All of your friends say to you, "Your girlfriend is cheating on you." Some of your friends you trust very deeply. Some only moderately so. But you love your girlfriend. You think about some inconsistencies in her behavior in the last few months which makes you suspicious. But on the other hand, her explanations make sense and have supporting evidence of their own. Do you choose to believe a group of your friends, or your significant other?

We all guess how this story plays out, as it often has before. The friends are right. Some of the friends don't even know each other, so its confirmation from different points of origin. The girlfriend does something stupid and gets caught in her lie. You feel stupid for believing her, break up, move on with life, etc.

But what about the cases where the opposite is true.

It turns out that several of your friends actually have a few friends in common that they don't know about. One of them starts a rumor that gets slight confirmation by a couple of random events: The girlfriend is seen talking to a guy from college she was friends with. She is overheard on the subway late at night in a heated argument with someone about her boyfriend. Stuff like that.

The same stories build up and mutual association of close friends tell you that she's up to no good. You choose to confront her, and in either situation you believe her explanations or you think she is lying, when in fact she is telling you the truth.

I know this is an odd allegory. I think that what I'm trying to say is that we are now at a point where reasonable people will start making choices such as either "The government is watching everything I say online" or "The government is only doing routine requests for mostly good causes". People who are more conspiracy minded, myself included, start choosing the "watching everything I say" argument, while other folks take the "mostly good causes" approach.

We've now seen at least 5-6 of these public announcements from companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google that more or less are saying the same thing. They respond to legitimate government requests but push back against seemingly illegitimate ones. And on top of that, the requests are small in number in the 10-20k range.

We can either say that a) the NSA/FBI are only doing moderate numbers of requests and not wholesale collecting and monitoring us like 1984 on steroids, or that b) they're collecting more information about us than they care to let on and all of our worst 1984-esque fears are coming to pass.

To any readers of this that read anything else I write, I'll say this: I lean towards the latter.

I am an admitted layman (don't ask me to do advanced math), but I try to stay informed about the directions that technology is leading us and its effects on society. I'm what you might loosely call a "Singulitarian" in that I feel justified in stating the transformative effects of technology over the next 20-100 years will be far different than anything we've ever experienced before. We're already in the low end of the hockey stick.

I see that right now, including the last few years and a few years into the future, we are living in the 1984 Orwellian state. A little bit gentler and a lot shinier, but basically 1984. But this won't last. Right now the NSA is building a massive data center in Utah, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56461026-90/nsa-data-u.... That gives them the ability to capture and store more data than there are stars in the sky. But this is only temporary. As with all technology, this eventually will scale out to be accessible to all of us.

What is 1984 like when its 2084 but the State is everyone you know and possibly everyone in the world?

So it summarizes like this (note my distaste for TLDR):

Many large companies are spouting the same line right now. We only cooperate with legal government requests, and there aren't that many requests.

This has been going on for two weeks and like all humans, we're getting burned out. Most of us will decide one way or another that the government is spying on us and move on. We'll either not care of be slightly more cautious of what we say/do online. Not that it will help. Either way, your next paycheck is coming, rent is due, oh a bachelor party!, look at the shiny Google/Apple thing!

I don't claim to have an answer. I'm not going to change much of what I do online. I'm not a violent revolutionary, though I'm beginning to think its time for US Govt 2.0 through more peaceful means.

Anyway, if you made it to the end of this congratulations. If you're in SF, buy me a beer and I'll continue at length.