For all the NSA documents revealed by Snowden, and for all the news headlines stressing the gravity of the situation, it seems the general public has not changed their behaviour much. At least that would be the conclusion if looking at the worldwide trends of a few Google search terms: As can be seen in the first chart, the terms Snowden and NSA quickly rose to prominence when the story broke in the second half of 2013. However, interest quickly declined. If we look at the two next charts, comparing terms privacy, surveillance, encryption there seem to be no correlation with the former terms at all. Maybe there is an ever so faint increase in the term encryption, but nothing of significance.

The two last charts compare the terms encryption, surveillance in Germany. Here there is a small blip for the former term, while interest in the later, surveillance, seems to have increased significantly. This is possibly driven by the news stories there about NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel.

These trends are rather disappointing to see. One would have hoped for at least a blip on the radar when it comes to public awareness of these issues. Instead, the distraction campaigns by most of the mainstream media seems to have been successful: The headlines have been focusing on Snowden, his girlfriend, his father, and whether he is a hero or traitor. Masking and excusing the abuse of power by NSA, GCHQ and the politicians who support these organizations have been successful. In fact, in Britain the story has taken the bizarre turn where the government is investigating The Guardian and editor Alan Rusbridger for publishing the leaked documents. What other clue do you need to see that the so called democracies and free countries of the West is nothing but a mirage for a powerful and abusive elite?

Swedish politician Rickard Falkvinge put it nicely in his post about the coming of the Swedish police-state:

A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don’t get everything they point at.





