Since James Bond or perhaps even before then American fell in love with spies. But proliferation of “spytainment” has skyrocketed in the last 15 years.
Spy genre novelists Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy have sold 300 million books in the last 15 years, nearly one for every American.
Spy-themed video games have gone from a $2 billion industry in 1996 to one of $16 billion in 2011. Spy movies have made the top-10 grossing U.S. film list every year since 2000.
A recent poll
Don't snoop on our e-mails to catch online drug dealers conducted by YouGov
shows that a majority of Americans (55%) don't think that law enforcement should be able to monitor internet usage, such as e-mails and browsing histories, in order to stop the online drug trade.
However,
30% of Americans support law enforcement having those powers, similar to the powers the NSA and other federal agencies have as part of their mission to prevent terrorist attacks.
Amy Zegart, co-director of Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a prominent researcher in the field of public opinion about security, thinks that she
found a strong correlation between frequent spytainment viewing and approval of aggressive counterterrorism tactics, including rendition, assassination, and harsh interrogation methods. In fact, support for torture was higher in 2012 than it was during the Bush administration. The influence of spytainment, I posited, helps explain why. Here are some of the statistically significant findings from my 2012 national poll:
- 38 percent of frequent spy TV watchers believed that waterboarding terrorists was the right thing to do, compared to 28 percent of infrequent watchers.
- 60 percent of frequent spy TV watchers thought transferring a terrorist to a country known for using torture was right versus 45 percent of infrequent watchers.
- 34 percent of frequent spy moviegoers said that they thought it was right to chain terrorist detainees naked in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms for hours. Only 27 percent of non-movie goers thought the naked-chaining-stress-position approach was right.
My October, 2013 poll reveals that spytainment viewing habits also extend to the NSA. I found that the more people watched spy-themed television shows and movies, the more they liked the NSA, the more they approved of NSA’s phone and Internet collection programs, and the more they believed the NSA was telling them the truth. In many instances, opinion differences between spytainment viewers and the rest of the country were large.
Either because of spytaiment propaganda or maybe because Americans are confused by NSA officials like Robert Litt, general council for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, they are ambivalent about NSA spying. Mr. Litt during
Senate hearing responding to Sen. Franken question
"Isn't it a bad thing that the NSA doesn't even have a rough sense of how many Americans have had their information collection under a law ... that explicitly prohibits targeting Americans?" responded that determining the exact number of Americans whose data is collected
would actually be a larger invasion of privacy than any that might already be happening. According to Litt, determining this number would require NSA analysts to look further into data — such as an email address — than they normally would, thus bringing up more information about that person just to determine if they were an American.
While this logic hardly make sense to most people it surely impresses ones who are scared of terrorist attacks. Even, for example, Boston marathon attack has happened despite ongoing phone wiretapping and monitoring.
These reasons also might explain results of yet most recent National poll sponsored by Amy Zegart reveal according to the author
that CIA favorability remained almost exactly the same from 2012 to 2013 (53 percent held a favorable view of CIA in 2012, 50 percent in 2013. That’s within the margin of error). Favorability also held steady for the FBI and Department of Homeland Security in the last year. (Unfortunately, I didn’t ask about public favorability toward NSA in 2012, so I can’t do the same year-to-year comparison). It appears that Americans like the CIA, FBI, and DHS about as much as they did a year ago.
While there are some
positive news in that poll
Americans just don’t trust the accuracy of intelligence provided by these or other three-letter intelligence agencies as much now. Poll says confidence in the accuracy of U.S. intelligence gathering has dropped eight points since last year.
Opposition is bipartisan
Probably the most important conclusion is not optimistic
Opposition is not widespread. Most Americans still don't rank it as a top issue.
These conclusions are similar to the findings of the Summer poll conducted by the
Pew Foundation
A majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. An even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.
Nonetheless, the public’s bottom line on government anti-terrorism surveillance is narrowly positive. The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved.
Still more than 17,500 signed White House petition
Reform ECPA: Tell the Government to Get a Warrant
We hope that after reading this post you will consider to sign it too.