[lazyjones]

> That being said, I wouldn't go as far as to say the average American doesn't care, just that their reaction in light of these leaks is underwhelming.

Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog situation. What is now somehow acceptable, would have been outrageous a dozen years ago. In a few months' time people will have accepted that the NSA is spying on US citizens without a warrant.

This is why it is inevitable that the US will become a totalitarian surveillance state - if the political establishment chooses to go down that road.

[rayiner]

Except it was worse 30-50 years ago. Do you really think what the NSA is doing now compares, vis-a-vis outrage (not scale), to what the FBI was doing in the 1960's? To analogize to the OWS protests, you think anything that happened with that is as bad as the Kent State shootings in 1970?

Going back further, watch this movie on Prohibition: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition.

You think 4th amendment rights are being violated now, back then Prohibition Bureau agents were just sweeping houses looking for illegal alcohol. Seriously, watch the video. It should be eye-opening for anybody who thinks that the trajectory of this country has been towards less freedom and more corruption.

I don't see a boiling frog situation, I see the opposite: people getting more used to stronger protections against government and reacting more strongly to lesser outrages. That doesn't mean the outrages are less valid, but rather it means that the defeatism inherent in the "boiling frog" analogy is unwarranted.

[rdl]

The counterpoint is...can you imagine Hoover as the next DIRNSA?

[rogerchucker]

Hmm.. let's not criticize the situation now because it was much worse in the past. But I'm not shocked you used that argument given your apologist comments on other posts related to the National Sorority Agency on HN.

[rayiner]

You might have a point if I was arguing that the NSA spying isn't bad because the FBI used to be worse. But I'm specifically responding to the "boiling frog" reference in lazyjones's post. The whole premise of the "boiling frog" is that things get worse for the frog over time, but slowly enough that it doesn't notice until it's cooked. The boiling frog analogy, and various slippery-slope lines of reasoning, seem quite inconsistent to me with the general trajectory of civil liberties over the last 100 years.

[anigbrowl]

It's a very good argument, because the suggestion that we've abandoned some golden age of individual liberty in the US is not rooted in fact. The individual has far more standing in conflict with the state than used to be the case.

[anigbrowl]

Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog situation. What is now somehow acceptable, would have been outrageous a dozen years ago.

It might have stirred some opposition in August of 2001, but by September of 2001 people were pretty united in the desire to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 by any available means.