Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non-technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle.

I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.' Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with you...I KNOW you have shit to hide."

She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least.

So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing.

Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the pitchforks are still in garages.

Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings.

Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately want to believe they do.

As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically, discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and, frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum.

So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT much interest in her meant that she mattered?

I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the first place.

It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am, in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey, only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on.

I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2 deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay, feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.