Edward Snowden’s impact
A lot of readers have seen John Oliver’s amusing interview of Edward Snowden. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth a watch. One of Oliver’s themes is that Snowden actually hasn’t had a major impact on American politics. Surveillance law is too complicated, Oliver suggests, and Snowden doesn’t have a simple message. But I think there are other reasons why Snowden hasn’t has a big impact on American public opinion — and also reasons that probably doesn’t matter for achieving Snowden’s goals. Here are some tentative thoughts on this big topic. I’ll hope to follow up later, with more firm views, in light of comments and responses.
I’ll begin with public opinion. Although the Snowden disclosures have impacted public opinion about government surveillance in some ways, they haven’t caused a major shift. Different polls are worded in different ways and suggest different things. But my overall sense is that public opinion has long been roughly evenly divided on U.S. government surveillance and continues to be roughly evenly divided post-Snowden. For example, in 2006, a poll on NSA surveillance suggested that 51% found NSA surveillance acceptable while 47% found it unacceptable. Shortly after the Snowden disclosures began, public opinion was equally divided about the Section 215 program. And just a few weeks ago, a Pew Research poll from last month found public opinion pretty evenly divided again:
Overall, 52% describe themselves as “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about government surveillance of Americans’ data and electronic communications, compared with 46% who describe themselves as “not very concerned” or “not at all concerned” about the surveillance.
The polling questions aren’t asking identical questions, so any conclusions have to be tentative. But on the whole, I don’t think the Snowden disclosures have caused a major shift in how the public thinks about national security surveillance.
The question is, why?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/09/edward-snowdens-impact/
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