This is not about you. This is not about your data. This is about our society's collective ability to think and act for itself. Blanket acceptance of surveillance is a dangerous attitude and shockingly common.

Political efforts, technological efforts, societal changes are all required to keep democracy alive. And that's what's at stake here, not your personal files. Nobody cares if you can keep those safe - I want my democracy to be safe, please.

It's also about the future of our society, that which our children have to grow up in and deal with.

I don't know how we'll be able to turn to our children in the coming decades and tell them "the government is monitoring everything you say through voice and text on your phone, every keystroke you make on your tablet or computer, every purchase you make on your phone or through your card in this inevitably cashless society, every connection you make on a connected device, everywhere your devices check in, connect to GPS or triangulate... oh and every camera you see out and about is recording you and facial recognition software is tagging it as you" with the justification for their complete lack of privacy being "there were some guys in the middle east riding around in pickup trucks with AK47s so we needed this to protect us".

We're at a pivotal point now and it's very much up to us which way it goes. Our governments are supposed to serve us but instead we live in a society where we are very much ruled, where our rulers are the elite and their ruling mechanism is the complete charade of representative democracy.

We'll all be dead before it gets too bad, thankfully, but our apathy will condemn our children and their descendants to a life under tyranny which we ushered in through theatrical politics, fear mongering and a bizarrely held belief of There Is No Alternative.

But after Snowden's leaks? It's simply something we have to accept.

Amazing how quick some people are to dismiss already acknowledged issues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Amongst the anti-surveillance faction, I think that a major gripe is that the feedback loops put in place to prevent a tyranny of the majority situation are being subverted, if not in the letter of the law, then in the spirit of the law.

How can elected officials have an even discussion regarding state surveillance when imperfect information abounds, and they themselves are kept in the dark from what is actually happening? That is to say nothing about the general population having a more direct say on what their government does on their behalf.

Also while the US is a formal republic, it does often emulate a democracy. Based on common belives the constitution is reinterpreted, or simply ignored. This has been well documented by legal scholars such as Richard Epstein.

I don't think you quite understand the point of anarchy.

We have historical examples of milions of people living this way.

Democracy means that your fellow citizens get a vote too. If you and those that agree with you can't craft a message that appeals to them and their day-to-day concerns, the grandparent comment will continue to be quite correct.

The citizens never asked for this intrusion and would likely have resisted if they had been, so it was executed in secret, and would have remained a complete secret if not for Snowden.

Nobody has even tried to "craft a message that appeals to the public" until AFTER the fact, when their overreach had been exposed.

A democracy generally works by citizens' issue A going to politicians B and being passed after debate to agency C which effects action D; in our situation currently the NSA has decided that it is in the best interest of itself to effect surveillance. It isn't democracy in action no matter how you attempt to spin it.

The suppression of the minority factions by the majority is always popular, which is exactly why the bill of rights exists.

  they cannot and will not step down while other
  countries, basically everyone that is capable
  to do it, will do it

But there are plenty of other things they could do. Instead of weakening encryption standards, they could work to strengthen them. Instead of trying to get software vendors to install backdoors, they could get them to use deterministic builds with release checksum transparency. Instead of developing hardware backdoors, they could develop inspection systems to find them.

With sufficient know-how and sophistication you can keep your messages private anyways no? If that's the case, then isn't it really just the average joe using off the shelf tech that's screwed?

Edit: That sounded combative, but it wasn't meant to be.

Yes, the future is digital. And yes, there will be dangers from several global parties. But why does the NSA chose to effectively weaken public communication by discovering and using security issues in known protocols instead of making sure those get fixed (if the NSA can find it, who's to say no one else can?).

With their proven effort to make everyone's communication interceptable (and effectively weakening crypto systems in all possible manners) they aren't protecting anyone, but instead putting US companies, US citizens and all global users of the web at an even higher risk.

I haven't even started on the effects on civil rights and freedom of speech of a global surveillance apparatus that is acting in secret and not under democratic control.

If it would be about an arms race, why not enforce secure crypto standards and help the industry in that regard? Clearly it's not about having more "cyber power" than China, North Korea and what have you. Instead, it's about having power on individuals, no matter where they're from.

Different technologies, but the actions changed and were addressed via politics mainly. Technologies might be here to stay, but we shouldn't expect that the way we use them as societies stay the same.

I can't disagree more. Just a few centuries ago slavery was not only ubiquitous but it was widely regarded as a god given right. Free man power was also a massive boost to economy but we abolished that just fine.

Naysayers will be proven wrong.

"Ethics and Power in the Long War" https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-ele...

You're right that stopping it politically is hard:

If you look at the historical record of surveillance structures, you have never, we’ve never seen a modern state without going through a revolution or something similar, roll back deployed and operational and technical capabilities.

You can though tweak the economic cost (and I'd guess that legal process is part of that, technical measures are too):

The economics of spying is the structure that controls whether or not spying is done. The notion of return of investment is very germane here. How much intelligence product are you going to get for a given investment. That is what determines which intelligence methods are used.

That is more an issue of unflagging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network than worrying about who is the alpha agent. We can count fine against secret traumatic wars if we each log action, community action (with secure, stable, distributed tools like http://www.matrix.org/alpha and https://www.getaether.net), and begin to self-determine our social systems and safety issues.

[1]: http://www.welivesecurity.com/2013/10/29/survey-says-77-of-a...

Don't be an apologist for immorality just because it's accepted as the status quo. We can do better.