12 ms·

Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance

270 points by forgotAgain 12y ago

chaostheory 12y ago
Why does this matter? Because it doesn't just extend to writers. It extends to engineers, scientists, programmers, architects; basically anyone who makes things. Having to worry about whether or not what you say, write, or think is illegal has a cost to creativity, since it will inevitably affect behavior like sharing ideas. imo this is one major reason that western nations produce more innovation than places like China. It's what gives the West an edge. If this trend continues over the long haul, western governments may finally achieve killing the goose that lays golden eggs; eventually we may just end up being on par with places like China minus the industrial output.
- flueedo 12y ago
  I think 'illegal' isn't the best word here. In the US and the other 'five eyes' nations, it seems to me, agencies have a much broader scope than that. Things you say aren't strictly illegal (after all there's the first amendment, and similar laws in the other countries), but they are classed as threatening in other ways. Also, anything we say might not get us in trouble today, but since it's hard to predict what the future holds -- laws may become harsher for example --, it might indeed get us in trouble two or even five years from now, (possibly after it no longer represents our current opinions even) since it's all recorded. About China I agree, and think they and other similar nations stayed competitive because they have where to 'borrow' innovation from (i.e. the freer nations). If we ever get to a place where the whole world is totalitarian/authoritarian this will stifle innovation everywhere.
  - chaostheory 12y ago
    Ok we can call it 'thought crimes' instead of illegal, but the overall effect still won't change.
alan_cx 12y ago
Just writers? I'd suggest that many people putting their thoughts and opinions in any sort of permanent, record-able, store-able, searchable medium are self censoring to some degree, or at least considering it. In the last few years, I'm saying less and less, let alone writing it down. Im conscious that, for example, anything I write on the internet could be used against me in the future, in ways I cant know about now. Anything I say on the phone is vulnerable too. Its bad enough worrying about the present, but who knows what attitudes will be in the future.
- codyb 12y ago
  Yea I've definitely thought about it before tweeting, even before favoriting things (which, I don't believe at least, on twitter, anyone should be able to see) but I'm just not certain about anything anymore. With the recent battles with the NYPD here in NYC, I've often found myself on both sides (although certainly more generally identifying with the more open minded (and occasionally less vehement) protestors (although I think it's a societal issue (poverty begets poverty, most people in poverty minorities, people in poverty more likely to commit crime, especially in our materialistic society, most people in bad crime ridden neighborhoods with low social mobility and extremely expensive education are minorities --> thus minorities are bad) as opposed to just random system wide racism that sprang up institutionally through out the country) but despite that, and despite my utmost respect for many members of the NYPD and all of the pleasant interactions I've had with them (generally asking for directions), I'm still a little concerned when I tweet with their hashtag or even their full acronym. I know I'm probably not their biggest suspect, but still... That's a weird feeling.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure you've missed a close-paren there ;). I don't want to be picky, it's just that the multiple-nesting structure of your comment makes it insanely hard to parse correctly. Would you please mind reformatting it? From my current attempt at parsing it, what I understood is basically "I respect NYPD and have mostly pleasant experience with them, and yet still I'm very conscious of what I tweet if the message has their hashtag/name in it". Is that correct?
cryoshon 12y ago
Chilling effect has been achieved, all according to plan. To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less; terrorism is merely an excuse for technological implementation that was desired since time immemorial by the powers that be. Now, onto the implications that the NY Times was too friendly to state: 1. People are self-censoring dissenting views in regular conversation outside of people they trust 2. People are self-censoring dissenting views in written communication 3. People are self-censoring their own minds as a result of #1 and #2 Therefore, 4. Dissenting communications and dissenting thoughts are reduced in frequency, leading to a snowball effect as ideas are more and more suppressed In terms of the scope, while the poll was only of writers, it seems as though the majority of writers consider themselves to be victims here. I think it's safe to say that the implications I listed are also applicable to other segments of the population-- most importantly, the segments of the population that are the usual hotbeds of dissent, because they are more likely to be paying attention to advances in government power which would create a chilling effect. The chilling effect produced by the endless rounds of disclosure of government abuse of surveillance is probably not going to go away anytime soon. Unfortunately, self-censorship is one more nail in the moribund democracy here in the US. Keep in mind that even if a person does not self censor, the mainstream media (which should now be understood as including major internet news hubs such as reddit) will likely prevent off-narrative news from spreading. So, what's the solution? I don't know. Still waiting on a hot new SV startup to "disrupt" the surveillance state.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  >To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less; The biggest myth perpetrated by the US government is that they are in control of the country. That illusion must be protected at all costs. The government nibbles around the edges and catches a few criminals(<20%) but by and large the country is relatively safe internally not because of the police but because most citizens are good people.
  - bdamm 12y ago
