Of course mass surveillance leads to a chilling effect. Personally, I'm now concerned about what I say in email, in text messages, in discussion forums, and in telephone calls. I fear that if I use the wrong words or visit the wrong websites, I'll trigger some automated system and will be put on some kind of watch list that will change my life. This is a very scary state of affairs. And unfortunately I don't see a near-term solution. The interests of government and corporations are aligned (reducing pressure to enact any serious privacy regulation). They're both looking to vacuum up as much personal data as possible for national security on the one hand and to develop new and improved revenue/business models on the other.
>Personally, I'm now concerned about what I say in email, in text messages, in discussion forums, and in telephone calls. I fear that if I use the wrong words or visit the wrong websites, I'll trigger some automated system and will be put on some kind of watch list that will change my life.
well, if you read Stanislav Lem, you'd immediately see that not using "wrong" words and not visiting "wrong" sites may also be a trigger - like "this guy is deliberately trying to stay under radar, why? what he is hiding/planning?" If you try to behave following average pattern for your demographics, you may trigger another one - "he is trying to blend in" :) You can't win that game for the simple reason that the game rules are decided upon strictly after your moves had already been made.
You see, the issue isn't extra collection of data by government - this is already lost cause due to technological progress, the main issue is the ability of government to oppress using that data, ie. absence of due process.
For months, I've been making like a sniper, going to and from work by crawling through dense foliage wearing camo. I crawl slowly, making only about a couple of hundred yards a day but, once I get there, I am completely unknown. No one knows I'm there and no one knows I've left.
I encrypt everything and carry it all with me when I leave so no one knows what I've done. I make sure I muss up the trail behind me so I can't be tracked. If I get really spooked, I have a few drop off points where I can store material along with a change of clothes (though I probably shouldn't have said that here).
It's hard work but I know it's all worth it. I haven't seen, heard of, or had any problems since I started this. Not that I had any problems before. I just know that the only issue now is I haven't received my paycheck in months. I'm worried I may have slipped up somewhere and my funding is being re-directed elsewhere in an effort to find me.
Oddly enough, I've been less worried about that sort of thing since the Snowden revelations for reasons I can't adequately explain. I _think_ that I subconsciously assumed 'suspicious' searches would be flagged and lead to tracking, but post-Snowden just assume it'll be tracked regardless so don't bother self-filtering (I'd love to know if the hours I spent researching anthrax and dispersal methods [saw it on TV, was curious if it was plausible, and fell down that rabbit-hole for a couple of days] a few months ago caused a blip on security services RADAR).
That said, it is a terrible state of affairs, and I do completely understand the impulse to self-censor to avoid future issues. Likewise, I don't see a near-to-mid term solution - mass surveillance appears fairly entrenched, is not a single country issue (which would at least make it somewhat avoidable), and very few people even near positions of power seem to be addressing it adequately (or even see it as a problem).
Me too. How common is this? I deliberately avoid certain topics of conversation and often don't speak the way I truly feel out of fear it will hurt me down the line. I hate this reality.
>Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now.
To me this is so bizarre. Now that I'm living in Asia (mainland China) it's even more bizarre. Because here ofcourse the government has the ability to look at everyone's communication - but no one has the ego to think they personally will be looked at. People appreciate that there are millions of people and no one actually cares about you unless you're really making waves.
Look back at the US, my home country, I feel like a lot of people are on the off-the-grid-survivalist spectrum of paranoia. The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?
Anyways.. just a different perspective from the other side of the globe
For example, there are lists of words the government provides payment companies, and they have to take your money if you mention them in relation to the payment.
Try and pay someone using Venmo and say Achmed or Cuba revolution. *(it's not just venmo)
I'm coming to live in the US for a year in August and currently going through the visa process. I can definitely say I have typed and then not submitted a few different comments on Reddit because of this.
You know what happened "shortly before" Snowden's leaks, two terrorists killed 3 people and injured hundreds others in a terrorist attack in Boston. Is that a good time to establish a baseline for number of page views?
