China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour

Wow... how many more sick and oppressive policies does the Chinese government have to churn out (and so brazenly too) before the people of China say something? Where's the social unrest.. where's their sense of responsibility towards their future generations to nip a thing like this in the bud before it becomes the norm... what, nothing??

The reason why people are not interested in the alleged US government over reaches is because we still fundamentally trust our government to do the right thing.

Americans just don't give a shit if the government has access to your data, because so far it doesn't use it.

This is why the John Oliver segment a few weeks back showed that when people thought their sexts were actually able to be viewed, they were outraged.

Our government already has the power to literally end humanity.

Right now, all the NSA stuff and other spying is just has the potential to be abused. No harm, no foul writ large.

You can believe that is wrong or shortsighted, but it doesn't mean the American people don't care about anything.

Now you know (of) a single person. Our public servants are largely fine people. We get stuff that's weird because of people being dancing monkeys for campaign finance. This is actually, in my opinion, overt, specific and designed entertainment product. It's very rarely an attachment to principle or thought out - one reason Reagan did so well is that he pretty much believed a lot of what he said ( not all - you have to be tactical too ) . He said, not what people around him, said.

Clinton wasn't as much of rigid principles, but you got the feeling he was, outside of being very charismatic, genuine. Even Dubya, I more or less trusted.

Use your anthropic principle - there would not be people saying things like what, say Ted Cruz says unless there was positive feedback for it.

I don't think nationalizing campaigns works, either. Huge public choice problem and a slightly different set of incentives.

I've worked a bit with actual government employees, and they were uniformly great except for one clot of them. Total observer bias, though.

All in all, I think the shear between what we actually want and what we say we want is the cause, and is an excellent example of revealed preferences. Why else would there have ever been some policies we've seen, like racial laws in the post-Reconstruction South? How does that ever make any sense at all, yet so much energy and time went into it?

To misquote Walt Kelly ( of the Pogo cartoons ) - "we has met the enemy, and it is us."

I have many fairly right-wing friends, and most of them, when pressed a bit, will clarify what they are afraid of. It's not nothing. They have their bias, I have mine. I'm able to talk to them about these things without much ugliness.

There was a good talk back in 2012 from ex NSA that laid out some of the details for how the US surveillance keeps track of online behavior too[1]. I think (as awful as it is) we can expect most governments major governments to do this if it's within their technical capacity.

To get out from under this, I think we'll need 100% encryption of everything, open source devices, and ways for companies to make money without ads or data brokering. Basically, this will stop when hell freezes over.

[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5338-en-enemie...

speed up to 1:14 for the good stuff

This might show my European perspective, but I'd rather have my government collect such data than some unaccountable private entity. Even better if no one does it of course.