LitPro

It seems to me that Boomers in the main are not really sure what it is all about. Gen X is resigned to the fact that what they thought was happening all along, is actually happening. Gen Y is blythely posting their lives online anyway such that it is not really an issue. Not surprisinginly, this may be too cynical a view.

I don't think the surveillance is breaking down along generational lines except in a de facto sense. If I use email, social media (Reddit), search engines and live my life online I am "in", if I use email only and favor the phone I am less "in". My sense is that the NSA is vacuuming everything (see the Utah site article at Wired.com) but can only gather what actually exists of course.

I take your point on 2001 being sort of a touchstone, see the so-called USA PATRIOT ACT and so on. In one sense the overall problem is so abstract and beyond the non-technophile that it doesn't make a lot of sense. Indeed, if the data is truly anonymized, why isn't that okay (this is rhetorical)?

My concern is that slowly taking away safeguards is actually working, "lack of privacy creep" if you will. Whereas if the Government in 1977 under the Warren Court had said, we have this new tecnology that permits us to surveil everything that occurs over AT&T's analog phone lines, you would have had a remarkably different result when the country found out and the court's dealt with it leading perhaps to an impeachment (interesting this is a program started (?) under a Republican but continued by a Democract). Now, the country seems interested but there is a large contingent of "meh" out there.

Admttedly, the story is still breaking, but in times past I think there would have been an even bigger reaction and perhaps outrage. Perhaps the US has decided we will give up privacy in exchange for security. Have we turned that corner?

How do you think this story is resonating, or not, with the generations in the US, e.g. Boomers, Gen X, Y? What political ramifications does that difference give rise to? How do you provide oversight to black projects if not with a secret (FISA) court?