I'm not saying there isn't a chilling effect, just that I am highly skeptical of this measurement of it. Wikipedia pages on these subjects are practically news articles. They are going to be pretty highly linked with whatever is going on in the world at the time. Considering that, I would fully expect terrorism searches to be high after a recent terrorist attack and to drop as terms like "Al Queda" become less newsworthy on a global scale.
Putting quotes around shortly before makes it seem like you are drawing from the linked story, but you aren't. A quote that is actually from the article:
>In the 16 months prior to the first major Snowden stories in June 2013, the articles drew a variable but an increasing audience, with a low point of about 2.2 million per month rising to 3.0 million just before disclosures of the NSA's Internet spying programs. Views of the sensitive pages rapidly fell back to 2.2 million a month in the next two months and later dipped under 2.0 million before stabilizing below 2.5 million 14 months later, Penney found.
They did not use the day or week of the Boston Bombing as their baseline. Don't misrepresent the research.
I'd be interested to see the rest of their results, because I think you've just demolished that headline figure.
Reading the article I noted that an audience varying between 2.2 million to 3 million in the months before and 2.2 million to 2.5 million in the months after didn't look like a step change in user behaviour; the claimed "fall" was no bigger than the variance over the previous 12 months. And I think you've just explained why the monthly results peaked at 3 million in one of the months before.
I don't think the hypothesis is altogether implausible, but the evidence presented in the news article summary is less than compelling, particularly when this is the sort of research where researchers are at liberty to cherry pick their results.
Clearly (i) the hypothesised step change in user behaviour post-Snowden doesn't exist for global web searches (ii) there are a lot of spikes attributable to individual events, not least one in early 2013 and (iii) there's a trend decline in searches for terrorism starting over a decade ago
As an immigrant in USA who loved to read about religions,mythology and history I have stopped buying books about Islam and middle eastern history on Amazon I buy them in cash at B&N. I stopped using Quora completely too.
My fear is that not just people who might be interested in Islam or middle east might get targeted but I am sure government will also target the Libertarians and anti-authoritarian people.
My conclusion, traffic is probably changing due to what is in the news rather than anything else. If the US Army is sent in to invade another country, their wikipedia page will be back on top.
ISIS was way higher last year, average about 25k/day in the middle of 2015, but the news media are tiring of them and they are also fading away.
That said, I was about to send a completely legit email yesterday that had the keywords "pipe bomb", "suicide vest", "IED", "Al-Qaeda" and "Mali" in it (a friend just lost two of his men in Mali), but I decided to self-censor for the benefit of the recipient rather than myself.
[0] ISIS was technically announced at the end of April, but they were not well known and the page was just a stub. It fell below threshold for collecting page view stats.
I read your comment half-way, then upvoted it. I mentally prepared a response with further arguments against the size of the chilling effect. Then I read the rest of your reply and saw all the keywords. "Oh no", I thought, "I showed my engagement with this post by upvoting it!"
Needless to say, I don't feel like arguing against the chilling effect anymore.
> My conclusion, traffic is probably changing due to what is in the news rather than anything else.
I appreciate you throwing some data for a few keywords together in your comment, but you'll excuse me if I lean toward trusting the published paper instead.
I did after your comment lead me to it! There's more than one thing that's funny about it. Is it the word 'cybercode'? The man 'near' it, whatever that means? Or the nonsensical photo? Great stuff. They should have left out the caption for their own good.
Most illuminating is how this documented chilling effect can be used,
"Penney’s work may provide fodder for technology companies and others arguing for greater restraint and disclosure about intelligence-gathering. Chilling effects are notoriously difficult to document and so have limited impact on laws and court rulings.
More immediately, the research could aid a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Wikipedia’s nonprofit parent organization and other groups against the NSA and the Justice Department."
A study over a long period of time on many articles helps avoid the noise of news.
This is a good start and I hope it will encourage additional studies into the chilling effect of mass surveillance. The only previous study that I have read is from Germany, and it looked at the effect from the then new Data Retention Directive. That survey showed that people would start refraining from calling help-lines, lawyers, doctors and priests as a direct result of mass surveillance.
I would need to read the paper to be sure, but from what I gathered a simpler SEO explanation hasn't been given.
