It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

Why Don't Americans Care?: A Distant Fear

-- By LeylaHadi - 09 May 2015

Distilling the Apathy

John Oliver in his increasingly popular late night show recently ran a sequence regarding the NSA metadata surveillance program, and interviewed Snowden in Moscow to bring further attention to the issue. His interviews with pedestrians in Times Square reflected the same lack of awareness or concern about Snowden and his revelations that I have encountered throughout the semester: for a pervading, invasive, arguably unconstitutional, and highly secret program that affects almost every single American, nobody really seems to know much about it, or really seems to care.

The underlying rationale behind this apathy stems from two deep-rooted ideas: either that privacy is officially nonexistent in the world we live in, or that one's innocence will protect them from the invasions of privacy, or a conflation of both. So even though citizens are aware that they are being watched and surveilled in some capacity, they either think surveillance is (a) harmless (as they are not committing crimes/they are not terrorists), (b) inevitable, (c) necessary, or (d) not as severe as Snowden's revelations make clear. These themes dwarf the overriding constitutional objections to a system of data surveillance as expansive and unprejudiced as the one in play, so much so that students at Columbia Law have a shameful understanding of our realities (including myself prior to this course), with only one professor even speaking to the program’s existence and legalities.

By March, I thought this might change, mostly because Hollywood stepped in. With the backdrop of Sony’s hacking, as well as the hacking of famous actresses to expose their naked pictures, Laura Poitras won an Academy Award for "CitizenFour" and delivered a thought-provoking acceptance speech that I naively and excitedly thought would mobilize the country and the world to learn about the NSA program. At least among my environment, it did not.

My fellow law students have not been motivated to investigate the Snowden revelations out of their own accord (even by simply watching the documentary). Their understanding is either ensconced in one or all of the above mentioned perceptions of internet privacy, or their opinion of Snowden as a traitor shadow the importance of what he showed us. The culture speaks of "Big Brother" Orwellian surveillance institutions as science-fiction paranoia, or as inapposite to America, without attempting to wrap their brain around the reality. I believe this status quo can change either with the occurrence of targeted breaches of citizens' sexual privacy, or when the true nature of GAFA's information-sharing with the government creates real life, tangible effects for the average citizen. Until then, the convenience of GAFA, the apathy towards "metadata", the naive trust in the constitution's active protections, and the fear of terrorism will not motivate citizens to question or inquire into Snowden's revelations.

Making the Fear Real

Sex

Oliver's expose comedically contrasted the current "average" citizen's understanding of who Snowden is/what he achieved (which appeared obscenely uninformed) with their reactions to learning that NSA often came across and even shared people's "Dick Pics". People were horrified. Of course, I do not want to rely to heavily on a late night HBO "news" show aiming for both humor and sensationalism as proof of this theory, but I do think there an important reality is found in his piece: Americans adamantly care about sex, or more accurately, the regulation of sex.

Even in our class, one of the topics that created the most debate and provided the most emotionality to the arguments was in the discussion of revenge porn (particularly for the non-LLM Americans). Access to our personal, sexual lives is deemed entirely unacceptable, unless it is in advancement of hunting down those labeled sexually perverse in a macro form of sex regulation.

Actual Repercussions

As of today, Wikileaks is far too removed from our personal every day lives. Snowden, while many hoped and still hope will be the face of an internet privacy revolution, appears to have not been, again because there was no personal felt effect on the average American. a Ferguson to motivate the masses, particularly the Millenials.

---

You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, LeylaHadi
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.