I think Snowden is now a blackmailer.The polls may have reflected, a limited amount of information available at he time the questions were posed and the wording used in the polling. Ask if people think the surveillance knowlegdge is important ,you get a "yes". Ask if people agree with blackmail or another push style question, you get a "no"

Good stuff.

Digby brought up the age-old "shoot the messenger" problem such as Ken Silverstein faced when he did undercover work that exposed how lobbyists bring a shine to Mobutu or Hussein or other unsavory leaders around the glob. Like the Iranian terrorist group MEK, not only can they get off the US terrorist list, they can get Congressman & other Washington bigwigs parading for them to show how great they are. (Never mind the bodies, let's not bicker over who killed whom.)

The public may be starting to notice this demonization game - such as when the FBI stepped recently to drive a hacker to suicide by piling up charges to life in prison. People in Occupy Wall Street were arrested - but curiously no one from Wall Street was guilty from a trillion dollar meltdown. (aside from the outsider Bernie Madoff, and a more historical non-meltdown figure Mandel whose main crime from his trial seems to have been strip clubs and prostitutes - SEX SELLS!). People may be seeing more and more how crimes such as mortgage theft are exposed - and then nothing happens. Maybe people noticed with intrusive full-body scans at airports that the bombing at the Boston Marathon couldn't be stopped. Some even noticed an FBI interrogation turned into shooting the suspect with some bizarre shifting story.

It doesn't take a lot to see the rush to take down Qaddafi (with his nice oil fields), while our uncertainty in taking out Assad says "maybe he's not such a problem". For 12 years we've been bleating wolf about the Iranians and their nuclear program - once scary enough to rise to a campaign issue, now just another background noise of fear tactics.

It's not surprising that 2 currents are running strong - that there's not much we can do about government & corporate encroachment post-9/11 or that it's somehow necessary but muddy, vs. it's all a game that shouldn't be taken too seriously.

It doesn't help to have the government characters act so government, so foolish and stiff and hypocritical. Corporations have no problems bending the rules to pay no taxes all around the world, and government supports them trading with Iran or other acts against supposed national interests, but when an individual breaks the rules, we're supposed to get irate - & bring up well-worn enemy images of Russia, China, Muslims. Frankly I should be questioning Assange & Manning & Snowden more, but instead it's such a perfect Hollywood David vs. Goliath, the kinda cool geek or timid frail leaker vs. the over the top Dark Knights of Mordor or secret agents from somewhere. "Run, Forrest, Run" we scream. If only Tom Hanks were younger to portray Manning, or Brad Pitt to play Snowden.

Or maybe it has something to do with the Sandy Hook shooting where once again someone does something awful and bloody, but we can't respond with any legislation or measures to lower the chance of it happening again - once again a lot of outrage, demonization, and then nothing. New game, same as the old game.

The Marc Rich connection is interesting. First, he was a symbol of the chummy Washington set where there's no right or left - just rich & well-connected, where Scooter Libby can be friends with Rich and get backing from "left" and "right" newspapers over sentencing for leaking a CIA agent - all those inside-the-beltway people are just so nice, don't be mean to them - my kid goes to the same tennis camp as him!

Then he was a symbol of over-zealous government using financial laws to create crimes out of civil penalties - in this case Giuliani who prosecuted him, as well as Milken. The soft deal Giuliani gave Boesky to get to Milken gave an idea how it's all pretty arbitrary, and then the message in going after Milken for messing with the system rather than actually stealing from people (very interesting long overview of Milken here). Guiluiani indicted Milken's brother to get him to flip, and started questioning everyone in Millken's family - just start going after everyone and everything, and they'll confess - whether they did something or not. (I don't want to defend Milken on specifics - but much more complicated than the standard Goldman Sachs toxic assets or mortgage ripoff, which were much more obvious Aunt Millie scams).

So even with Rich, the message was "shoot the messenger". Clinton was guilty for bad optics. Rich was guilty for what were tax issues that could have been settled as fines. That Rich had traded with Iran suddenly became a problem, but not a problem for a Vice President elected the same year whose previous company Halliburton had traded with Iran. Few noted that Rich's pardon meant he was exposed to hundreds of millions in civil penalties once he returned to the US - apparently so drastic he never returned.

The US spends something like $80 billion a year on Homeland Security, $700 billion on DoD - yet flash drives walk out of the building, a leaker can fly through Hong Kong & Moscow without being stopped, while we can't catch a Muslim extremist in Boston who's been travelling to Dagestan & Chechnya and has been looking up Web sites for turning a pressure cooker into a bomb. So we grab all this info even on Americans, but we can't do anything useful with it? We're in Afghanistan for 12 years - Osama bin Laden dead the last 2 - for what reason exactly?

