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?
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”.
I wish there were some easy solution to this problem, but I don't see one. I do recommend the NASA document "What Made Apollo A Success". https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243
That is to say, it’s really really hard to pinpoint exactly what makes up character and whether someone has it. So when we DO cross paths with those who clearly have character it’s all the more reason to network, communicate, and keep those people in our orbit, so that we might learn from them and maybe have a little bit of their character rub off on us.