NSA Surveillance: IT Pro Survey Says What?



"A majority of Americans who don't understand security find the National Security Agency's use of secret court orders to collect phone and email data acceptable. IT professionals, however, see things differently.

"When the Washington Post published the results of a Pew Research poll on the subject last month, it concluded that most Americans (56%) accept NSA data collection, even at the expense of privacy, as a defense against terrorism. But it didn't characterize its 1,004 survey respondents as ignorant about computer security.

Stu Sjouwerman, CEO of security training firm KnowBe4.com, did so indirectly. He posed the same survey questions, via SurveyMonkey, to more than 1,500 IT professionals — people who do understand computer security — and came to the opposite conclusion. In Sjouwerman's survey, some 70% said the NSA's actions were unacceptable, compared to 41% in the Washington Post-Pew survey.

Sjouwerman, in a phone interview, said he decided to replicate the Post-Pew survey because he "didn't think that people really understand the implications [of the NSA's data gathering], especially long term." Here is (warmly recommended) the full article.




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