The Surveillance State Is A Very Dangerous Place To Live
In The Boston Globe, columnist Kevin Cullen quotes Margaret Marshall, retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court:

"The massive, barely perceptible assault by the government on the right to privacy is perhaps the greatest threat to freedom of the press and free speech our country has ever known," she said. "9/11 caused a recalibration of the trade-offs between privacy and security in this country, and the balance we struck is not compatible with a free people living in an open society."

Unfortunately, survey says:

"Americans Say They Want Privacy, but Act as if They Don't"

That's from a Claire Cain Miller piece in The New York Times -- which doesn't quite get at the real problem quite as well as one of the commenters on the piece:

Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.

That paradox is captured in a new survey by Pew Research Center. It found that there is no communications channel, including email, cellphones or landlines, that the majority of Americans feel very secure using when sharing personal information. Of all the forms of communication, they trust landlines the most, and fewer and fewer people are using them.

Distrust of digital communication has only increased, Pew found, with the young expressing the most concern by some measures, in the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden about online surveillance by the government. Yet Americans for now seem to grudgingly accept that these are the trade-offs of living in the digital age -- or else they fear that it is too late to do anything about it.

"The reason is often they don't have real choice," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's not like picking up the newspaper and realizing ice cream has too many calories and you can start eating frozen yogurt, information that people can act on."

One reason is that once people are invested in a service -- if they have all their social contacts on Facebook or years of email on Gmail, for instance -- they have a hard time giving it up.

"It's this modern economy that doesn't really rely on price, but on connections and stickiness," Mr. Rotenberg said. "The companies have done everything they can to make it impossible to go somewhere else."

Commenter Larry L. nutshells the real deal well:

Larry L, Dallas, TX
I think the fault in the author's reasoning is that Americans do care about their privacy. The problem is that if you want to do ANYTHING today, you have to submit to the demands of a relatively small cartel of communications and media empires. In other words, American consumers really have no choice in the matter and they have really no legal recourse (unlike in Europe where there are laws the specifically govern such things).

The truth is that the entire technological infrastructure has been basically usurped for twp things: spying and marketing. Every other form of innovation has been waylaid on the way to market so that billions can be spent for a lot of useless stuff that do not solve this generation's central challenges: nutritious food, clean water, disease control, climate change, energy infrastructure, financial stability and democracy.

via @PostBaron