    That, and there is comparatively little resource scarcity. The government could easily steer the country into the economic ground, resulting in widespread suffering and eventual complete social breakdown.
rbrogan 12y ago
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance People have to (be able to) say what they think or there will not be much thinking going on at all.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  ... and when there's not much free thinking, there's not much innovation that's going to happen either.
graeme 12y ago
I lived in Cuba for a while, as an intern at an NGO. I was surprised to see how free spoken the people were. Over time I learned how the system worked. In every neighborhood there was a CDR, committee for the defence of the revolution. Members of the CDR surveilled. Generally, people knew when you went out, who you had over, some things you said. You couldn't know when someone would know. Some topics were taboo, others were more risky. But the biggest factor was whether you were likely to cause a fuss. People who weren't important were allowed to blow off steam. But they were watched. And the day they rose to become a threat, the system had been on them for some time. So you thought long and hard before doing something that would actually threaten the system, outside the bounds of what was tolerated. Ending with a system that looked free, and many even described as free. Because in a lot of important senses, it was. But in very specific, important senses, it was not.
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  Sounds a lot like the utopia of THX1138.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  I'm not sure why the left and the libertarian right are such advocates of Cuba. Its a hellish system there where basic human rights are trampled with impunity. Sadly, whenever this is brought up, I get the usual whataboutism's about the US.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    You're conflating "advocates for Cuba" with those simply against the pointless embargo. There's a huge difference, but if the US wants to continue the embargo at least be consistent about it, hit China, Haiti, Yemen, India, and so on. Heck just hit all of the "Unfree" in the freedom index[0], that would at least be a little consistent. Cuba definitely has a lot of problems. But so do many of the US's major trading partners, I mean want to talk about Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China..? [0] http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
    - 12y ago
theorique 12y ago
Writers, as always, are free to think and write anything that does not threaten State security. As good citizens, we know that they would not want to jeopardize the security of the State, and therefore, we assume that they will keep tabs on the things they write. Only if they write subversive or other undesirable content will they be observed. And only repeat offenders will be brought in for questioning and re-education. Of course we are free. What a stupid question.
CapitalistCartr 12y ago
Freedom of speech isn't fought at Michelangelo's David; it's fought at Larry Flynt's Hustler. Freedom of speech without the concomitant rights to privacy in one's person and papers, and the right to free association with others, privately or publicly, is severely hobbled. The War on Some Terrors has set back free society more than anything else since "The Red Scare".
slg 12y ago
I don't want to diminish this problem, but I am not a fan of the way some of these survey questions were framed. It lumps people have taken actions in with people who have considered taking that action. It is a real "Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?" type situation. There is a big difference between a third of writers thinking about whether they should change what they write about and a third of writers actually following through with it.
vkb 12y ago
Speaking as a writer and blogger, I can say that this has absolutely been the case for me over the past year. Whereas before I used to blog about anything that came to mind (that wouldn't negatively impact my employment), I now weigh each blog post, Facebook post, tweet ,and non-OTR encrypted GChat (for friends who are too lazy/clueless to install OTR) carefully, employing an amount of self-censorship that I never would have thought possible before. I am even now different over text messages. I've lost my writing voice. I was afraid to write even this post [1], which sounds ludicrous, but it's amazing how much hearing the revelations impacted me. The irony of this situation is that, even before the Snowden leaks, I had been (and am) working on a novel about 1936 in the Soviet Union, the year before the largest of the Great Purges, and had been struggling to get a handle on how people felt about information censorship and how people found out that their government was not what it seemed. [1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2013/06/being-american/ http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2013/06/being-american/
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you afraid of? Not meaning to belittle your concerns; I just wonder what topics are now taboo, e.g. discussion about hijacking planes or how to build bombs perhaps, that might flag you in some keyword search and trigger a visit from the FBI?
  - vkb 12y ago
    That's the thing...I [we] don't know what keywords trigger deeper searches, or how exactly our browsing/typing history is tied together in which database. If I type 'Bin Laden' in a chat, does it flag me somewhere? Or is it filtered out as useless? If I write, 'I had a blast at a party last night' (a really simplistic example, but you get the point) or 'Check out this story about this guy who wanted to kill Obama..he was crazy!',does that do anything, or are those keywords ignored? What's considered a false positive, and what's a true positive? The algorithms do the filtering, but the humans write the algorithms. What's the error rate? I think I am most afraid of what I don't know about how this works.
    - 12y ago
ThomPete 12y ago
It's interesting. As a Dane writing in Danish media I would never ever feel like my civil rights where in any real danger. In the US a country which I love dearly there are subjects I don't dare writing about. Not sure whether thats a nationality thing or if it runs deeper.
- orthecreedence 12y ago
  Curious, what topics don't you dare write about?
