One of the most disturbing aspects of the public response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the scale of governmental surveillance is how little public disquiet there appears to be about it. A recent YouGov poll, for example, asked respondents whether the British security services have too many or too few powers to carry out surveillance on ordinary people. Forty-two per cent said that they thought the balance was "about right" and a further 22 percent thought that the security services did not have enough powers. In another question, respondents were asked whether they thought Snowden's revelations were a good or a bad thing; 43 percent thought they were bad and only 35 percent thought they were good.
In an Observer article a few weeks ago, Henry Porter expressed his own frustration at this public complacency. "Today, apparently," he wrote, "we are at ease with a system of near-total intrusion that would have horrified every adult Briton 25 years ago. Back then, Western spies acknowledged the importance of freedom by honoring the survivors of those networks; now, they spy on their own people. We have changed, that is obvious, and, to be honest, I wonder whether I, and others who care about privacy and freedom, have been left behind by societies that accept surveillance as a part of the sophisticated world we live in."
I share Henry's bafflement. At one point I thought that the level of public complacency about the revelations was a reflection simply of ignorance. After all, most people who use the Internet and mobile phones have no idea about how any of this stuff works and so may be naive about the implications of state agencies being able to scoop up everybody's email metadata, call logs, click streams, friendship networks and so on.