Yes there is. I consider the police lazy enough that they'd do it in good faith because aside of the idiots that may come to them to get arrested instead of them having to go out and catch them, they would probably also reduce the number of cases where someone actually gets mugged, robbed or otherwise becomes victim of a crime, which would be yet another reason to leave the box of donuts and go out into the world to interview the victim and do a search of the crime scene.

Even if you don't think there are any cops left that actually want to do what is allegedly their job, there's plenty of reason for them to establish something like that without resorting to paranoid surveillance conspiracies.

And as soon as that download takes place in a police station under a surveillance cam we might actually come close to having a semblance of a similarity between the two.

If you think that a customer service rep doesn't cancel your subscription because he likes to tick you off rather than because he gets told by the very same senior manager or boss you wish to complain to about it to make it as hard as possible for you to cancel your subscription, I can see where your depression is coming from.

And if someone is trying to find large numbers of people from a certain demographic they don't like in order to capture and do unpleasant things to those people, do you think having a detailed profile of everyone's entire life available at the touch of a button will make this (a) harder or (b) easier?

If the parallel isn't obvious enough for you, please consider a controversial subject like gay marriage and the power of the Christian Right in the US, or the attitudes towards Muslims exhibited by some people in Europe and the rise of far right political parties in the same places.

No. Just as correlation does not imply causation but can certainly suggest a potential causal effect worth investigation, so a very clear difference but in only a small sample can suggest something worth investigating using a larger sample and proper controls. The kind of behaviour I describe has been widely reported anecdotally, so unless you've actually do have some more robust data that shows otherwise, it remains a plausible theory that the situation I described among the younger generation I know is also the case more widely.

In other words, I'm not claiming that my own experience is necessarily representative, but I am claiming that it might be until better data shows otherwise.

Well, considering what army we're talking about, I think the commanding officer will be General Protection Fault.

Jeesh, kids these days with their newfangled technological crap. We only had Katyushas. And we were GLAD we had them, our daddies had to go and burn those houses down with their own matches, they would have killed for our Katyushas. Thinking about it... they did...

You don't know much about the internet, warfare or international diplomacy, do you?

Why did this picture instantly pop into my mind?

And depending on how things pan out, you might even get to see some of those "freedom terrorists" who insist in defending their liberties against their own government...

I tend to think that I can actually estimate the NSA's obligation and motivation. Mostly because they are mine, if only in a different area and a different part of this planet. I, too, am concerned with security. I'm responsible for the security of quite important and valuable assets that, if threatened or even harmed, could have a serious negative impact on various parts of the economy and maybe lives, depending on how important some people take their belongings.

I'm not responsible for the security of a country, but of a large enough corporation that maybe this allows me to speak in perspective here.

And there is one thing that is imperative when it comes to security: Your efforts must not threaten your own assets. When protecting my assets costs more than they are worth, the security is not even just useless, it's worse than useless. Because you just wasted more than what an incident could have costed.

Likewise, you cannot protect your assets by throwing them away. Of course you can avoid them being stolen by discarding them, but that doesn't accomplish anything either.

And the NSA is doing just that. What's it worth to defend the USA against terrorist attacks if those attacks would do less damage than the protection? What is it worth to defend the "American way of life" if that very way of life with its liberties and freedoms is discarded in favor of a security theater?

You're talking with Bob.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

But aside of that, these crib sheet supporters exist for a reason. Their existence does not only serve the purpose to waste your time, because that could be accomplished even cheaper than the support monkeys are. By keeping you in the holding loop.

No, the reason is that these utterly and absolutely moronic questions they ask that make you wonder whether they think your IQ measures in the single digits actually solve most tech support problems. Yes, people ARE that stupid. And no, I'm not talking about the supporters here.

The "solutions" these sheets offer that make you wonder whether the support thinks you're unable to tie your own laces without a coach and a personal assistant DO solve the problems most idiots calling them have.

Don't blame support. Blame the idiots who want tha intarwebz but don't want to be bothered with knowing anything about those funny boxes with the blinkenlights next to their computer... or what do you call that thing where my Farmville is shown?

That depends entirely on what fields the supervisor will check and maybe even overwrite with misleading information that the asshole is actually someone you should treat like a human being.

I've actually seen support software been changed to ensure support staff does not get the information of the customer's address. For exactly this reason.