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    Drugs, Terrorism, Patriotism, Whistleblowers, Feminism.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sandworm 12y ago
I don't see the clear link. A writer expects that his writing will be viewed by countless others. For instance I have no fear of the NSA reading this message. Surveillance or not, this is a public forum. They don't need taps. Are they afraid that by writing that they will become the subject of increased surveillance? That could/would happen as easily 30 years ago as today. At least today we have tools to fight back. The mathematics of encryption are on the side of the individual. Open source software, Tor, PGP ... today anyone with a netbook can play in the big leagues of secrecy. Journalists should probably feel safer than they did back when the only thing protecting their documents was a metal key to a leather briefcase, when the only thing stopping them from reading their mail was the glue.
- grrowl 12y ago
  > Surveillance or not, this is a public forum. Unfortunately, many here write under a pseudonym. Surveillance at the scale the NSA/FBI/CIA is practicing deanonymises everyone, pseudonym or not. You control the information you put into this public forum, but they operate at a level beyond that information.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  > Are they afraid that by writing that they will become the subject of increased surveillance? That could/would happen as easily 30 years ago as today. It was less efficient and a lot slower decades ago. Back then you just have people manually combing and reading books. Now you have computers with improved machine learning processing huge numbers of documents. Even without machine learning, just being able to flag keywords is really powerful compared to yesteryear.
- talmand 12y ago
  The fear isn't of being read, the fear is of the backlash of what was written. The fear is that free expression is no longer free but subject to strange, vague rules that change all the time. Such as supporting something today and then years from now it's out of vogue so that previous statements, collected and tagged all those years ago, will be held against you. Either socially, or in some cases criminally. And it isn't just the government that's been doing this. Many of us now live in a world where your opinion can have heavy consequences outside the scope of the context of the opinion. I would say that if you have an opinion on anything that you share publicly, prepare to have your apology ready to go to appease the offended masses that will not hesitate to make an example of you. Keep in mind that some people see this as a good thing, until it happens to them.
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
I just read the actual report: http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Chilling_01-05-15_FINAL.pdf http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Chilling_01-... Sorry, but I'm not seeing the big deal here. There's surveillance in the U.S. and U.K., true, and it has to stop or be severely curtailed, but these countries are a far cry from a place like China, where people actually are arrested for violating strict censorship laws. The NSA's mass surveillance has been brought to light by a former contractor; the secret is blown, the cat's out of the bag, and Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall already. Americans have a newfound, healthy distrust of the federal government. There are lawsuits pending. Tech companies are already creating work-arounds, for example Apple's announcement of encryption for their users' devices that even they can't break. I suspect that in the near future, the major email providers will offer end-to-end encryption for all their users with no possibility of back doors. The NSA technicians will lose the ability to casually type in a name like "Bill Clinton" and read his email at their leisure (as happened with that analyst who got fired). As for self-censorship, can anyone document how widespread that actually is? Today we are witnessing the most diverse array of opinions disseminated to billions of readers that has ever occurred in the history of the human race. These writers in this PEN survey sound timid and fearful to me. I wonder what they would say, had they had a chance to compare the current situation with that of eastern Europe and Russia during the Soviet period, or the military dictatorships of Latin America, where outspoken writers were rounded up and tortured. I'm not trying to belittle the surveillance problem that we have; I'm adamantly against it and it does indeed threaten our long term freedom. I'm voting against anyone who supports NSA surveillance. Unfortunately, it's going to take some time for the import of this situation to sink in to the dim consciousness of the American voter. I wish that the writers surveyed by PEN would lead the charge to raise people's awareness of the situation by writing bold essays and opinion pieces to state their views, rather than "self-censoring" as they apparently are doing in order to avoid what they imagine to be retribution or harassment from nefarious government entities.
- xnull1guest 12y ago
  However the censorship laws in China only apply to messages that try to gather people for public group actions. Messages critical of the government and vocal of discontent are entirely allowed and not subject to censorship. Even group forming messages that support the government are censored. See this study done at Harvard for details: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf With regards to the freedom to protest, the US government has its own mechanisms to unfurl public group action. Apple still cooperates with law enforcement and can give access to almost all data which you might 'infer' from reports are protected. Please find details from Apple's report here: https://ssl.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2014.pdf https://ssl.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2... Also remember the removal of Apple's Warranty Canary. It's also interesting to note that were Secure Enclave manufacturers compromised or to collaborate with law enforcement (giving access to UUIDs mapped to each device) the whole scheme is caput. I am wondering if you can provide a quick primer on who you've not voted for and will not be voting for that supports surveillance.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

