zlacker

> In practice, most people do not understand the ramifications of the things they agreed to

Going further, it must be clarified that the whole point of doing things this way is that people do not understand it. The people who want to surveil everyone could either do it illegally and get in trouble, or create an inscrutable bureaucratic system that so sufficiently obscures what they are doing that they get the same results along with a legal cover if they are discovered. If we did have privacy laws that prevented this, they would just collect it illegally. This is absolutely not to say that privacy laws are pointless (they would be helpful) but that we must understand this situation not as an accident, but as the slow creation of a class of people who want to exercise power over us and have been getting their way.

>>Taylor+(OP)
Google founders had some internal compass when they offered GMail "free" with an explicit statement that they would "index the emails" or whatever. I recall smart people, a few of them, noting it but the rush happened. Second was smart phones not being too coy about knowing your phone call records with an ID attached to it, every time, all the time. When the public accepted those two things, in recent memory, that was enough to tip IMHO here in the USA. Whatever legal powers behind the scenes with the Patriot Act were contemporaneous, after GMail.

>>mistri+sq
I checked a few dates.

Gmail launched in 2004.

The Patriot act was signed in to law in October 2001.

Bill Binney blew the whistle on illegal NSA mass data collection of email, web browsing, and cell phone records in 2002.

Hard to pinpoint when smartphones became mainstream, though as a point of reference the iPhone was launched in 2007.

So clearly the NSA was trying to do dragnet surveillance of the internet well before gmail or the widespread use of smartphones.

A quote from the Bill Binney wikipedia page: "Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that 'it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project