With the Snowden leaks each and every media outlet started publishing reports on those topic. That means that the Google SERPs of relevant keywords started to be clogged by relevant articles and editorial contents that displaced Wikipedia entries from the first positions. I've done my share of editorial SEO stuff during the last few years and I've seen that happen many times for even smaller events.
A more meaningful way of testing this would have been to have a similar sampling of entries from another topic to test against the key group. Maybe that's in the paper, we'll see when it's out. Still, the numbers are consistent with the fluctuation of positioning in Google results.
> suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary pursuit of information
... while they might be wrong about the cause (which is important of course), you could argue that the consequence remains the same; that depends on whether the articles and editorial are good replacements content-wise.
Perhaps related: The number of "VPN privacy services" has increased greatly since mid 2013. And I've heard informally that subscriptions have increased dramatically for some older services.
One might think that Tor usage would also have increased. However, a large botnet installed Tor in late 2013, so user counts since then are entirely unreliable.
All I see are governments creating a vast global market for encryption of EVERYTHING. The more people feel threatened, and react through encryption, matters start to become really difficult if you want to spy on anyone.
You can read Wikipedia articles without letting them know which article you're reading by downloading the database dump of Wikipedia, which can be obtained at dumps.wikimedia.org.
I do not feel comfortable about expressing my views about American security policy. Sure I say whatever here, but I planned on demonstrating outside the American embassy here in Norway, but I decided it was too risky. It has been uncovered that the American embassy films and photographs all demonstrators. I travel frequently to the US because I am married to an American and because of work. I don't want to risk getting on some secret list and getting problems when visiting the US.
And let me tell you there is nothing I dread more than American border authorities. They are the worst of any country I have visited. My university or american authorities made some mistake when I left the US after a masters study. I got all sorts of shit because of that years afterwards on every visit. I got interrogated for probably an hour with all the same stupid questions repeated again and again. It didn't matter that I thought the issue got cleared up the first time. It was back to square one the next visit, while my wife and kids had to wait a long time not knowing what was going on.
And that is just me, but I have so many friends and acquaintances with horror stories, some who swear they will never come back to the US due to their treatment. One guy was dragged into interrogation because he didn't keep his finger too long on the fingerprint reader.
I got a friend in the neighborhood who happens to be brown. That is not a safe color in the US, because that is the terrorist color. He isn't a muslim and have been living in Norway the last 15 years. But no the border guards just started hurling accusations of him being a terrorist and that he was plotting something in the US, seemingly just throwing anything at him to see what would stick or get him off his balance.
Like most Norwegians he travels on vacation all over the world a lot. Yet somehow this kind of shit only seems to happen in the US.
You know how they operate in the US. As a foreigner I have no rights in the US, as is also evident from how they view collection about data about non-americans. So I don't want to risk anything that will get me in serious trouble.
I can tell Americans are affected to. When my wife talks about Snowden with her family in America they get all nervous. They think it isn't something one should talk about. They got very upset when she used encrypted email and said that would get her targeted by NSA.
It is all sad because I would have liked to live some years with the family in the US. It is a country which has a lot to offer. But police state feeling of the US is just creepy. It puzzles me that American are not more aware of the problem. How can so many be so convinced that America is a country with so much freedom. People kept parroting this to me when I lived there, but it was the lack of freedom that made me leave.
This makes me wonder. On occasion, I have read the IS magazine "Dabiq" just to get some sort of insight into their messed up thinking (I think the CIA actually mirror the files!) As horrible as it is to say, I assumed because I was a white atheist this would be entirely fine and this explanation would wash should it somehow ever come up. If I was a Muslim though I wouldn't dare read it.
This is more a sign of the power of the media than anything else. The media is looking for a story. There's very little that's compelling out there. Terrorism keeps popping up because it gets clicks. Soon enough there will be another Kardashian or another Adrian Peterson to take the collective mind on to the next distraction.
It has certainly enraged me, but while I might rail more against the surveillance state online anonymously I find myself much more careful in the public space.
"I fear that if I use the wrong words or visit the wrong websites, I'll trigger some automated system and will be put on some kind of watch list that will change my life"
I'm afraid you've got caught up in a modern-day hysteria. Nobody is watching you or cares anything about what text messages you type or websites you visit.
