My impression is not that people don't understand or care, but are afraid and feel powerless to do anything.

I think many people do not understand. What seems obvious for us may be difficult to grasp even for programmers. Almost 20 years ago, I have received the virus "I love you" in my mail box. For me, it was obvious it was a virus and that it was "safe" to save it on disk and open it using notepad as long as I did not double click on it. I was very surprised that for most of my colleagues, it was far from obvious. I am not against giving powers to police, but for me, giving a backdoor is completely unacceptable.

People understand they're being spied on and feel powerless to do anything about it. Huge source them feeling powerless about it is that they do not understand how to respond to the matter using technology. That said, not understanding how something works does not mean they don't understand what is going on. If history is any measure of the future, they are right to be afraid and wary of saying anything.

I believe that people who know more fear more. And those who don't know simply aren't able to identify the threat well enough to take action. For now, the threat is relatively abstract (some dark agency somewhere maybe has access to some amount of computery things and might stalk me or whatever). And by the time the threat evolves into men with guns in their living room, it won't be associated with the current info wars. Assuming, of course, that true history remains accessible...

There's nothing "more" to know, people do not like being spied on and no one would sign-up to have someone watch their home if that meant everything they said was being monitored. People understand and are afraid to say something for fear that it will come back to haunt them.

I think your perspective is a valid one. However, I don't think everyone realizes they are actually being spied on or to what extent. The media says one thing (not always the same thing) and government denies it. I believe to many people that's enough controversy to avoid thinking too much about it.

And to pre-empt any argument that I may be too faithless about people's natural proclivity to protect themselves, consider something as as epic and clear-cut as climate change. I can't think of a better example of something so threatening to society yet so popularly disregarded.

I have the impression that the biggest problem is that these issues are not intuitively approachable anymore.

We have very similar issues with computer security. The majority of people have a totally different skillset and simply can't grasp these things. This is probably only getting worse as the technology behind our interfaces is getting increasingly unintuitive.

On the extreme end of this separation in our culture of specialists we may need a fundamentally new framework for trust. And maybe it's these the trust issues causing all these nonsensical surveillance ideas at the moment — to get "more control".

Image what happens if AI robots are roaming the earth, causing all kinds of post-humanity questions, and nobody really understands what the fuck is going on anymore.

The future is probably both horrifying and glorious :D

You posit a very challenging idea. How does one create a "framework for trust" when experts can't effectively communicate their valid ideas because educating the masses is impractical or impossible?

Perhaps the goal is to re-establish trust in expertise. Something I believe has been eroded over many decades by talking heads and overly confident imposters.

How do you teach someone to recognize truth, even when they cannot verify it for themselves?

This ambivalence is not dissimilar from the torture debate.

You have the few POWs against it, people with principle against it, and people who are afraid of for it. Many others are ambivalent about it.

That's like 90% of issues though. That's how pressure groups work.

I think people care about it as much as probably something like bitcoins. The chance of it directly influencing their lives is small.