Rally in Washington DC Against Mass Surveillance. Susan Melkisethian. Some rights reserved.In recent weeks, two events have deviled the digital-privacy community and online commentariat. In March, Wikileaks released Vault7, a series of leaks detailing the CIA’s comprehensive program to surveil American citizens through such devices as smart TVs, Web browsers, and operating systems. Later that month, Congress voted in favor of S.J. Res. 34, a bill repudiating the late-Obama-era regulations of surreptitious user-data collection by internet service providers (ISPs) for commercial gain. In the wake of these developments, the matter of online privacy has reached the forefront of political discourse, lightly evoking the fevered concerns of Edward Snowden’s 2013 NSA revelations.
What can explain this dissonance between Americans’ supposed apathy toward online privacy and security, versus their actual, documented concerns about it?
Of course, it isn’t always this way. Discussions of online privacy within mainstream media occur periodically, following Congress’s lists of priorities. In the cybersecurity off-season, when no leaks have occurred within the last two weeks, and the House of Representatives has no privacy bill on which to vote any time soon, the notion of digital protection is relegated to a vaguely dystopian unpleasantry lying latent in the political conscious.
