I’ve spent the last week digesting the news about PRISM, the NSA’s system for spying on pretty much everything we do on the Internet. If you don’t know about it, Wikipedia has a good breakdown of what it’s about. Suffice it to say, the US Government’s domestic security apparatus has a way to see everything we do through Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, and more, with Dropbox “coming soon.” Reaction has been swift, and angry—justifiably so, but the more I think about it, the less worked up I get, and I was never terribly angry to begin with. It’s not that I don’t recognize PRISM as the grave threat to individual liberty and privacy that it is. It’s just another piece of straw thrown on the long broken back of a camel that can no longer care.

In the case of PRISM, it’s more the sense of ineffectiveness of any sort of organized protest against a program that’s already been in place for years. I don’t blame the companies involved for opening up access. When the NSA comes knocking on your door, demanding access to your data, the cost of saying “no” is likely to be worse than the cost of saying “yes”. Ire should be pointed squarely at the government, and I think few people would disagree with this. Only knee-jerk haters of Company X would think otherwise. [1] My only hope is that the sheer quantity of data the NSA is collecting makes real analysis difficult to outright impossible. It made me think of this clip from The Simpsons Movie. [2]

Perhaps the populist backlash will get PRISM dismantled, but that’s only a temporary victory. When the furor dies down, those with something to benefit from collecting our every move will try to do it again. If there’s a way to prevent this in the future, it’s through increased technological literacy. Tomasz Tunguz notes that “28% of Americans don’t use the internet and 32% lack broadband.” When more than a quarter of the population isn’t involved in technology, they’re disincentivezed to care. Even worse is the lack of knowledge that our elected officials have of technology. According to an article on Slate “The 111th Congress, which took office in 2009, was the oldest in U.S. history, with an average age of 57 in the House and 63 in the Senate. (The sitting 112th Congress is only slightly younger.)” The technological disconnect was only too well illustrated by John McCain asking Tim Cook why he had to update apps on his iPhone.

Without being involved and developing an understanding of the increasingly connected world we live in, both average citizens and politicians alike are in danger of being dominated by far more aware technocrats with sinister plans. It’s one thing to say the NSA can see what’s on some random person’s “Dropbox”. It’s a very different thing to let the NSA get access to your own personal files. Spying of this nature is never limited to just the textbook definition of “bad guys”. Ex post facto justification of PRISM could come from using it to bust anyone for the cause du jour. If terrorism doesn’t work out, the NSA could bust someone for piracy because they have an illegally downloaded MP3 on their Dropbox account. We need to nip this in the bud, have public accountability, and the knowledge to understand where the eyes of the government belong.

Perhaps I care more than I thought I did. The question remains: what can I actually do about this?

Nearly fourteen years ago, two teenagers committed an unspeakable act of brutal violence against their fellow high school students. That day, seventeen-hundred or so miles from that tragedy, I was in my own high school, unaware. This was before social media as we know it was even a dream, and before even a high school student had an Internet connection in their pocket. Still, somehow, word got around about what was happening in Colorado. As we left that day, I noticed a number of odd looks in my direction. I was already a bit of a loner in my school, and for some reason that morning, I’d opted to wear army fatigue pants and an olive drab t-shirt to class. Still, confusion mostly reigned that day.

It wasn’t until any of us got home that we could see the disaster unfolding. Pictures of students running from a sprawling suburban high school, rumors of bombs under cars, gunshots, terror. The next day we had names, faces, reports of last words, and scapegoats to pin the actions of two who would be forever unable to speak for themselves again. In its wake, metal detectors and X-ray machines were stuffed into my inner-city school’s entryway, more to assuage the fears of parents and administrators than our own. Our student fears were more grounded, knowing full well that if anyone tried to shoot up our school, to “Pull a Columbine” in the parlance, would find the new security measures to be a nuisance at best.

In the intervening decade and a half, we’ve seen countless tragedies on scales as grand as 9/11 and as seemingly small as the man who crashed his plane into an IRS field office in Texas. Each time, it seems the reaction cycle becomes shorter and shorter. It used to be that we wouldn’t know anything that we had not seen with our own eyes until we read the newspaper the next day. Radio and then television shortened the time span so that for decades, we could learn the horrors of the day over dinner or just before bedtime. The earliest days of the Internet made breaking news all the more immediate, but until only a few years ago, it was largely a one-way communication medium.

I first heard about the Boston Marathon explosions on Twitter, while posting something on my company’s social media feeds, and immediately thought “I’ve seen this film before.” Whether it was the Newtown massacre, Aurora, to whatever else you care to name in the last few years, I knew there would be finger-pointing, false reports of further horrors, and tasteless jokes written to deal with the tension of not knowing. In darker corners of the Internet, there would be claims of “false flags” and conspiracy. None of this is new. It’s a quirk, to put it mildly, of human psychology, where in the face of ambiguity, we fill in the details with our own experience and knowledge, or the lack thereof.

The instant nature of modern communication, the disintermediation of social media, and the even footing these technologies offer our voices has made it easier for misinformation to spread and blame to be assigned. The biggest difference between now, and then, is that they spread at exponentially faster speeds, to exponentially larger audiences. And yet, there’s an upside to this. Starting with the Aurora massacre, and continuing today, citizen journalists on Reddit and elsewhere have taken on the task of sorting the misinformation from the information, posting as many facts as they can verify, and keeping people up to date. They do a service that is all too necessary these days, with no recompense.

For the rest of us, it comes down to this: be prudent about what you read and be prudent about what you post. Technology is a transformative tool, but the fundamental decisions of how we apply this tool have not changed. There’s no reason, no excuse, for us to use this tool to bring harm, deliberate or otherwise. The facts of what has occurred will shake out in time. Patience is what we need most in trying times, a patience that seems almost contrary to the nature of things. Yet, if we can tolerate that ambiguity, trust ourselves, and trust those we’ve tasked with the job of answering our questions, we will be all the better for it.