Public opinion and privacy: Weird contradictory polling on NSA phone spying scandal

Hard to know what to make of this. To my knowledge, there have been two national polls thus far regarding US public opinion on privacy issues related to revelations that the National Security Agency keeps metadata from domestic US phone calls in a massive database. A Pew-Washington Post poll found that 56% of American adults support the phone-spying program and 41% oppose it, a result I found surprising and a tad depressing. Then almost immediately thereafter a Gallup poll came out reaching virtually the opposite conclusion, finding that Americans disapprove of the program by a margin of 53%-37%.

Both, obviously, cannot be accurate. Maybe neither are. The Gallup poll conforms more to my own predilections, a fact which makes me hesitant to instantly embrace it given the risk of confirmation bias. But I'll admit I was relieved to see evidence contradicting that Pew-WP poll, whose results seemed fantastically out of kilter with my own experience and expectations. Basically, this means we'll have to wait for multiple additional polls on the topic and average them before it's possible to guess what the public really thinks. These two polls don't jibe with one another even at the extreme ends of their confidence intervals. There's no way to accept them both.

One element that did stand out in both surveys: Support for the NSA phone-spying program would be much lower were it not for Democrats who appear so intent on Obama apologia that they're willing (IMO hypocritically) to back him on policies they criticized George W. Bush over just a few years ago. (See the fourth table here titled "Partisan shifts in views of NSA surveillance programs.") That's an embarrassment.

The truth is, whether or not there's majority support for privacy reform, and there might be, there's no doubt a vocal, bipartisan minority ardently supports it and the pro-life folks have shown that's more than enough to organize an effective political movement. These are issues that cut across party lines. The trick is going to be to convince partisans not to be fair-weather privacy advocates, criticizing Big Brother abuses only when they're undertaken by a member of the opposite political party. If that hump can be overcome, IMO the public would heartily welcome pretty sweeping privacy reforms at both the state and federal levels.