270 points by forgotAgain 12y ago

Why does this matter? Because it doesn't just extend to writers. It extends to engineers, scientists, programmers, architects; basically anyone who makes things. Having to worry about whether or not what you say, write, or think is illegal has a cost to creativity, since it will inevitably affect behavior like sharing ideas. imo this is one major reason that western nations produce more innovation than places like China. It's what gives the West an edge. If this trend continues over the long haul, western governments may finally achieve killing the goose that lays golden eggs; eventually we may just end up being on par with places like China minus the industrial output.

flueedo 12y ago
I think 'illegal' isn't the best word here. In the US and the other 'five eyes' nations, it seems to me, agencies have a much broader scope than that. Things you say aren't strictly illegal (after all there's the first amendment, and similar laws in the other countries), but they are classed as threatening in other ways. Also, anything we say might not get us in trouble today, but since it's hard to predict what the future holds -- laws may become harsher for example --, it might indeed get us in trouble two or even five years from now, (possibly after it no longer represents our current opinions even) since it's all recorded. About China I agree, and think they and other similar nations stayed competitive because they have where to 'borrow' innovation from (i.e. the freer nations). If we ever get to a place where the whole world is totalitarian/authoritarian this will stifle innovation everywhere.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  Ok we can call it 'thought crimes' instead of illegal, but the overall effect still won't change.

alan_cx 12y ago

Just writers? I'd suggest that many people putting their thoughts and opinions in any sort of permanent, record-able, store-able, searchable medium are self censoring to some degree, or at least considering it. In the last few years, I'm saying less and less, let alone writing it down. Im conscious that, for example, anything I write on the internet could be used against me in the future, in ways I cant know about now. Anything I say on the phone is vulnerable too. Its bad enough worrying about the present, but who knows what attitudes will be in the future.

