Gosh and Golly Gee! Does it really take an empirical study to confirm
something we already know? I remember one of my Social Psych classes
talked about Empirical Findings that proved marriage is more apt to
occur among people living in close proximity to one another.
Do you think?
I suppose that empirical studies are one way of causing people to
pause and think about those forces that control our lives. Maybe we
Americans are too busy these days, running madly on the Treadmill of
Life, just trying to stay even, to find time to pause and question
some of the weird pressures that mold our society.
Intimidation is the cornerstone in a government's program of
population control. That is true because intimidation is used across
our Land as a basic tool. Parents intimidate their young with threats
of corporal punishment if they behave outside their family's norms.
The boss intimidates us by holding the power to fire us if we fail to
follow his business policies. God will punish us if we fail to
worship him. And of course, every denomination has the inside word on
just how that worship must be conducted. To do otherwise will bring
eternal Fire and Brimstone.
My elder sister learned at a very early age that she could control her
little brother and sister by threatening to tattle about some misdeed
or other that we'd done.
An even better example was the reaction of the employees, once my
friends and co-workers, when I was actively attempting to organize the
factory where I worked. The word went out that anyone thinking that
they were going to have a union in their future, would be pounding the
pavement looking for another job. Out of about 120 employees, only
five of us had the nerve to stand against the intimidation by the
boss.
When I told my Pastor that I was not only leaving my wife of ten
years, but that I was also leaving religion, because I no longer
feared the wrath of a God whom I no longer believed existed, my pastor
wept shamelessly. He begged me to reconsider, because he did not want
to see me burn in Hell. But I told him that Hell was a place I no
longer believed existed. This Man of God honestly believed Satan had
taken control of my life. But in fact, from where I saw things, it
was he, my pastor, who was controlled by intimidation. But because he
did not dare to challenge the belief that had been pounded into his
brain, he would never see how thoroughly his life was controlled by
fear and intimidation.
For sure, in the years that followed my dismissal of God, I have found
myself confronted by intimidation. Each time I felt that pressure, I
had to weigh the pros and cons, and decide if I could stand against
it, or if I was in a better place by accepting it.
But in "going along", I vowed to never violate one of my basic values.
But of course I could not know if I was violating my basic values, or
not, if I had not slowed down and thought about them.
We are encouraged by our fast paced society, to focus our attention
outward, rather than looking within. But unless we question every
action or belief, we can never be sure, never really know what is
driving us.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
