I understand as a hacker that you want to provide the truth, but the way to stop these letters isn't to downplay their danger, but to make people scared to death of them.
If someone appeals to me to care about X but lies about the facts of X, their credibility is damaged in my eyes and I am inclined to think that they are overplaying the danger.
For example, "sneak" replied to my comment with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and links to other information. But I'm already less inclined to trust sneak, since he/she is already known to play fast and loose with the facts.
I don't mean to appear to be playing fast and loose with the facts. Certainly, the NSA tapping exchanges is a different issue than whatever restrictions the government has placed on itself when issuing NSLs for message metadata.
The fact is, message metadata is enough. I have friends and acquaintances that have been harassed and detained by officials based on their names appearing in contact lists of other suspected-but-not-charged-with-anything individuals. We're not even talking about evidence of actual communications such as message headers or metadata.
The fact that they can (and do) pull thousands of people's message headers and have access to the communications graph and traffic frequency without ANY JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT WHATSOEVER means that their ability to conduct state-sponsored extrajudicial harassment is way out of control.
It truly doesn't matter if NSLs allow them to get the body of the messages or not. If you're on the radar, you and everyone you communicate with regularly is a target. There are no legal remedies for this sort of stuff anymore.
If you do anything of import non-anonymously, you can expect to have your hardware stolen and never returned (under the guise of a search), your travel impeded, your accounts inaccessible (google "civil asset forfeiture"), your social network harassed and detained similarly, and your access to legal remedies hindered in every conceivable way.
A half-dozen examples known to me personally come to mind immediately. I'm sure there are more that I don't know about.
The threat is very real, and trying to split hairs about whether or not "reading your email" means message bodies or just headers is not productive.
I disagree that "It truly doesn't matter if NSLs allow them to get the body of the messages or not". It truly matters a whole hell of a lot to me if someone can see my messages, as versus my email headers.
I don't wish to open a whole separate thread, but...
The strategy you advocate is what many environmentalists, notably Al Gore, have been employing.
It turns out that most people aren't as dumb as you think. They pick up on the fact that they're being misled. And that tends to turn them against your mission.
Thus, many people are now desensitized to warning of climate change. They've seen the scientists lying and conspiring to gag dissenting views, and cherry-picking studies to highlight the worst possible outcomes. And if those scientists (rogues that they might be) need to gag the dissenters, they must not have very strong arguments.
Please note: I don't mean to take a side here in the climate debate, only to illustrate how one strategy used in that debate is having an effect opposite to what was intended.
I'm sorry if the truth is inconvenient, but that's no excuse for suppressing it and spreading lies in its place. If they really are so bad, you shouldn't need to subvert the truth in order to prove it — because their badness is the truth. If they aren't that bad, I don't see why it's so important to make people scared to death of them that I'd sacrifice my good name to do so.
You assume that people agree with me. Most people are far more interested in security than freedom. Which a valid choice so long as that choice is made for them alone, and they don't make it for me.
I don't have the speaking skills to convince the world of this, but coming of age after 9/11, I have seen first-hand the awesome power of fear.
[edit] So, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you are saying that after seeing the damage that fear has done to your culture (which I would say is far, far greater than the damage done to New York on 911), you then think that you should stir more fear and use it to achieve your political desires. In a just cause, of course. Everyone has a just cause. And your justification is that you don't think you are eloquent enough to convince people by other means? That is a fucking repulsive attitude.
You say you want to use fear to influence the society of which you are a part, because you think that it's general attitude towards security impinges too much upon your own personal freedom and you also don't trust anyone else to be able to deal with honesty. And so you are actually attacking others who are trying to be honest, for not just ramping up the fear in the direction that you perceive would most satisfy your own self interest.
Remind me where the surgeon metaphor fits into all of this horseshit.
Spreading more FUD on the internet is not likely to help a cause in the long run, it won't even make it stand out from the background noise. And you aren't really scaring the shit out of people by telling them that the government can read their emails, which they already think anyway, when they also know that the same government has nukes and has been happy to play brinkmanship with them against other countries with nukes, for well over a generation.