codyb 12y ago
Yea I've definitely thought about it before tweeting, even before favoriting things (which, I don't believe at least, on twitter, anyone should be able to see) but I'm just not certain about anything anymore. With the recent battles with the NYPD here in NYC, I've often found myself on both sides (although certainly more generally identifying with the more open minded (and occasionally less vehement) protestors (although I think it's a societal issue (poverty begets poverty, most people in poverty minorities, people in poverty more likely to commit crime, especially in our materialistic society, most people in bad crime ridden neighborhoods with low social mobility and extremely expensive education are minorities --> thus minorities are bad) as opposed to just random system wide racism that sprang up institutionally through out the country) but despite that, and despite my utmost respect for many members of the NYPD and all of the pleasant interactions I've had with them (generally asking for directions), I'm still a little concerned when I tweet with their hashtag or even their full acronym. I know I'm probably not their biggest suspect, but still... That's a weird feeling.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure you've missed a close-paren there ;). I don't want to be picky, it's just that the multiple-nesting structure of your comment makes it insanely hard to parse correctly. Would you please mind reformatting it? From my current attempt at parsing it, what I understood is basically "I respect NYPD and have mostly pleasant experience with them, and yet still I'm very conscious of what I tweet if the message has their hashtag/name in it". Is that correct?

cryoshon 12y ago

Chilling effect has been achieved, all according to plan. To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less; terrorism is merely an excuse for technological implementation that was desired since time immemorial by the powers that be. Now, onto the implications that the NY Times was too friendly to state: 1. People are self-censoring dissenting views in regular conversation outside of people they trust 2. People are self-censoring dissenting views in written communication 3. People are self-censoring their own minds as a result of #1 and #2 Therefore, 4. Dissenting communications and dissenting thoughts are reduced in frequency, leading to a snowball effect as ideas are more and more suppressed In terms of the scope, while the poll was only of writers, it seems as though the majority of writers consider themselves to be victims here. I think it's safe to say that the implications I listed are also applicable to other segments of the population-- most importantly, the segments of the population that are the usual hotbeds of dissent, because they are more likely to be paying attention to advances in government power which would create a chilling effect. The chilling effect produced by the endless rounds of disclosure of government abuse of surveillance is probably not going to go away anytime soon. Unfortunately, self-censorship is one more nail in the moribund democracy here in the US. Keep in mind that even if a person does not self censor, the mainstream media (which should now be understood as including major internet news hubs such as reddit) will likely prevent off-narrative news from spreading. So, what's the solution? I don't know. Still waiting on a hot new SV startup to "disrupt" the surveillance state.

happyscrappy 12y ago
>To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less; The biggest myth perpetrated by the US government is that they are in control of the country. That illusion must be protected at all costs. The government nibbles around the edges and catches a few criminals(<20%) but by and large the country is relatively safe internally not because of the police but because most citizens are good people.
- bdamm 12y ago
  That, and there is comparatively little resource scarcity. The government could easily steer the country into the economic ground, resulting in widespread suffering and eventual complete social breakdown.

rbrogan 12y ago

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance People have to (be able to) say what they think or there will not be much thinking going on at all.

chaostheory 12y ago
... and when there's not much free thinking, there's not much innovation that's going to happen either.

graeme 12y ago

I lived in Cuba for a while, as an intern at an NGO. I was surprised to see how free spoken the people were. Over time I learned how the system worked. In every neighborhood there was a CDR, committee for the defence of the revolution. Members of the CDR surveilled. Generally, people knew when you went out, who you had over, some things you said. You couldn't know when someone would know. Some topics were taboo, others were more risky. But the biggest factor was whether you were likely to cause a fuss. People who weren't important were allowed to blow off steam. But they were watched. And the day they rose to become a threat, the system had been on them for some time. So you thought long and hard before doing something that would actually threaten the system, outside the bounds of what was tolerated. Ending with a system that looked free, and many even described as free. Because in a lot of important senses, it was. But in very specific, important senses, it was not.

