Friday, April 29, 2016

New study shows mass surveillance breeds meekness, fear and self-censorship...

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. 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.” Full story...

Related posts:
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  2. Safe and Sorry – is mass surveillance making us safer?
  3. Julian Assange: they won - mass surveillance and spying is here to stay...
  4. Record of EVERY website you visit to be held for a year under new spying laws which...
  5. Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study...
  6. First they came for the iPhones...
  7. The whole POINT of the internet of things is so Big Brother can spy on you...
  8. The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy'
  9. German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens...
  10. US using 9/11 trauma to terrorize people...

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