It's interesting the shifts in psychological outlook over different periods in history. The late 1800's were very globalized, a lot of mass movement around the globe, and a deep trust in scientific knowledge, reductionist analysis, we could break every issue down into components and it would be solved, treaties could prevent the problems of yesterday. Relativity and World War I blew all that away - the uncertainty principle took over, and our deeply set world order could be blown to shit in an hour, or with 1 bullet in a far away land.

Our psychology is shifting now - the internet came in the early 90's, but we're just now really embracing it, it embracing us, overwhelming attitudes between phone & laptop & infosites & communication networks. Twitter & LinkedIn in internet years aren't even young, Google's a grandpa at 13. Papers are unimportant, internet is probably more important to our daily lives than government, and where we used to interact with other cultures via the news, TV, an occasional travelog or long-planned European vacation - now it's through blogs, or the multicultural community in the neighborhood or schoolmates and a lot more casual travel or people who work normally around the globe, plus much of our stuff comes from Vietnam & China and Mexico and India. We've managed to maintain a strong stereotype of the Muslim world (despite the Arab Spring & a lot of expat life in Dubai), but our Cold War mentality of everyone else as an enemy doesn't hold up anymore - it's just another caricature. Probably for most Americans the Mideast is just forgotten - a bad TV series that's on another channel we just don't watch anymore, rather than get upset about it. The snooping on the internet is background noise we haven't assimilated yet - we know it's happening, we know it's gotten much worse since 9/11, but it hasn't risen to panic. Part of that is from the cheerleaders in the press (where opinion is compressed into a narrowly left-right acceptable range) who keep a steady conservative thumb on what should set hair on fire and what shouldn't. And we get more upset over whether Serena Williams says something un-PC about a girl getting raped than something that affects us personally in a much more sinister way.

We're on Facebook & Twitter every day, giving up our privacy to whoever wants to watch - but at some point we'll think about the cameras, the Truman Show element, the genie that can never be stuffed back in the bottle - and who are the lurkers worse than pedophiles staring at our accounts and public presence. It's all been good vibes up to now.

At some point the dam will break. This latest Snowden move seems significant - it started a conversation we've needed for quite some time, and even if the accepted wisdom of "support the state / support our intelligence gathering" has a scant majority, people are asking questions we've needed to ask for 12 years or for 23. There will be a new order of how a globalized world deals with information - not just white hat vs. black hat cold war equation, but all those little details of abuse & need & efficiency on a personal level.

President Obama did not call the leaders of China, Russia or Ecuador. Secretary of State Kerry did not call his counterparts. Incompetence? It is likely the multiple alphabet agencies are trying to locate the thumb drives with the encrypted data that Snowden told Greenwald were in existence. If Snowden is going to release more information if he is arrested, then the wise thing to do is try to track down as many encrypted thumb drives as possible.

Snowden gave China some data.Russia probably got data as well. Ecuador is considering the data that Snowden offers versus the impact of losing favored nation status in a trade agreement that is soon to expire.

how much the public rebels against surveillance cameras,etc remains to be seen. The lasting image of the Boston bombing from a law enforcement standpoint was the cheers the citizens gave to the law enforcement forces including armored vehicles after the Tsarnaevs were confronted.

during the siege, law enforcement requested that the local citizenry stay a home, there was no edict demanding that people stay at home. The gentleman who found Tsarnaev cowering in this boat, did not obey the request. FBI assault teams arrived and fired multiple shots at Tsarnaev. Since the brother would hid in the boat was taken alive, it seems the gunfire was to let the suspect know what faced him if he presented a threat.

law enforcement did not focus on the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing. Local authorities were focused on Occupy Wall Sreet, a ridiculous waste of time. In the after surveillance video and other techniques were used to track down the brothers in a relatively short time. Law enforcement swarmed in and were applauded.

Opinion on how Americans feel about certain issues can turn rapidly. The next threat will increase the public desire for surveillance. The longer Snowden evades prosecution in the United States, the more he will be viewed in a negative light.

in order to get the public outraged about data-mining, a case where a journalist or activist was threatened and forced to do something because of data obtained by PRISM or other program, the public will view the threat as theoretical. The image of law enforcement bringing massive force and leaving when a specific task was accomplished, as in Boston, will e how the public views PRISM.

The polls are scattergrams because the questions are not phrased properly. Snowden is more popular than Congress, but dog bites are probably more popular than the current Congress.