[desp]

I keep seeing this John Oliver segment brought up in threads related to Snowden & the NSA - it's a comedy show! While interesting, it is not statistically significant proof that "most of society apparently couldn't care less." 0.33% of the US is more than 1 million people. They show ~8 tourists in Times Square on a cold morning in April.

Additionally, being able to identify Snowden is not necessarily indicative of public awareness and concern around issues of civil liberty, privacy, etc. When you do go looking for these numbers they of course vary wildly based on the poll source, questions asked, etc. As a quick example, these two pew reports[1][2] can be interpreted pretty differently.

Does anybody know of any great analysis that's been done in this space?

[1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/14/nsa-opinion/country/unit... [2] http://www.people-press.org/question-search/?qid=1858375&pid...

[mcdougle]

True. But his bit follows pretty closely with what I've experienced (and I've heard others say the same). My friends within the tech sphere pretty much all understand the issue and have an opinion on it. For the most part, my friends outside of the tech sphere generally don't care -- the ones that do are usually pretty into current events and generally know more about what's going on in the world than I do.

I know that's still not statistically significant, but I haven't really seen much analysis on it, so I go with what I've got.