A Majority Of The Public Still Approves Of NSA Dragnet, 4 Graphs

CrunchGov Essential is a scannable roundup of technology’s influence on the day’s big issues. Below a feature post, we present the most thoughtful, outrageous, and inspiring stories told through the web’s best content. Sign up for the morning newsletter here. I’m not a fan of the National Security Agency’s secret dragnet program, but I’m honest enough to admit that I hold a minority view. Recently, a string of stories have wrongly implied that the public has become more privacy-happy in response to the scandal surrounding the leak of the NSA’s telephone and Internet metadata surveillance program. So, to test whether public opinion had actually changed over the last month, we ran our own national opinion surveys and found that, like last fall, about 56 percent of Americans approve of the government collecting their data to investigate terrorism. Perhaps more importantly, Americans think the government is collecting the actual content of email and phone calls, and approval of the program slightly increased in the last month. In future surveys, I’m hopeful that public opinion will, at the very least, support more transparency in mass surveillance programs, but, in the meantime, let’s explore the facts as they are. Little Shift In Public Opinion Since January 2006, about twice as many Americans have consistently thought it more important to “Investigate terrorist threats” than to “Not intrude on privacy”. The last column in the graph is our own Google Survey CrunchGov Poll. You can view the methodology and wording here. Our results show about a 4 percent dip from Pew from last month, but it’s almost within the margin of error (2 percent) and it’s slightly different wording, so it’s doubtful there’s much of a change, if any, in public opinion. Fortunately, Google Survey also gives us an idea of why people answer the way they do. A few responses: –”protect me within the rules of the law” –”investigating terrorist threats at the sake of privacy is fine as long as the information isn’t used for any other purpose and the focus is on terrorism and not anything else” About the NSA specifically, a slight majority (54 percent) favored the current dragnet program. Some of the justifications: –”acceptable for the investigation of terrorist but evidence cannot be used for anything else” –”acceptable if done by keywords” –”i’m not as upset at that invasion of privacy as the irs” Privacy-advocates may not like the way

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james van der beek