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Fearing Government Surveillance, US Journalists Are Self-Censoring
binarstu writes "Suzanne Nossel, writing for CNN, reports that 'a survey of American writers done in October revealed that nearly one in four has self-censored for fear of government surveillance. They fessed up to curbing their research, not accepting certain assignments, even not discussing certain topics on the phone or via e-mail for fear of being targeted. The subjects they are avoiding are no surprise — mostly matters to do with the Middle East, the military and terrorism.' Yet ordinary Americans, for the most part, seem not to care: 'Surveillance so intrusive it is putting certain subjects out of bounds would seem like cause for alarm in a country that prides itself as the world's most free. Americans have long protested the persecution and constraints on journalists and writers living under repressive regimes abroad, yet many seem ready to accept these new encroachments on their freedom at home.'"
Continuing to believe that is a sign you're delusional, not 'free'.
... but their actions tend to contradict what they say.
Torture and the taking of political prisoners are touted as flaws of third world dictatorships and communists v. waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay and attempts to arrest Snowden and others who have taken a political stance they don't like.
The other three out of four were too fearful of their survey answers being logged by the NSA...
Tell them to come to the UK and they can see _real_ journalism in action.
In America, you have Ferengi style capitalism and call it "freedom".
In the UK, we are certainly not perfect, but we also have capitalism, but with a social conscience, because we understand that in the long run, our way of doing things leads to more freedom for a greater number of people
We also have a habit of telling people who would harm us to go and procreate with themselves. In America, a few thousand people are sadly killed and you cower in terror and throw away everything which made you so respected.
In the UK, we have 7/7/2005 and then the citizens of London rode the tube in a large display of defiance sending a giant f***-you to the terrorists. Your journalists need to come over here and experience _our_ way of life.
Oh, and Edward Snowden, a true American hero, trusted a _British_ newspaper to reveal the truth.
That fact makes me proud to be British.
Maybe if the so-called press had done their job in the the first place over the last 20 years we would be in this mess.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Man, this is some [GOOD NEWS]. I hope congress quits [WORKING TOO HARD FOR THEIR OWN GOOD], pulls their [HARD WORK AND COURAGE] out of their own [LOVE FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE] and finally [TAKES THAT PAID VACATION THEY ALL WELL DESERVE].
When my father was a Luftwaffe Soldier/POW in US custody, he saw a German POW's foot being overrun by a US Army (or Army Air Force) truck on purpose. "To make the POW confess the killing of a downed US airman.
So, torture is NOT new for U.S. forces.
By voting for which party in our political duopoly? The whole American political system is a mess because with the two entrenched parties, there is almost no ballot space for new ideas.
Yet ordinary Americans, for the most part, seem not to care...
It may only seem that way. Ordinary Americans are worried about suveillance too.
I'm even wondering if I should post this comment anonymously.
Proverbs 21:19
nearly one in four has self-censored for fear of government surveillance
That's not exactly what the report said, and I'm just skimming the thing here.
http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Chilling%20Effects_PEN%20American.pdf
28% have curtailed or avoided social media activities, and another 12% have seriously considered doing so;
24% have deliberately avoided certain topics in phone or email conversations, and another 9% have seriously considered it;
16% have avoided writing or speaking about a particular topic, and another 11% have seriously considered it;
16% have refrained from conducting Internet searches or visiting websites on topics that may be considered controversial or suspicious, and another 12% have seriously considered it;
13% have taken extra steps to disguise or cover their digital footprints, and another 11% have seriously considered it;
3% have declined opportunities to meet (in person, or electronically) people who might be deemed security threats by the government, and another 4% have seriously considered it.
Boiled down: about one-third of the American press are chickens, about two-thirds are not.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It is too easy to eavesdrop on communication. There is no way to avoid it happening, whether by corporation, the government, or a criminal gang.
We could decide to keep ourselves safe by self-censorship and accept the loss of freedom of speech. Or, we can continue to act normally. If the government has to contend with 0.1% of the population who are loud malcontents, the malcontents have a problem. If the government has to deal with 90% of the population who are loud malcontents, the government has a problem. They can't put us all in jail or shoot us.
