[n8m]

I have to say, I was fairly suprised of the way the interview was conducted. It was somewhat refreshing to see not the same questions being asked all over and over again. I think Mr. Oliver & his team picked very well what the average Joe does care about. Very well done!

[sneak]

I really wish the idea pushed that bulk collection allows the military intelligence orgs to blackmail every single member of the executive and judicial branch: every federal judge's extramarital affair, every congressperson' drug habit or undisclosed political ties, every bribe- none of the counter forces of checks and balances apply anymore.

It's not about your dick pics. It's about the district court's inbox's underage titty pics.

The only people who can stop it are also subject to its destructive impact.

[amyjess]

J. Edgar Hoover did this back in the '60s.

This is nothing new, doesn't require modern technology, and doesn't even require mass surveillance (Hoover targeted specific individuals for gathering blackmail material).

[Lawtonfogle]

It isn't even about that. It is that the completely clean guy who is standing for integrity who gets told 'either you do as we say or we will convince the world you are a child molester, and trust us, we can plant all the evidence we want where ever we need to'.

[XorNot]

Which has nothing to do with surveillance.

If you're going to flat out lie and make stuff up then you quite literally do not need to do any surveillance.

John Kerry's war record being tarnished was done openly, publicly, and without any involvement of the NSA (which would have been useless to the cause anyway).

[LLWM]

That's not an argument against mass surveillance. Collecting evidence you are a child molestor, aka lying and saying you did, only requires targeted surveillance.

[nick89]

I have to agree. With the mass information dump everyday from news outlets, it's sometimes hard to put it into the perspective of "how does this affect me?".

Using 'dick pics' to engage the audience was priceless!

[forthefuture]

Unfortunately it's actually more common to never take a picture of your dick. If anything most people watching will think, "I don't take pictures of my dick, so I'm safe", which is the exact opposite of what you want people to think.

[chrisbuchholz]

But they will surely understand that if they're able to obtain and see your dick pics, they are also able to see all the other pictures your take and send via email and so forth.

Most people don't take dick pics, but almost everyone take photos of other occasions which they might not like others to see, like their children running naked in the garden, your wife sun bathing or just the random social occasion that are no others business but yours and whom ever you deliberately choose to share it with.

[XorNot]

Which again buries the entire issue because if we're going to ask "who can see pictures you share with people without encryption" then the question goes a good deal further then "oh my god the government!"

Quite literally any sysadmin at your ISP can see that material, and might see that material in the course of normal work. If you posed this to an "average" person they also haven't realized this. They also don't realize Dropbox is unencrypted. Neither are your bank records - not from your banker or the random support person you're calling.

If we're on a role they might then be inclined to wonder why everyone in their life isn't constantly trying to blackmail them with all the information they could easily get all the time. And then eventually, we'd loop around to the obvious realization: because it would be illegal for them to actually use any of that information they obtained in confidence. And so on the vast vast scale of modern society, they don't.

At which point you have a problem: the NSA doesn't actually randomly start posting stuff it collects on the internet. In fact people barely know what it does because it doesn't impact them. Because government thugs aren't kicking down doors of political dissidents, or doing any of the "totalitarian" stuff they expect.

After this entire thought exercise, the average person might conclude they should stop emailing dick pics around if they don't want their ISP to see them. But then they'd also realize that's probably nothing to worry about from the NSA either. And by and large, they'd be right.

[misnome]

> They also don't realize Dropbox is unencrypted.

This set off my alarm bells at the broad statement - I checked, and Dropbox is encrypted, in that any uploads to and from the server are via SSL. This is probably 80 of what anyone cares about.

It's like saying your online banking isn't encrypted because the bank can still read your balance.

[csandreasen]

No, Dropbox is not encrypted on the server, which is the point the parent was trying to make. Theoretically, any Dropbox employee can look at any unencrypted dick pics that you decided to store on their servers, much like how your ISP can see any of your unencrypted web browsing.