[soundgecko]

Its sad that it took so long spite of being all over HN, Reddit, /. Etc.

Shows that the tech community is not as big as we think and/or is apathetic to even filling a form, forget about peaceful marches. This is why politicians don't care and don't need to care about things that are important to only the tech crowd.

The numbers are just not there. There are lots of posts, tens of thousands of comments, even more up votes, but when the rubber meets the road, there is nothing. And the people with lots of money in the tech field don't care to part some for social change or to form PAC. We have no one else to blame for this but ourselves for things like the Aarons case and the state of affairs. Politicians have zero reasons to care one bit when a simple online petition can't make 100k votes all over the US in 2 weeks of non stop and over the top coverage in tech circles and going viral.

[cle]

I wonder...how many people are not apathetic but scared to sign a petition like that?

Also I think many people aren't apathetic about the issue, they're apathetic about the White House's laughable petitioning system.

[kimlelly]

"people are not apathetic but scared to sign"

That's exactly what this surveillance is doing: killing free speech by intimidation is killing democracy.

[devillain]

Or maybe not everyone agrees with you. There's been a lot of discussion about the 'means', but not much about the 'ends'. The 'ends' is the same as giving nuclear secrets to Iran or North Korea.

[cinquemb]

So are you saying the public is now equated to being the enemy of the state?

[Everlag]

Perhaps it could be due to the fact that, given all past evidence, the chance of this specific petition actually doing anything of any importance is extremely small.

Every time anything even mildly controversial has gotten the signatures required, it is either ignored or replied to with a template answer.

Perhaps one could get a little fatigued after continuous failure to elicit change.