[autotravis]

I feel like the more we talk about it, the more everyone becomes desensitized to the U.S. surveillance problem. Then we get the public at large just rolling their eyes and saying "Oh, another paranoid lunatic wants to take over the government".

I want to do more than just like stuff on facebook... hopefully this will present something more tangible. I signed up for the "Add a banner to your site" list. I can tell ~15k visitors about this over the next month at least.

[bananacurve]

>U.S. surveillance problem

As long as people are willing to pretend that the problem is only the US and not the entire West colluding then the easier it is for these governments to continue.

[dmix]

Case in point, the Canadian government is currently building "the most expensive government building ever constructed in Canada" for CSEC (our version of the NSA) and vastly expanding their headcount:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/inside-canada-s-top-secret-b...

And GCHQ has less significantly legal restrictions than most other SIGINT agencies.

[bushido]

> As long as people are willing to pretend that the problem is only the US and not the entire West colluding then the easier it is for these governments to continue.

This may be true to some extent. But let me provide an anti-thesis to the statement.

For nearly a century (or more) everyone has looked at the US to lead in reforms and at times reversing reforms. What happens in the US is often used as a model by world governments as a blueprint.

If the US citizens, corporations and the tech community in general could get the US to positively change the distopian outlook/direction we (the world) seems to be heading in, this change would trickle down to the other countries beginning with the Western countries that you aptly state are colluding together.

[tunap]

I for one would like to include the other players,Corporate & private industry, with their collusion/lobbying/takeover of lawmaking added to the discussion. Don't forget, when the [Pick-An-Acronym &/or Pick-A-Branch] wasn't doing their own spying, [MaBell, AT&T, Axciom, MS, Dunn&B, Google, etc] were selling the data to them.

More relevant today than when it aired almost a decade ago...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/