Can somebody do me a favour and help me shake the anxiety I've been feeling since the Snowden leaks? Has anybody else found themselves stressed out by the implications of a technological surveillance state being constructed right in front of us?
I find myself stressed out about that, but I don't think it's an irrational anxiety or one that can be simply shaken off. Rather, it's something that we have to deal with directly and fix before we can feel safe.
This is the way I feel about energy issues and on-going automation (I love machines, I hate that people have to slave their lives off to survive, I want that post-scarcity utopia, but I'm afraid we don't make it through the transition period, that civilization will collapse).
2) Who cares if your emails are in some NSA server. They already are on some server that you don't control, gmail, work, etc. What is the practical difference?
The numbers of approved wiretaps is really low.
You have a much greater chance of being spied on, legally with a warrant, by traditional police.
Or, worse really, getting sued and then having lawyers crawl up your ass in discovery.
This is not a very helpful response. Just because your anxieties are not triggered by the knowledge of what the NSA does, does not make it right to minimize the worries of others with vague (i.e. not backed up with hard evidence) and dismissive attempts at corollaries [1]. There are massive practical differences between the NSA/government holding my emails/email data without my knowledge and Gmail's black box that your average person takes it to be. The most important being: if Google decides to wrong me in any way pertaining to my data, I have legal recourse against them with the government acting as mediator in a civil case, and secondly, Google is pressured to act within the confines of law with what they do with my data -- they can't discriminate against me if I'm searching for or sending emails about taboo topics. Should the government be holding email data, and should action be taken on that information (parallel construction issues aside), how do I go about finding recourse against the government? The judiciary has shown little inclination that they will hear these sorts of cases.
