That's because a majority of Americans don't believe they have anything to hide, or that the stuff they do want to hide is probably so mundane to the average government official that they assume they wouldn't care. I'm guessing the way the survey question is posed has a lot to do with the outcome. Take out the word "terrorism" and I'm sure support would drop. Add the phrase "personal information" and I'm sure it would drop even further. Or perhaps ask "Would you be comfortable with the government tracking your activity on Facebook, Gmail, and Skype?" I'm guessing support for that would be close to 0%.
The even crazier story is this: In 2006, 61% of Democrats thought it was unacceptable, and in 2013, 34% of Democrats think it is unacceptable. I vote as Democrat as the next guy, but that's some crazy double-think going on there.
I <i>think</i> I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA. Maybe other things like that, with some checks in place (mostly to prevent this data getting out of their hands).<p>But <i>I</i> want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective.<p>There's <i>no way</i> NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
Keep in mind many Americans have never traveled outside the country, they are fed a constant diet of bullshit by our media alternating between frantic fear-mongering and gushing American paternalism, and simply don't stop to think about what is actually going on.<p>I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
I think we need to make a choice as a society where the line is drawn. We chose to allow privilege for religious, medical, and legal conversations. Sure, in individual cases, it would be better to get the data from someone's confession, but overall, it's better for society (or people decided) to allow those conversations to encourage religious confession.<p>Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes of cloud service, computing service, or communication. Certainly allowing people to use an "exocortex" without fear of seizure would make people smarter. It might make some crimes harder to punish.<p>Luckily, technology gets a vote, too.<p>I think a clear/easy line is that anything which is "personal thought" or approximates thought should be immune to search, ideally though technical means. Notes (for yourself), a journal, etc. Maybe "quantified self" measurements. etc.<p>The line is probably in a different place than in the telephone era, or even the disconnected Internet era.<p>I'd prefer it be defined through legislation (and maybe through constitutional amendment) vs. through legal decisions. The problem with legal decisions is they tend to involve criminal cases, and "a person was keeping a personal diary of his child rapes" is an exceptionally hard thing to argue privacy for, even if that's only 0.001% of the use case enabled by making personal notes private.
I think that people like us (that is, people who think in a systems fashion about the electronic communications networks and the data flowing over them) are more likely to view this with alarm than the normals. I think that's because we actually know how much power having things like metadata gives you. The question is, how do we explain this to non-engineers in a way that they will listen to so that they will be as alarmed as we know they should be?
I'd like to see more surveys or reviews of this survey's methods. It isn't difficult for the phrasing of the questions to skew results in one direction or another (e.g. Gallup).<p>I'm sure it's possible for people to be a bit apathetic and support widespread data snooping, but I'm wary of the inevitable attacks and possible drummed up support for current policies.
And I have no problem with them opting in to have their lives and data tracked. The real problem is that everyone is tracked, including those in the minority who do not want their lives and data tracked. But such is democracy.
until ppl get problems, they have no idea what the nsa does with the data.
if they have no idea and get no problem, "why would it bother them?"<p>that yeah. its like if i had the right to sentence anybody on earth to death, but i wasn't doing it too often, and when i do it, nobody has any idea it happened.
So people would think its ok.