[rayiner]

Talking about "majority of power holders agree" is so disingenuous. See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/05/poll-public-supports-nsa-sp... ("As we’ve written about before, the American public has widely supported the NSA’s activities before and after the scandal. I’m no fan of the secretive spying, but if the government appears to be acting slowly on surveillance reform, it could be because they’re responding to constituents.").

And this is a poll of people. If you polled likely voters, who skew older (i.e. more who lived through the cold war), you'd see even healthier margins in support of the NSA.

Also, it's a bit of historical revisionism to paint Obama as extremely anti-surveillance. Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture. He's answer to "what would you have done instead of going into Iraq?" was "I would have hit Afghanistan harder!" He was a candidate who was self-conscious about the perception of Democrats as being "weak on security" and campaigned to avoid that label. And on his second go, he campaigned as "the guy that killed Osama." He's been quite consistent as someone who wants to project a lot of U.S. military power abroad, and in the grand scheme of things the NSA is part and parcel of that.

[grandalf]

Most Americans learn about the issue from media stories created by firms owned by powerful interests, so public opinion is not surprising.

If you look back at the early coverage of the Snowden leaks in the NY Times, the story was reported but the paper dutifully prepped a character assassination attack on Snowden himself, while intentionally suppressing the story of James Clapper's perjury and while also avoiding suggesting that Obama owed the public an explanation.

[tptacek]

This might or might not be true, but it is also among the oldest arguments in all of propaganda: the will of the people can't be trusted, because it's shaped by malignant elites. Often, it continues on to say that until we can fix that problem, we all need to be governed by this other group of benificent elites.

[grandalf]

That's not really the argument I'm making b/c I do ultimately believe it's the public's own responsibility. But nonetheless, short-term framing of issues is influenced by media, and that's often enough to nudge things quite significantly.

[untog]

Yes. Taking on the government is the wrong fight when they are (at least broadly) representative of public opinion. The fight should be educating people on the dangers of NSA spying, something that I haven't really seen anyone try to do. All commentary comes from the perspective that "NSA = bad" is already a given.

[grandalf]

Hmm. How can the public have an opinion about a secret program? If a leaker revealed that the government had a secret underground concentration camp below the Arizona desert would you view that to be the result of dutiful fulfillment of public service?

[untog]

The public can have an opinion about a secret program when details of it have leaked, as is the case here. But more to the point, if the public don't know how little they know then that's also an area for activism. All of these topics ought to enrage everyone, but they don't because of a lack of awareness. Yet the tech crowd starts the debate assuming everyone is angry.

I have no idea what point you're making with the concentration camp comment.

[rayiner]

Read the techcrunch article: they support the program even after the details leaked.

[grandalf]

>Yes, he opposed certain of Bush's programs, but look at the whole picture.

True, since his days as a Senator from Illinois he has positioned himself as "power ready" by adopting power-friendly "moderate" stances on various key issues.