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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

by 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.
  - blisterpeanuts 12y ago
    OK, so suppose you are flagged. It could happen; it might have already happened. What's next: you'll end up on a no-fly list? You'll be arrested?
    - vkb 12y ago
      Yes. Or, again, I don't know. That's the terrifying part. But given that we know the surveillance machine is much deeper than we anticipated, I can't come up with a worst case scenario anymore, which is what scares me the most.
      - beeworker 12y ago
        Worst case scenario: you die, or you die after lots of torture. Why not look at the most probable case, which is nothing happens? There's a quote from Richard Stallman that applies here: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson." Personally, I fear writing certain things with a username that's easily associated to my real name by the public at large, not the government with their clever tools. That's because I know the real and not-so-improbable consequences of doing so[0]: losing my job and getting blacklisted from the entire industry I've spent most my life trying to improve in and contribute to. It can be economic death. The threat of the mob is much realer to me than the threat of the government. [0] https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad...
    - dthal 12y ago
      I suppose stuff like this [1] could start to happen. Note that Moxie Marlinspike is not actually in/involved with wikileaks. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike#Traveling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike#Traveling

by vkb 12y ago

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.
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  OK, so suppose you are flagged. It could happen; it might have already happened. What's next: you'll end up on a no-fly list? You'll be arrested?
  - vkb 12y ago
    Yes. Or, again, I don't know. That's the terrifying part. But given that we know the surveillance machine is much deeper than we anticipated, I can't come up with a worst case scenario anymore, which is what scares me the most.
    - beeworker 12y ago
      Worst case scenario: you die, or you die after lots of torture. Why not look at the most probable case, which is nothing happens? There's a quote from Richard Stallman that applies here: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson." Personally, I fear writing certain things with a username that's easily associated to my real name by the public at large, not the government with their clever tools. That's because I know the real and not-so-improbable consequences of doing so[0]: losing my job and getting blacklisted from the entire industry I've spent most my life trying to improve in and contribute to. It can be economic death. The threat of the mob is much realer to me than the threat of the government. [0] https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badgered-pressured-and-purged/ https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad...
  - dthal 12y ago
    I suppose stuff like this [1] could start to happen. Note that Moxie Marlinspike is not actually in/involved with wikileaks. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike#Traveling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike#Traveling