I'll be damned if I let freedom of speech slip away. We didn't get it because of government benevolence (see The Old Issue by Kipling), and we won't keep it by being timid.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
And the fascist corporatists need the police state to ensure the continued vassalage of the underclass.
I'll take Bob LaFollette or FDR over Mussolini any time.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Once again, you're plowing your way though the comments with a reckless lack of perspective. There's no need to run a police state in order to institute universal healthcare, expand education programs, or build on welfare mechanisms. Nor does running a progressive agenda inevitably give way to the construction of a police state. There is nothing inextricable about the two ideas, and as usual, you don't even attempt to back up your flamebaiting claim. Knock it off.
It's always confirmation bias!
"The world's most free" ?? That is a joke. If and when the journalists of a country - the journalists, for crying out loud - stop to mention certain topics on the phone because their government might be interested in the conversation, then that country is by all standards modern NOT free.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
He's not talking about the politicians, he's talking about the journalists themselves (who only skew public opinion, rather than shaping public policy.)
sig: sauer
And then "conservatives" like you claim to want a small government but then turn around and regulate a woman's body and people's sexual preferences with an iron fist. Your "less powerful government" would simply push the poor off a cliff so that the idle rich can buy a more influence over the government.
C'mon man. Nixon is long gone. It's silly to even give him some of the blame. You should always be blaming the people who continue it and refuse to exercise the power to stop it. Stop living in the past.
If your statement were true then Germany, Norway, Belgium, and lots of other countries would be police states. If you want to argue for smaller government you're doing it wrong.
Developers: We can use your help.
It just kills me that those in power with their jingoistic cries of "they hate our freedom" are the ones stripping us of our freedom. It kills me even more that we, as a nation, keep electing them. It's as if we are actively doing this to ourselves.
We THOUGHT we were voting for a new FDR in 2008.
Dude, who is this "we" you speak of? If you voted for Obama thinking he was FDR, what was it you were smoking in 2008, 'cause I'd like to partake in some of that now. Obama was an obvious tool in 2008. Were you reading his campaign material instead of following his votes in the Senate around Iraq, Afghanistan, FISA?
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
By voting for which party in our political duopoly? The whole American political system is a mess because with the two entrenched parties, there is almost no ballot space for new ideas.
Do something to create that ballot space then! We're working hard to create ballot space for Pirate Parties here in Europe so you're not alone in the fight.
Uhhhh, you seem to be putting the cart before the horse. The UN didn't cause the US to take an anti-drug stance. It was the US that coerced the rest of the world to go along with this "War on Drugs" thing. Don't blame this fiasco on the UN, it's all of our own making.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
News flash: We do not have a black president. We have a half-white president, who was groomed and approved of by the entrenched party.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When I was growing up we were told some of the reasons the Soviets were so terrible is because people could not travel without "their papers", the Soviet government spied on its own citizens, the Soviets put people in secret prisons, the Soviets put people in prison without trial. Sounds a lot like the USA today. In the USA today these bad things seem mostly to be limited to "special circumstances", but they set a scary precedent. There are many great things about the USA, but pretending the bad stuff doesn't exist doesn't help the country, it undermines it.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
When my father was a Luftwaffe Soldier/POW in US custody, he saw a German POW's foot being overrun by a US Army (or Army Air Force) truck on purpose. "To make the POW confess the killing of a downed US airman.
So, torture is NOT new for U.S. forces.
That is the point of the reference though. Killing and torture happen frequently in theaters of war, unfortunately. Even though torture is a very old practice in human culture, the US has been demonstrably exceptional in refusing to endorse (and actually condemning) the practice as policy.
What the prior comment was highlighting, and what is only implied if you did not follow US policy from 2001 to now, is that such action has basically received official endorsement at the highest levels of government as a necessary method for "gathering intelligence" or whatever it was they made up at the time. That is a huge change from the period between 1791-2001.
