Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 30, 2013 0:17 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

> The final day of LinuxCon Europe had some of the only content that was focused on the largely European audience at the conference. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, gave a talk about living in a surveillance state, with an unmistakable slant toward Europe and the rest of the world outside of the US. There is an imbalance in the surveillance being done, not just the imbalance of governments vs. the people, but also that of the US vs. the rest of the world.

Jake, are you basically implying that most people in the US don't mind any imbalance as long as it's in US' favour?

I did not find the talk that slanted; maybe I was just too naïve.

Well, i guess that would at least put US people in sync with their government which from a purely democratic perspective is a success.

Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 30, 2013 14:54 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> Jake, are you basically implying that most people in the US don't mind any imbalance as long as it's in US' favour?

That is largely true. In my experience most people just presume that this imbalance is the natural order of things, they are so used to the US being the only worlds superpower that they don't see the rest of the worlds countries or people as equals but as inferiors. Even people who are disagree with the government and are fighting these excesses often come from a position where the US has agency and the reset of the world are just quirky sidekicks. Jingoism is burned in pretty deep.

Living with the surveillance state

Posted Nov 1, 2013 2:53 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I tend to encounter an attitude not so much as "the US is the best part of the world, and that's as it should be". It's typically more an ill considered blend of two ideas.

Idea 1 is "the US is the best", which gets expressed in various ways. For example in school (ages 6-12) we were repeatedly told that our country was special because we are Free, as if personal freedom was an extremely rare thing in the world overall, with no clarification on what other parts of the world might have similar properties was really ever communicated. This idea that the US is "the best" is usually stated without any specific comparison to any other thing.

Idea 2 is "the US is separate/apart from the world". This kind of thing has cropped up in other powerful cultures from time to time, the most obvious being China's historical concept of being 'the Middle Kingdom', halfway between the earth and heaven. There is here, the US, and then vaguely.. there is everywhere else. This comes from size, from water boundaries, from historical political priorities and a lack of regional nearby powers.

Together they kind of thoughtlessly blend into a position of unconsidered privilege.