular bad thing makes no difference whatsoever. There is no statute of limitations on opposing evil and doing good. Wrongs can—and should—be corrected no matter how much time has passed since the discovery and the subsequent correction.
It might also be a subtle hint to read up on history.
In the specific case of Hoover, the public did react. When Hoover died, ending decades of quiet terror, his 3rd in command was passed over for promotion to the top job. In retaliation he started leaking a lot of dirty laundry to the press, which caused a huge reaction that ultimately ended with the resignation of the president, huge shakeups of all spy agencies, and a giant crack in faith from which we've yet to recover.
One disgruntled spook with a fistful of secrets paralyzed all "four" branches of the government of the most powerful country in the world for over a year.
I certainly did not intend to imply that it's somehow less morally reprehensible if it has been done before. I guess what I meant was that people should pay more attention to history - more people should realize that abuses of power like this will happen; there are way too many who still believe that surveillance is all right because the powers that be can be trusted to do the right thing.
> It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".
While I can't speak for Sharlin or tptacek, when I point out that things have happened before, my intent is to prompt people to stop being merely outraged. It is all very nice to say that wrongs should be corrected, but it is entirely useless to waste that outrage on complaining at a local watering hole.
Articles and comments like this have, at best, some vague hope that Congresspersons will notice and wish to pander to those particular constituents by authoring a bill. What kind of lackluster plan is that? Near as I can tell, most people are outraged because it makes them feel like they are similar to the other outraged persons and, action proving truth more than word, entirely disinterested in changing the status quo.
Speaking of history... I notice a great deal of arm-chair anger all around me combined with a strong lack of faith that anything can change. Most of my friends, even those with some political engagement, consider things like protests (peaceful or otherwise) completely ineffective and keep any kind of moral change limited to their personal lives. Do you have an idea of how common this kind of situation has been in the past? Is it a natural step in a growing anger, or is our situation somewhat special?
Slavoj Zizek seems to mention this issue in some form or other quite often. He argues, as far as I understand, that a big difference between 'us' and previous generations is that we seem to both disapprove and accept the status quo to an unprecedented degree. I've also heard others claim that we are a 'silent generation' that just kind of tries to be different in the private sphere, and leave it at that.
I don't know if this is true, but I do know we often consider our situation unique when even a cursory look at history shows that it isn't.
It's really hard to accurately gauge this kind of thing. If you go too far in the past, then the percentage of literate people drops too fast for us to have first-hand accounts of what people really thought of their contemporary policies. The accounts we have available are accounts from those who were affluent enough to bother with literacy: precisely the groups that would contest the power of the state. If you stick to the last few centuries, you simply don't have enough data.
I'm a liberal, which to me, includes being a meliorist. This means, roughly, that I believe that things get better, and that this is especially true over the long run. I think that the present day society is better than those in the past. So that's the context in which I say, "Yes, we can do something."
The silence of our generation comes, in part, from our multiculturality. Too many of "us" feel like we're irreconcilably different. Race, sex, industry, level of education, socioeconomic status, etc.: we see more ways in which we're different than in which we're the same. So we retreat behind facades of private domains, where the differences can be muted by not seeing them, and in a vicious cycle, reinforces our inability to come out into the public sphere and engage. We spend our days traveling from our private homes, along roadways where our interactions with others involve cursing and frustration, to private businesses, and so many of us need to be back home to sleep soon afterwards for another day of work. If your neighbor went on strike, would you even know or care?
I realize I didn't really answer the question, but I don't really have an answer.
I am trying to understand what its "newness" has to do with anything. Most crimes are not new, but we still prosecute. It sounds to me like you are suggesting that criminal justice is (or should be) based on how it would look as a CSI episode. (Sorry, simple blackmail is too bland a plot we can't prosecute, the audience will just sleep through it. Make it more fresh, have a twist at the end, something 'new').
What I meant is that abuses of power like this ought not be surprising - there are too many people who think that the powers that be can be trusted to do the right thing wrt surveillance.
