Why don't people seem to care as much as they should about what Snowden revealed and how he's being treated?

submitted by EY_SCOOF from self.AskSaidIt

It seems like no one cares how he basically sacrificed his life to expose the governments of the world intensely spying on its citizens. Whats up with that?

And what will the history books say about it?

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[–]AmbroseBierce 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Look at how they are treating Assange.

Snowden only exposed the US, and the media was quick to memory-hole it to protect Obama.

[–]StillLessons 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree that Assange is the perfect test case for this. It is shocking to me that while millions of people go into the street to fight police brutality in the case of George Floyd, Assange - who faces unbelievable institutional brutality ongoing at the hands of TPTB, gets crickets. This is a perfect pairing to demonstrate the case that protests like BLM are manufactured by power to serve the interests of power. Don't get me wrong, what happened to both Floyd and to Assange is evil. But why respond to one and not the other? The answer is obvious.

[–]BravoVictor 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Because:

  1. His claims are really in the weeds. You have to spend a lot of time breaking down everything he says to really understand it. It's more complicated than "government spying, government bad". Scott Adams makes a good point about this. If some issue becomes so complicated that, in order to see the truth, you have to get in the weeds, it's not going to register with the public at large, because they have other things to do and can't spend that much time on it.
  2. People don't actually care as much about their privacy as we typically like to believe.
  3. The government really wants its spying powers, and so politicians aren't really pressed to change anything. Few politicians get elected on a "tear down government spying" platform or lose an election by not being pro-privacy enough. However, politicians are desperately afraid of losing an election because some terrorist murders thousands of people because the government didn't have enough intel and was blindsided.

Just look at all the "shortcuts" the intel community took to wiretrap the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, believing that anyone who was even remotely pro-Russia and in Trump's orbit must be a secret KGB agent trying to infiltrate the US. The FBI was able to obtain secret FISA warrants for Carter Page, Michael Flynn and others using evidence that was later found to be just rumors and outright political smears by Hillary supporters or Trump political opponents like Christopher Steele.

[–]1hairlessmonkey 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Julian Assange as well. Its definitely frightening to realize that most people are uninterested or don't understand. It seems that the media does a great job in not giving the issue any attention and I don't think too many people are at the point of wanting to seek out the info because life is comfortable without knowing.