Thats just simply not true. There are automated systems doing precisely this kind of tracking. Did you not dig into the Snowden revelations and see just how bad it is?
Because, its really, really bad. No, I do not want my data in some secret government organizations' computer systems, for secret analysis. Ever. It may not be of consequence to the current administration, but do we really want Trump to have the power that the NSA grants? Clinton? Do we really want anyone with that power?
I think the biggest problem with the Snowden revelations is that, even now years after the fact, people don't seem to understand just how corrupt and how crippling the NSA security apparatus is, truly. Dig into the details and you will see that one of the most technologically advances tools of mass oppression is now upon us - and not just 'upon us', actually - but has been in operation now for over two decades.
Just what effect it has had, we will never know. Maybe there are people who have been spirited away, detected by this system as the rising new radicals that will upset the apple-cart, and we have absolutely no idea who or what they were. Do you really trust the religious zealots in power over this machinery to use it appropriately? Really? Then you are a huge part of the problem.
There seems to be a wholescale hysterical neurosis around the entire issue. The narrative on HackerNews is that every piece of electronic communication is monitored and stored. The majority of HackerNews contributors actually believe this.
It's not that wild when you read history about US government actions towards foreign/domestic organisations/individuals they deem have strayed to a point of challenging the status quo. The most obvious example is looking at how communism was treated post WW2. This I find amazing, not that I support communism, but that the government was so ready to act this way towards someones political choice, regardless of what that is. That's far from upholding democratic values.
So feeling this is a likely monitoring point seems a reasonable statement to me especially on any serious anti-authoritarian activity. As for evidence, that's always going to be a hard one, whether its happening or not.
[+] [-] mjfern|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
well, if you read Stanislav Lem, you'd immediately see that not using "wrong" words and not visiting "wrong" sites may also be a trigger - like "this guy is deliberately trying to stay under radar, why? what he is hiding/planning?" If you try to behave following average pattern for your demographics, you may trigger another one - "he is trying to blend in" :) You can't win that game for the simple reason that the game rules are decided upon strictly after your moves had already been made.
You see, the issue isn't extra collection of data by government - this is already lost cause due to technological progress, the main issue is the ability of government to oppress using that data, ie. absence of due process.
[+] [-] toomanythings2|10 years ago|reply
I encrypt everything and carry it all with me when I leave so no one knows what I've done. I make sure I muss up the trail behind me so I can't be tracked. If I get really spooked, I have a few drop off points where I can store material along with a change of clothes (though I probably shouldn't have said that here).
It's hard work but I know it's all worth it. I haven't seen, heard of, or had any problems since I started this. Not that I had any problems before. I just know that the only issue now is I haven't received my paycheck in months. I'm worried I may have slipped up somewhere and my funding is being re-directed elsewhere in an effort to find me.
But that will never happen.
[+] [-] stordoff|10 years ago|reply
That said, it is a terrible state of affairs, and I do completely understand the impulse to self-censor to avoid future issues. Likewise, I don't see a near-to-mid term solution - mass surveillance appears fairly entrenched, is not a single country issue (which would at least make it somewhat avoidable), and very few people even near positions of power seem to be addressing it adequately (or even see it as a problem).
[+] [-] 55555|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akerro|10 years ago|reply
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-c...
>Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now.
[+] [-] optforfon|10 years ago|reply
Look back at the US, my home country, I feel like a lot of people are on the off-the-grid-survivalist spectrum of paranoia. The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?
Anyways.. just a different perspective from the other side of the globe
[+] [-] awakeasleep|10 years ago|reply
Try and pay someone using Venmo and say Achmed or Cuba revolution. *(it's not just venmo)
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|10 years ago|reply
If their lists start to contain millions of people they become useless. They drown in noize. Well, let them drown.
[+] [-] eggman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user10001|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] slg|10 years ago|reply
I'm not saying there isn't a chilling effect, just that I am highly skeptical of this measurement of it. Wikipedia pages on these subjects are practically news articles. They are going to be pretty highly linked with whatever is going on in the world at the time. Considering that, I would fully expect terrorism searches to be high after a recent terrorist attack and to drop as terms like "Al Queda" become less newsworthy on a global scale.
