[mindslight]

> people who get frustrated with recent attention to surveillance because "Of course this is going on, haven't you heard of Room 641A? I've been talking about this for years!

> Grrr, I am upset that I am no longer unique for my suspicions."

The first part is entirely true, but the second part is a misplaced caricature. If one wasn't operating with this threat model pre-Snowden, they mustn't have been analyzing the situation too hard.

The people who saw the Snowden revelations as inevitable had to endure being buzzkills for the past several years while everyone else leaped at the chance to party with the "cool kids" as geeks entered the limelight. It was clear that Apple's/Facebook's/Twitter's advances were primarily in the marketing department, but it was easy to ignore this to avoid being negative when you're finally gaining long-craved social acceptance.

Now that the herdthink has shifted towards privacy, we're seeing the same wishful marketing being applied to a lot of non-solutions to privacy (encrypting servers like Lavabit, remote code like Hushmail, facades of anonymity like Bitcoin, etc), when the reality is that solving (as opposed to merely obfuscating) these problems is extremely hard and any solution requires users to start taking a modicum of responsibility for their computing environment. But lowest-common-denominator faux solutions cannot address this inconvenient truth, so they give people the illusion of doing something while wasting away this iteration's outrage.

[jlgreco]

The first part does not warrant frustration that the issue is being covered. The first part alone should render you glad that the issue is now being given the attention it deserves.

The people who complain that it is now receiving attention are doing it, I think, out of frustration that they are not being adequately recognized for being ahead of the curve. They feel vindicated but they think that nobody notices that, so they lash out and complain about the wrong thing.

I see a parallel between this and David Simon's stance. He is upset that people are concerned about PRISM not because he has a good reason to be unconcerned about PRISM but because he wants that outrage reserved for his pet issue. He lashes out at the wrong thing; it should not concern him that people are concerned about PRISM, rather it should concern him that they are not also concerned about the War on Drugs.

(I picked the "upset at not being vindicated" example because it is a position I find myself tempted to take. I feel qualified to talk about the mentality behind it because I understand and resist the urge to adopt that mentality myself.)

[mindslight]

I know the tack you're referring to, it's similar to dismissing things as "first world problems", and I consider it petty and divisive. But I don't think it encompasses all of the told-you-so reactions either.

Communications freedom is basically my pet issue. I'm glad the issue is getting attention, but don't feel enthusiastic about how the reaction is playing out.

The primary response seems to consist of politically-aimed incredulousness, as if the NSA will ever stop intercepting everything they physically can. It could have purpose if this were going to be the event that caused dismantling of USG, but it's not.

What's really lacking in the popular dialog is self-reflection about how the pervasiveness is entirely due to people's own poor, compulsive, and lazy technology choices. The status quo in the non-privacy threads is still enthusiasm for the latest shiny centralized trap from Google/Apple/Facebook/Dropbox/otherWebStartup.

The tide of awareness has not actually shifted until it starts being socially uncool to use a Gmail.com address, let Facebook mediate your social life, electively upgrade your pocket tracker for a new facade, rely on software that's controlled by someone else, or build new products in walled gardens.

So it seems like dispassionate/condescending "I've been telling you this all along" is an appropriate way to point out that there's been plenty of people who've been preaching the solution before you bothered to realize there was a problem. And if you'd actually like to empower yourself, you really do need to follow their inconvenient advice instead of seeking easy gratification through the latest fad kickstarter campaign or https site with flawed marketing spiel.