Why don’t the spooks seem to spook us?

Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the Edward Snowden story, addressed a convention of Socialists over the weekend via Skype – and said he doesn’t understand why big-name journalists are condemning him – when they should be applauding him.

“The purpose of our story, the purpose is to say, ‘If you, the United States government, wants to create a globalized surveillance system in which we no longer have any privacy in our individual lives or on the Internet, you at least ought to have us know about it so that we can decide if that’s the kind of world we want to live in,” said Greenwald.

But of course, millions of people have decided. Every day, they surrender information to social media. And that personal data has been weaponized, but not by the NSA – it’s the bullies, the identity thieves, the scammers.

Americans just don’t seem terribly worried about the NSA.
In fact, Greenwald himself joked about it.

“I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the brave patriotic men and women of the National Security Agency. They’re people. They have feelings. So at the beginning of almost every conversation I do insist that whoever I’m speaking with say ‘hello’ to them,” said Greenwald.

And everybody in the crowd cheerfully gave a shout-out to the NSA.

They didn’t seem too worried.

I think that’s the reason Greenwald and Snowden aren’t getting much love – other than from the socialists on the left, and the libertarians on the right. Because like him, most people just don’t seem particularly worried that the government is going to do anything evil with their information. At least not compared to what the Internet already does with it.