Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy?
by Cory Doctorow from Technology | The Guardian on (#P844)
Every week or two, from now on, will see new privacy disasters, each worse than the last
On September 13, 2001, four US Senators from both sides of the aisle introduced the first version of the USA Patriot Act, a sweeping, 342-page bill that overturned virtually all US privacy laws and led to the creation of the global, pervasive surveillance programs that Edward Snowden disclosed in June 2013.
It's possible that four senators and their respective staffers wrote the Patriot Act in a mere 36 hours, while America went into a panic over the worst terrorist attacks in US history. It seems a lot more likely, though, that the Patriot Act was already sitting in someone's desk-drawer, waiting to be tabled when a suitable disaster occurred.
