NBC News Online Survey: Public Opinion on Government Surveillance Embargoed for release after 12:00 NOON Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Americans Divided on Government Surveillance; Dont Trust Government or Businesses to Keep Their Data Private

Americans are divided over whether or not the U.S. government has gone too far in infringing on peoples privacy, according to the most recent NBC News online survey conducted by SurveyMonkey. TOPLINES Questions 1-10, 12-26 held for future releases; questions 10, 30-32 previously released. 27. Overall, in attempting to fight terrorism, do you think the U.S. governments surveillance program has: [ROTATE RESPONSES 1 & 2] 6.3-5.15 Gone too far in infringing on peoples privacy

38

Been too restrained when it comes to fighting terrorism favor

24

Been relatively balanced between privacy concerns and fighting terrorism

35

DK/NA 3 28. How concerned are you, personally, that the government might be collecting your own phone call records or monitoring your Internet activity--are you very concerned, somewhat concerned, not very concerned, or not at all concerned? Very

Concerned Somewhat concerned

A little concerned

Not at all concerned DK/NA

6.3-5.15 17 23 25 35 1

29. Which of the following do you trust MORE to keep records of your phone calls and Internet activity private and secure? 6.3-5.15 Businesses like cellular telephone companies and internet providers

21

Government agencies 11

Both equally 14 Neither 53 DK/NA 1

METHODOLOGY The NBC News Online Survey was conducted online by SurveyMonkey June 3-5, 2015 among a national sample of 2,153 adults aged 18 and over, including an oversample of 260 U.S. adults with an education level of high school or less. Respondents for this non-probability survey were selected from among those who have volunteered to participate in the SurveyMonkey Audience panel. This SurveyMonkey Audience project was run using a balanced sample. The process of sample balancing starts by setting targets for desired numbers of completed responses among certain groups (in this case: by gender, age, and race groupings). After that, a specified number of potential respondents are allocated to the project based on expected completion rates. Panelists are either linked directly to the survey from an email invitation, or routed to the survey after agreeing to take an additional survey after completing a prior one. Once the survey is put into the field, the system calculates actual completion rates by group, and uses that information to re-adjust the flow of new panelists to the survey. SurveyMonkey panelists are emailed no more than once every three days, and on average panelists receive one email every two weeks. SurveyMonkey also imposes a daily limit on the number of surveys a panelist can take. Data for this survey have been weighted for age, race, sex, education, and division using the Census Bureaus American Community Survey, marital status using the Current Population Survey, along with data from the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll on evangelicalism and the Pew Research Center on religious attendance to reflect the demographic composition of the United States. Because the sample is based on those who initially self-selected for participation rather than a probability sample, no estimates of sampling error can be calculated. All surveys may be subject to multiple sources of error, including, but not limited to sampling error, coverage error, and measurement error. To assess the variability in the estimates and account for design effects, we create a bootstrap confidence interval, meaning we use the weighted data to generate 1000 independent samples and calculate the standard deviation of the weighted average using those samples, producing an error estimate.

When analyzing the survey results and their accuracy, this error estimate should be taken into consideration in much the same way that analysis of probability polls takes into account the margin of sampling error. For example, if 47 percent of voters say they support Candidate A and 43 percent of voters support Candidate B, and the error estimate is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, Candidate A could be supported by as low as 44 percent of voters and Candidate B could have as high as 47 percent of support. Therefore, Candidate A does not have a "lead." The following table provides the unweighted sample sizes and the error estimate that has been calculated in place of the margin of sampling error for a variable that is expected to have close to an even split in most groupings (such as gender):

Group Unweighted N Plus or minus

Total sample 2153 3.0 percentage points

Republican 385 6.8 percentage points

Democrat 864 4.5 percentage points

Independent 860 4.4 percentage points

18-29 415 6.4 percentage points

30-44 598 5.6 percentage points

45-59 582 5.6 percentage points

60+ 556 5.9 percentage points

White 1506 3.5 percentage points

Black 184 9.2 percentage points

Hispanic 235 8.5 percentage points

Other 186 9.9 percentage points

LGBT 155 10.6 percentage points