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
Sounds a lot like the utopia of THX1138.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
I'm not sure why the left and the libertarian right are such advocates of Cuba. Its a hellish system there where basic human rights are trampled with impunity. Sadly, whenever this is brought up, I get the usual whataboutism's about the US.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  You're conflating "advocates for Cuba" with those simply against the pointless embargo. There's a huge difference, but if the US wants to continue the embargo at least be consistent about it, hit China, Haiti, Yemen, India, and so on. Heck just hit all of the "Unfree" in the freedom index[0], that would at least be a little consistent. Cuba definitely has a lot of problems. But so do many of the US's major trading partners, I mean want to talk about Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China..? [0] http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
  - 12y ago

theorique 12y ago

Writers, as always, are free to think and write anything that does not threaten State security. As good citizens, we know that they would not want to jeopardize the security of the State, and therefore, we assume that they will keep tabs on the things they write. Only if they write subversive or other undesirable content will they be observed. And only repeat offenders will be brought in for questioning and re-education. Of course we are free. What a stupid question.

CapitalistCartr 12y ago

Freedom of speech isn't fought at Michelangelo's David; it's fought at Larry Flynt's Hustler. Freedom of speech without the concomitant rights to privacy in one's person and papers, and the right to free association with others, privately or publicly, is severely hobbled. The War on Some Terrors has set back free society more than anything else since "The Red Scare".

slg 12y ago

I don't want to diminish this problem, but I am not a fan of the way some of these survey questions were framed. It lumps people have taken actions in with people who have considered taking that action. It is a real "Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?" type situation. There is a big difference between a third of writers thinking about whether they should change what they write about and a third of writers actually following through with it.

vkb 12y ago

Speaking as a writer and blogger, I can say that this has absolutely been the case for me over the past year. Whereas before I used to blog about anything that came to mind (that wouldn't negatively impact my employment), I now weigh each blog post, Facebook post, tweet ,and non-OTR encrypted GChat (for friends who are too lazy/clueless to install OTR) carefully, employing an amount of self-censorship that I never would have thought possible before. I am even now different over text messages. I've lost my writing voice. I was afraid to write even this post [1], which sounds ludicrous, but it's amazing how much hearing the revelations impacted me. The irony of this situation is that, even before the Snowden leaks, I had been (and am) working on a novel about 1936 in the Soviet Union, the year before the largest of the Great Purges, and had been struggling to get a handle on how people felt about information censorship and how people found out that their government was not what it seemed. [1] http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2013/06/being-american/ http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2013/06/being-american/

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
Just out of curiosity, what exactly are you afraid of? Not meaning to belittle your concerns; I just wonder what topics are now taboo, e.g. discussion about hijacking planes or how to build bombs perhaps, that might flag you in some keyword search and trigger a visit from the FBI?
- vkb 12y ago
  That's the thing...I [we] don't know what keywords trigger deeper searches, or how exactly our browsing/typing history is tied together in which database. If I type 'Bin Laden' in a chat, does it flag me somewhere? Or is it filtered out as useless? If I write, 'I had a blast at a party last night' (a really simplistic example, but you get the point) or 'Check out this story about this guy who wanted to kill Obama..he was crazy!',does that do anything, or are those keywords ignored? What's considered a false positive, and what's a true positive? The algorithms do the filtering, but the humans write the algorithms. What's the error rate? I think I am most afraid of what I don't know about how this works.
  - 12y ago

ThomPete 12y ago

It's interesting. As a Dane writing in Danish media I would never ever feel like my civil rights where in any real danger. In the US a country which I love dearly there are subjects I don't dare writing about. Not sure whether thats a nationality thing or if it runs deeper.

orthecreedence 12y ago
Curious, what topics don't you dare write about?
- ThomPete 12y ago
  Drugs, Terrorism, Patriotism, Whistleblowers, Feminism.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sandworm 12y ago

I don't see the clear link. A writer expects that his writing will be viewed by countless others. For instance I have no fear of the NSA reading this message. Surveillance or not, this is a public forum. They don't need taps. Are they afraid that by writing that they will become the subject of increased surveillance? That could/would happen as easily 30 years ago as today. At least today we have tools to fight back. The mathematics of encryption are on the side of the individual. Open source software, Tor, PGP ... today anyone with a netbook can play in the big leagues of secrecy. Journalists should probably feel safer than they did back when the only thing protecting their documents was a metal key to a leather briefcase, when the only thing stopping them from reading their mail was the glue.

