> There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids.

I’m alive. Nice to meet you.

I “accept severe surveillance”, not in the sense that I agree with it, but because I know that it already exists and has existed and that people that are against it are screaming into the wind. Many large and small countries have long histories of surveillance.

It’s not that you shouldn’t try to enforce privacy, in fact, the law requires it if you in some cases, and it’s a good idea in others.

I’m certainly not against the EFF standing up for the rights of everyone not to be severely surveilled.

But, realistically, the public cannot easily anonymize our activity and data. And if you try to do so, you’re painting yourself as a target.

If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?

Similarly, if you were a big data or security company wouldn’t you also do everything you could to know everything it is to know about a person if you had the means and time and it made sense for your business?

Following, if you were to have that power as a government, business, or other organization, wouldn’t it be critical to ensure that you restricted its use to ensure it wasn’t abused to the point that you’d lose it, even though the reality would be that you probably don’t have time to keep it as safe as you need to?

I “accept severe surveillance” not because I promote it or want it, but because I understand how the world works and what it does.

All these things will pass. If you have the focus and the mental capacity to do what is good, then do it. It likely helped the world in some way to learn about KGB wiretaps. But, in the U.S., as far as I can tell, the backlash against the CIA and NSA was just used for political gain and then to replace those that didn’t agree with the current administration. Was that helpful? And who are we really being manipulated by when we attack ourselves and install destabilizing leaders?

Chances of being manipulated and attacking yourselves would diminish quite a bit if those tasked with surveillance wouldn't be blinded by the pursuit of as much data as they can get their hands on. Yes, knowing everything there is to know about a person can be helpful to a point, but if you had the means and time there is literally no business where it makes sense to pre-emptively collect every bit of data on such a single person. To do so in regard to multiple people or more will have a crippling effect on gaining insight and understanding of relevant information. Having a vast knowledge-base is a huge waste of resources when it impairs your capacity to convert what you know into what would be wise. There's really no need to infiltrate anything and everything to know what needs to be known, and it will save a whole lot of distraction and data fatigue.

People eager to have such a vast trove of data at their fingertips lack patience and focus to develop skills to use their access responsibly - having them around is counterproductive and dangerous in any business where intelligence is key.

So, no. I would actually prefer to try and keep my country safe, thus any desire to infiltrate anything, anywhere, anytime would be irrational, and most likely an early warning signalling an onset of dementia, delirium or any similarly debilitating condition. It should certainly exclude me from working with highly sensitive data, unless you are in the business of making my country less safe.

  > If you were trying to keep your country safe, wouldn’t you like the ability to infiltrate any major cloud, SaaS app, social media platform, bank, government, VPN/internal network, and OS?

In fact, the opposite!

If I have keys then so do my enemies! I want that shit locked down as much as possible because I don't want others infiltrating.

Personally if I was the president I would direct the NSA to pen test our own networks and work with companies to resolve any issues. I would make this a major priority in fact. I don't want them to be vulnerable or subject to blackmail.

Is it annoying I can't get in and watch them? Sure. But you can't have both.

Everyone is adults here and get trust. Plus, I'm the government. If I have legitimate belief they're acting illegally I have the power to get in anyways. It's just shower, requiring courts who keep my power in check

This is a fairly defeatist approach to the issue (read that as a statement of fact, not an accusation or argument). The problem with taking this stance, for many people, is that you’re giving a mouse a cookie, except the cookie is marginally more and more control over your life in the form of the ability to control what you see, what communities you’re allowed to engage with, and what you’re allowed to do online.

This battle for online privacy and control is just that, a battle, and you are correct that it is not a fair fight. But engaging and pushing back, through advocacy, speaking out, and acts of noncompliance does three things:

First, it slows the progress of these measures and thus limits the amount of control over our lives we give up, hopefully until some more politically friendly people come to power.

Second, it provides a barometer (via its effectiveness) for assessing the state of that fight, and how dire it is becoming.

Finally, people voicing their concerns about these laws gives information that helps inform more powerful and potentially altruistic advocates with more resources (such as the EFF) in how those resources should be allocated.

Maybe those aren’t good reasons for you, and that’s okay. Lots of people just want to browse twitter and see sports scores and they don’t really care if they have to show ID to do that. For anybody else reading this though, there are lots of reasons why your involvement and engagement in this issue should not stop with “that’s just how the world works”.