[+] [-] garrettgrimsley|10 years ago|reply
0 results.
Putting quotes around shortly before makes it seem like you are drawing from the linked story, but you aren't. A quote that is actually from the article:
>In the 16 months prior to the first major Snowden stories in June 2013, the articles drew a variable but an increasing audience, with a low point of about 2.2 million per month rising to 3.0 million just before disclosures of the NSA's Internet spying programs. Views of the sensitive pages rapidly fell back to 2.2 million a month in the next two months and later dipped under 2.0 million before stabilizing below 2.5 million 14 months later, Penney found.
They did not use the day or week of the Boston Bombing as their baseline. Don't misrepresent the research.
[+] [-] notahacker|10 years ago|reply
Reading the article I noted that an audience varying between 2.2 million to 3 million in the months before and 2.2 million to 2.5 million in the months after didn't look like a step change in user behaviour; the claimed "fall" was no bigger than the variance over the previous 12 months. And I think you've just explained why the monthly results peaked at 3 million in one of the months before.
I don't think the hypothesis is altogether implausible, but the evidence presented in the news article summary is less than compelling, particularly when this is the sort of research where researchers are at liberty to cherry pick their results.
In the absence of the actual paper, here's the underlying Google trends https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=al%20qaeda https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=terrorism https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=bombing
Clearly (i) the hypothesised step change in user behaviour post-Snowden doesn't exist for global web searches (ii) there are a lot of spikes attributable to individual events, not least one in early 2013 and (iii) there's a trend decline in searches for terrorism starting over a decade ago
[+] [-] tn13|10 years ago|reply
My fear is that not just people who might be interested in Islam or middle east might get targeted but I am sure government will also target the Libertarians and anti-authoritarian people.
[+] [-] steve19|10 years ago|reply
Al-Qaeda / US Army / ISIS in January 2016
http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-Qaeda (~ 3k / day)
http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army# (~ 2.5k / day)
http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Islamic%20State%20of%20Iraq%2... ( ~15k / day)
Al-Qaeda / US Army / ISIS in May 2013 (before Snowden's revelations & before ISIS/ISIL was known in the West[0])
http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-Qaeda (~ 5.8k / day)
http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army# (~ 3.5k / day)
My conclusion, traffic is probably changing due to what is in the news rather than anything else. If the US Army is sent in to invade another country, their wikipedia page will be back on top.
ISIS was way higher last year, average about 25k/day in the middle of 2015, but the news media are tiring of them and they are also fading away.
That said, I was about to send a completely legit email yesterday that had the keywords "pipe bomb", "suicide vest", "IED", "Al-Qaeda" and "Mali" in it (a friend just lost two of his men in Mali), but I decided to self-censor for the benefit of the recipient rather than myself.
[0] ISIS was technically announced at the end of April, but they were not well known and the page was just a stub. It fell below threshold for collecting page view stats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Islamic_State_of_...
[+] [-] maho|10 years ago|reply
Needless to say, I don't feel like arguing against the chilling effect anymore.
[+] [-] atdt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machrider|10 years ago|reply
I appreciate you throwing some data for a few keywords together in your comment, but you'll excuse me if I lean toward trusting the published paper instead.
FWIW, paper is downloadable here (at least, for now): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645
[+] [-] jlubawy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxzero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] socceroos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobwaycott|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marricks|10 years ago|reply
"Penney’s work may provide fodder for technology companies and others arguing for greater restraint and disclosure about intelligence-gathering. Chilling effects are notoriously difficult to document and so have limited impact on laws and court rulings.
More immediately, the research could aid a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Wikipedia’s nonprofit parent organization and other groups against the NSA and the Justice Department."
A study over a long period of time on many articles helps avoid the noise of news.
[+] [-] belorn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camillomiller|10 years ago|reply
With the Snowden leaks each and every media outlet started publishing reports on those topic. That means that the Google SERPs of relevant keywords started to be clogged by relevant articles and editorial contents that displaced Wikipedia entries from the first positions. I've done my share of editorial SEO stuff during the last few years and I've seen that happen many times for even smaller events.
