Greenwald writes: "A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides
empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that
the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and
stifles free expression."
A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
01 May 16
A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence
for a kiy argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of
which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
to proper democratic debate."
As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study examined
Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
Internet."
The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for fear
of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can be
effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the tyranny
about which Orwell warned in 1984:
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became
instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in 2010,
the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
group's most famous publications.
What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support for
the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I included
links for how they could do so.
In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent revelations
showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
these fears were quite rational.
There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
empirical evidence proving it.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds
-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-s
tudy-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/
New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
01 May 16
newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence
for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence
of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free
expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning
described this phenomenon: "If we think that authorities are watching our
online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain
things just to avoid seeming suspicious."
The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of
which 87% of Americans were aware), there was "a 20 percent decline in page
views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that
mentioned 'al-Qaeda,' "car bomb' or 'Taliban.'" People were afraid to read
articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them
under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well
by Penney: "If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important
policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat
to proper democratic debate."
As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study examined
Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, "users were less
likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
trouble with the US government" and that these "results suggest that there
is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the
Internet."
The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory.
Ample evidence demonstrates that it's real - and rational. A study from PEN
America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of
fear of surveillance and showed that writers are "not only overwhelmingly
worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship
as a result." Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist
supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups,
while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for fear
of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who
believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant,
conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without
monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can be
effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it
possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can
never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act
as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling
effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the tyranny
about which Orwell warned in 1984:
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became
instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and,
except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I've been
arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of
privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful
dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in 2010,
the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the
group's most famous publications.
What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008
Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to
national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically
enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly
thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently,
it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support for
the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President:
since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its
founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital
transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate
waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in
Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource
shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous
leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my
readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I included
links for how they could do so.
In response, a large number of American readers expressed - in emails, in
the comment section, at public events - the fear to me that, while they
support WikiLeaks' work, they were petrified that supporting them would
cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with
crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security
threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily
relinquishing core civil liberties - the right to support journalism they
believe in and to politically organize - because of fear that their online
donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent revelations
showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters,
including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that
these fears were quite rational.
There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of
authority crave surveillance. It's precisely because the possibility of
being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior.
Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective
conformity. That's always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting
empirical evidence proving it.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
