Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance
Some smart people in the comments section have pointed out that the problem isn&#x27;t &quot;the innocent need not fear surveillance&quot; argument, but a very common &quot;I don&#x27;t care&quot; or &quot;I&#x27;m powerless to stop it, so why bother&quot; attitude that is the problem. I can assure you all this is the common problem, not only with the surveillance debate, but many others.<p>For those of you who are struggling with this I would like to try to help you understand why those attitudes are more common and therefore results in inaction so that you can be more effective in getting people to take a position, rather than ignore the problem. As an example, I&#x27;m going to be citing something anecdotal which is nevertheless true, in order to establish the necessary psychology you have to combat.<p>The vast majority of people that live outside the inner city don&#x27;t worry about someone breaking into thier homes. Breakins do happen, but for most people you only occasionally hear about them as happening to a friend of a friend. Occasionally a large string of burglaries will make the news, but generally the thief was caught by the time the news can begin reporting on it. This is the same way myths and legends are spread, and people don&#x27;t view such things as happening to themselves, but to vague other people they&#x27;ve never met. They don&#x27;t know the statistics and if they do they are still unlikely to change behavior or pay for a security service beyond having a yard sign. They do this because the perspective they have toward the problem is that of being unaffected. Possibly losing a TV or random jewelry is only worrying if you believe it could happen to you, and impactful enough that the pain of it happening exceeds to pain of doing something to protect themselves. If birgarlies are common enough where you live you might believe it could happen to you, but if you think of the loss in terms of money the cost of a security service over ten years is likely to exceed tge cost of what they might steal. However, if they think about potential loss in terms of something personally importanr to them they become more likely to hiring a security service. The chance that you might have to buy a new TV is less compelling than the possible loss of the wedding ring your grandmother gave you or the possibility that a rare photograph of your great grandfather might be destroyed by a meth addict carelessly throwing it against the wall while they search your room for jewelry.<p>Data leaks like this establish that thier data can and probably will be stolen, but it doesn&#x27;t establish how it can emotionally impact them. Most people are not journalists are significantly critical of the government and will continue to take for granted that journalist are sometimes targeted because as far as they can tell it isn&#x27;t impacting thier lives. You have to put it in perspective of something they care about, like the government might collect and look at thier nudes, or collect and leak thier banking details such as account passwords. That&#x27;s not even taking into account that surveillance can cause things like dropped calls, and some government agencies attempt to block consumer protections solely so they can continue to spy on you.<p>Imagine just for a moment that the FBI and CIA find it convenient that phone companies haven&#x27;t fixed the phone number spoofing and scam auto dialing problem because it means they send a spam call to any number at any time and appear as something other than a goverent phone number. This can allow them to force your cell phone to ping the nearest towers so they can triangulate your position even if you have GPS turned off. This works even if you reject the call, but it won&#x27;t work if you&#x27;re using Google Voice and you block the spammer&#x27;s number because Google won&#x27;t forward the call to your phone. The FBI or CIA doesn&#x27;t even have to bother with setting up a fake spam auto dialing scam because the spammer&#x27;s already call every active phone number multiple times a day. You might not care that the government is collecting your data, but those spammer&#x27;s are really fucking annoying, so even if you don&#x27;t care about the surveillance itself, you should probably care about how annoying some of thier methods for achieving surveillance can be.<p>Now, does the FBI or CIA care about whether phone companies implement the necessary anti-spoofing protections? I have no idea, but we know enough about recent surveillance history to say that they have used invassive and outright annoying methods. They&#x27;ve infected people&#x27;s phones with Spyware that runs in the background all the time, killing battery life. They&#x27;ve installed key loggers on all kinds of devices that can screw up the responsiveness of keyboard inputs. They&#x27;ve used malware that can change setting in your browser like search history, which could expose the porn search terms you&#x27;ve looked for (don&#x27;t pretend that possibility doesn&#x27;t scare a lot of you when you have to look something up in front of friends, we all know it does). They&#x27;ve demanded private companies create or leave in backdoors into people&#x27;s devices and accounts that have later been abused by hackers to steal nudes and other embarrassing information (or found vulnerabilities and not reported them so they could abuse them and they were later discovered and abused by hackers).<p>My point to all of this book of a response is that you need to figure out what the person you&#x27;re talking to cares about so that you can establish not only that unwanted surveillance can happen to them, but that it will impact thier life in ways they care about. Shit that annoys regularly or has the potential to cause severly awkward or embarrassing situations tend to work better than a quantifiable loss of money or even time.