A more meaningful way of testing this would have been to have a similar sampling of entries from another topic to test against the key group. Maybe that's in the paper, we'll see when it's out. Still, the numbers are consistent with the fluctuation of positioning in Google results.
[+] [-] vanderZwan|10 years ago|reply
> suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary pursuit of information
... while they might be wrong about the cause (which is important of course), you could argue that the consequence remains the same; that depends on whether the articles and editorial are good replacements content-wise.
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
One might think that Tor usage would also have increased. However, a large botnet installed Tor in late 2013, so user counts since then are entirely unreliable.
[+] [-] Aelinsaar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sugarfactory|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jernfrost|10 years ago|reply
And let me tell you there is nothing I dread more than American border authorities. They are the worst of any country I have visited. My university or american authorities made some mistake when I left the US after a masters study. I got all sorts of shit because of that years afterwards on every visit. I got interrogated for probably an hour with all the same stupid questions repeated again and again. It didn't matter that I thought the issue got cleared up the first time. It was back to square one the next visit, while my wife and kids had to wait a long time not knowing what was going on.
And that is just me, but I have so many friends and acquaintances with horror stories, some who swear they will never come back to the US due to their treatment. One guy was dragged into interrogation because he didn't keep his finger too long on the fingerprint reader.
I got a friend in the neighborhood who happens to be brown. That is not a safe color in the US, because that is the terrorist color. He isn't a muslim and have been living in Norway the last 15 years. But no the border guards just started hurling accusations of him being a terrorist and that he was plotting something in the US, seemingly just throwing anything at him to see what would stick or get him off his balance.
Like most Norwegians he travels on vacation all over the world a lot. Yet somehow this kind of shit only seems to happen in the US.
You know how they operate in the US. As a foreigner I have no rights in the US, as is also evident from how they view collection about data about non-americans. So I don't want to risk anything that will get me in serious trouble.
I can tell Americans are affected to. When my wife talks about Snowden with her family in America they get all nervous. They think it isn't something one should talk about. They got very upset when she used encrypted email and said that would get her targeted by NSA.
It is all sad because I would have liked to live some years with the family in the US. It is a country which has a lot to offer. But police state feeling of the US is just creepy. It puzzles me that American are not more aware of the problem. How can so many be so convinced that America is a country with so much freedom. People kept parroting this to me when I lived there, but it was the lack of freedom that made me leave.
[+] [-] feintruled|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gratsby|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxzero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jernfrost|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
I'm afraid you've got caught up in a modern-day hysteria. Nobody is watching you or cares anything about what text messages you type or websites you visit.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fit2rule|10 years ago|reply
Because, its really, really bad. No, I do not want my data in some secret government organizations' computer systems, for secret analysis. Ever. It may not be of consequence to the current administration, but do we really want Trump to have the power that the NSA grants? Clinton? Do we really want anyone with that power?
I think the biggest problem with the Snowden revelations is that, even now years after the fact, people don't seem to understand just how corrupt and how crippling the NSA security apparatus is, truly. Dig into the details and you will see that one of the most technologically advances tools of mass oppression is now upon us - and not just 'upon us', actually - but has been in operation now for over two decades.
Just what effect it has had, we will never know. Maybe there are people who have been spirited away, detected by this system as the rising new radicals that will upset the apple-cart, and we have absolutely no idea who or what they were. Do you really trust the religious zealots in power over this machinery to use it appropriately? Really? Then you are a huge part of the problem.
[+] [-] hargup|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
This is a wild and extreme accusation with no evidence whatsoever. Welcome to HackerNews.
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|10 years ago|reply
Another surprising one people dont realise if the CIA probably organised the removal of an Australian Prime Minister because he wanted to take the nation to a more neutral standing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...
So feeling this is a likely monitoring point seems a reasonable statement to me especially on any serious anti-authoritarian activity. As for evidence, that's always going to be a hard one, whether its happening or not.
[+] [-] tn13|10 years ago|reply
More subtle propaganda is already in action too: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-...
[+] [-] PlzSnow|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]