grrowl 12y ago
> Surveillance or not, this is a public forum. Unfortunately, many here write under a pseudonym. Surveillance at the scale the NSA/FBI/CIA is practicing deanonymises everyone, pseudonym or not. You control the information you put into this public forum, but they operate at a level beyond that information.
chaostheory 12y ago
> Are they afraid that by writing that they will become the subject of increased surveillance? That could/would happen as easily 30 years ago as today. It was less efficient and a lot slower decades ago. Back then you just have people manually combing and reading books. Now you have computers with improved machine learning processing huge numbers of documents. Even without machine learning, just being able to flag keywords is really powerful compared to yesteryear.
talmand 12y ago
The fear isn't of being read, the fear is of the backlash of what was written. The fear is that free expression is no longer free but subject to strange, vague rules that change all the time. Such as supporting something today and then years from now it's out of vogue so that previous statements, collected and tagged all those years ago, will be held against you. Either socially, or in some cases criminally. And it isn't just the government that's been doing this. Many of us now live in a world where your opinion can have heavy consequences outside the scope of the context of the opinion. I would say that if you have an opinion on anything that you share publicly, prepare to have your apology ready to go to appease the offended masses that will not hesitate to make an example of you. Keep in mind that some people see this as a good thing, until it happens to them.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

I just read the actual report: http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Chilling_01-05-15_FINAL.pdf http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Chilling_01-... Sorry, but I'm not seeing the big deal here. There's surveillance in the U.S. and U.K., true, and it has to stop or be severely curtailed, but these countries are a far cry from a place like China, where people actually are arrested for violating strict censorship laws. The NSA's mass surveillance has been brought to light by a former contractor; the secret is blown, the cat's out of the bag, and Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall already. Americans have a newfound, healthy distrust of the federal government. There are lawsuits pending. Tech companies are already creating work-arounds, for example Apple's announcement of encryption for their users' devices that even they can't break. I suspect that in the near future, the major email providers will offer end-to-end encryption for all their users with no possibility of back doors. The NSA technicians will lose the ability to casually type in a name like "Bill Clinton" and read his email at their leisure (as happened with that analyst who got fired). As for self-censorship, can anyone document how widespread that actually is? Today we are witnessing the most diverse array of opinions disseminated to billions of readers that has ever occurred in the history of the human race. These writers in this PEN survey sound timid and fearful to me. I wonder what they would say, had they had a chance to compare the current situation with that of eastern Europe and Russia during the Soviet period, or the military dictatorships of Latin America, where outspoken writers were rounded up and tortured. I'm not trying to belittle the surveillance problem that we have; I'm adamantly against it and it does indeed threaten our long term freedom. I'm voting against anyone who supports NSA surveillance. Unfortunately, it's going to take some time for the import of this situation to sink in to the dim consciousness of the American voter. I wish that the writers surveyed by PEN would lead the charge to raise people's awareness of the situation by writing bold essays and opinion pieces to state their views, rather than "self-censoring" as they apparently are doing in order to avoid what they imagine to be retribution or harassment from nefarious government entities.

xnull1guest 12y ago
However the censorship laws in China only apply to messages that try to gather people for public group actions. Messages critical of the government and vocal of discontent are entirely allowed and not subject to censorship. Even group forming messages that support the government are censored. See this study done at Harvard for details: http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/censored.pdf With regards to the freedom to protest, the US government has its own mechanisms to unfurl public group action. Apple still cooperates with law enforcement and can give access to almost all data which you might 'infer' from reports are protected. Please find details from Apple's report here: https://ssl.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2014.pdf https://ssl.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Oct_2... Also remember the removal of Apple's Warranty Canary. It's also interesting to note that were Secure Enclave manufacturers compromised or to collaborate with law enforcement (giving access to UUIDs mapped to each device) the whole scheme is caput. I am wondering if you can provide a quick primer on who you've not voted for and will not be voting for that supports surveillance.

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