The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset
Between the inauguration and living in DC, all anyone can talk about lately is politics. So I've had the opportunity to probe a bunch of mainstream Democrats on this issue. The overwhelming response has been not caring (though many are more worried now that Trump is in the charge of the surveillance apparatus rather than Obama). Even to the extent people care, nobody cares enough to want to spend limited political capital on the issue. To the extent policy is necessarily subject to political compromise, privacy doesn't seem to even make the top 10 of issues Democrats are willing to fight for.It seems inevitable to me that the same generation that willingly hands over all their personal information to Google and Facebook, and sees government mostly as a positive force for enforcing civil rights and increasing social equality will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state.