It's not news to me. But it does seem like most people don't care. Or don't care enough. However, what could they do, even if they cared enough?

If people care enough, they can bring down governments...

And in much worse conditions...

Yeah, well. They can because of the "much worse conditions". If you push people hard enough so they aren't fulfilling the lowest level of Maslow's pyramid, you'll get your bloody revolution. NSA issues is way too abstract for that.

>Yeah, well. They can because of the "much worse conditions". If you push people hard enough so they aren't fulfilling the lowest level of Maslow's pyramid, you'll get your bloody revolution.

I'll have to disagree with that. People often stay subservient when in dire conditions, but also have been known start a revolution for mild (or stronger) discomforts. Mankind is not driven by "bread" that predictably.

It's hard enough getting people to use VPNs and Tor.

Most people don't see it as a problem. They regard NSA as looking out for them, and confide that as long as they themselves do not engage in terrorism, they've nothing to fear from it.

Which, to a good first approximation, is true. But those of us with a sense of history mistrust any such gigantic agglomeration of unaccountable power, because we know how deeply susceptible such apparatuses are to employment toward unsavory ends.

The trouble is that there's no good, quick, simple way to bring this home to people. You end up sounding like Chicken Little, or so underplaying the significance of the issue that even a sympathetic interlocutor fails to recognize its gravity.

I don't really know a third way; I don't even know that there can be one, other than waiting for some suitable example in point, one that can't be explained away as an artifact of specific circumstance, and building the discussion around that. But even that strategy is fraught at best, and the easiest way to lose any argument is always to yield the initiative. So I don't really have a good, generally workable option here, as regards persuasive discourse on the issue, and if anyone else does, I'd sure like to hear about it!