When was America free? In the past, plenty of groups that didn't include white men didn't have very many rights. Even in the past, the government violated the constitution and discarded people's rights to supposedly keep them safe. I agree that there are some very serious problems at the moment, but I'm not sure America was ever truly the bastion of freedom that some people seem to think it was.
Do you mean to imply that Robert LaFollette was a Fascist? That's tantamount to calling Dick Cheney a Maoist.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Yet ordinary Americans, for the most part, seem not to care: 'Surveillance so intrusive it is putting certain subjects out of bounds would seem like cause for alarm in a country that prides itself as the world's most free.
America, land of the free, home of the brave.. Inviting every Tom, Dick and Harry from all corners of the globe to come join America's way of life wasn't such a good thing afterall. It has politicians back peddling like crazy to shore up the borders now. Now that we have clearly let some of those who would love to destroy America move on in.. Why is everyone so surprised by the survellance taking place now being that we are really threatened by these unknown foreigners emigrating and raising their children to hate America?
Uh, why are you so worried about foreigners? Because they aren't the ones passing "laws" giving themselves the right to arrest you without charges, imprison you indefinitely without due process, torture you, violate your right to be free from unlawful search and seizure, prevent you from exercising your rights to free speech and petitioning the government for redress of grievances, etc. etc. etc.
Really, dude, if you're worried about people who want to "destroy America," you should be paying more attention to DC and Wall Street than Ellis Island.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Such links are drawn using logic like.. Hillary Clinton believes in educating children. Also Fascists believe in educating children. Therefore...
Nixon first used the phrase, "War on Drugs". According to wikipedia, "The CSA did not only combine existing federal drug laws but it also changed the nature of federal drug law policies, expanded the scope of federal drug laws and expanded Federal law enforcement as pertaining to controlled substances."
Consider Paragraph 811 "Authority and criteria for classification of substances" of the Controlled Substances Act, written by Nixon's Attorney General, which says, in part:
Thus, US law is subservient to UN drug policies.
Stalin killed 50 million of his own citizens. That's a pretty big step up from what's going on in the US.
So until Obama kills 50 million US citizens, nobody can complain about the US government, is that it?
The US has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the entire world -- and by a landslide. Either there is vastly more crime in the US than anywhere else in the world, or the system has been rigged to enrich the power elite at the expense of the common man.
Granted, incarceration is a step below murder, but the end result is the same for a man who deserves neither: x number of years of your life have been stolen from you, by way of violence (physical force).
We THOUGHT we were voting for a new FDR in 2008. What we GOT was a new Calvin Coolidge.
A little weak on your history, aren't you? We thought we were getting an FDR but we got... well, not Coolidge, that would be Bush (and if McCain had won, he would have been Hoover). I'd say we wanted FDR and got Jimmy Carter.
I mean, really, do you believe for a second Coolidge would have signed the ACA?
Free Martian Whores!
Of course it's an ideology. The ideology is: I don't do drugs, therefore I will make laws so that you don't either. It is as authoritarian as anything.
Your inability to recognize the authoritarianism of those you support bespeaks cognitive dissonance.
We need to strip government of unneeded power and put ourselves back into proper Constitutional governance. The problem is, progressives need the power of the Police State to enforce their progressive policies. But they are the first ones that complain about the police state.
First of all, don't conflate the Democrats with progressives, we don't have a progressive party in the US. Second, US conservatives are just as (or more) authoritarian as it's so-called liberals. Don't get me wrong, I'm no longer a fan of Obama but Romney would have been no better. Second, look at all the votes for the Patriot Act in 2001 and 2006: the overwhelming majority of nay votes (and those abstaining) were Democrats. Third, who is passing all the laws requiring women to be vaginally probed before they can get an abortion? Who wants to force their religious values on others? Etc... The Republicans want just as big of a police state as the Democrats, they only have a couple of minor differences on what to enforce. The NSA has been with us for a long time, through multiple power shifts and no one has reigned it in.
In summary. The US does not have a party that is "left of center." Democrats suck. Republicans suck more.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.