In Cypherpunks, Assange raises an essential point that at least partly refutes this skepticism: "The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it." And while Appelbaum admits that even strong encryption can’t last forever, saying, "We’re probably not using one hundred year (safe) crypto," he implies that pretty good privacy that lasts a pretty long time is far better than no privacy at all.
Assuming that some degree of privacy is still possible, most people don’t seem to think it’s worth the effort. The cypherpunks and their ilk fought to keep things like the PGP encryption program legal — and we don’t use them. We know Facebook and Google leak our personal online habits like a sieve and we don’t make much effort to cover our tracks. Perhaps some of us buy the good citizen cliché that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, but most of us are just opting for convenience. We’ve got enough to deal with day to day without engaging in a privacy regimen. Occasionally, some slacker may lose his job because he posted a photo of himself cradling his bong or the like, but as with civil liberties more generally, as long as the daily outrages against individuals don’t reach epic proportions, we rubberneck in horror and then return to our daily activities.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/403604
"The Galgenhumor of our era," Appelbaum told me in an email, "revolves around things that most people simply thought impossible in our lifetime." He lists a number of chilling examples, including indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, warrantless wiretaps, drone strikes, state-sponsored malware, and the Patriot Act.
"It isn’t a great time to be a dissenting voice of any kind in our American empire," he continues. But it isn’t the myriad of ways that civil liberties have been gutted that we’ll look back upon. "What we will remember is the absolute silence of so many, when the above things became normalized."
“Very bright” individuals with IQs above 125 were about twice as likely to have tried psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals with IQs below 75. “Intelligent people don’t always do the ‘right’ thing, only the evolutionarily novel thing.” Other forms of evolutionarily novel behavior that are more prevalent among individuals with higher IQs include vegetarianism and the use of contraceptives. Even liberalism and atheism may fall under the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis as a form of evolutionarily novel behavior defying the deeply ingrained cultural traditions of humanity.
http://thehumanist.org/march-april-2
Many "philosophers" have taken up the navel gazing of postmodernism, swearing off attempts at rationality and science, which they disparage as weapons of "cultural imperialism".
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