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Researchers See a Post-Snowden Chilling Effect In Our Search Data
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "How risky is it to use the words "bomb," "plague," or "gun" online? That was a question we posed, tongue in cheek, with a web toy we built last year called Hello NSA. It offers users suggested tweets that use words that drawn from a list of watchwords that analysts at the Dept. of Homeland Security are instructed to search for on social media. "Stop holding my love hostage," one of the tweets read. "My emotions are like a tornado of fundamentalist wildfire." It was silly, but it was also imagined as an absurdist response to the absurdist ways that dragnet surveillance of the public and non-public Internet jars with our ideas of freedom of speech and privacy. And yet, after reading the mounting pile of NSA PowerPoints, are all of us as comfortable as we used to be Googling for a word like "anthrax," even if we were simply looking up our favorite thrash metal band? Maybe not. According to a new study of Google search trends, searches for terms deemed to be sensitive to government or privacy concerns have dropped "significantly" in the months since Edward Snowden's revelations in July."
When on the Cypherpunks list, there were people who had the usual search words in their signatures, as well as random generated sentences.
What likely will happen is that the usual wheat/chaff algorithm gets an iterative update on the spook side, and life will go on.
...then raise your dominant hand and slap yourself silly with it. Internalized chains are the hardest to break, and what the ruling class can't do any longer with religion they now do with plain old fear.
Suck my dirty bomb!
you know, for all of this, I did see two good things ... we (the united states) still don't have any prescriptive limitations on freedom of speech online, and the NSA did admit that they did need (procedurally, not technically) a search warrant to actually mine the data they collect.
It's almost as if the government's conduct can be discerned as a violation of our most basic human rights as guaranteed by the contract that allows said government to exist.
I just googled for homemade plague gun with bombs. We'll see what happens next.
Some people consider them the bomb. Those who are good at first posts have to be as fast as a bullet from a gun.
9/11 conspiracies are so last decade.
What happens in the forums during discussions like this? Basic moderation as I understand it doesn't explain it.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Let's not blow this out of proportion. Sure, it would be the bomb if the NSA stopped spying on everyone, as all this spying is a plague on our freedoms. But let's not burn any bridges here.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Why use http://nsa.motherboard.tv/ if you have m-x spook?
What if Google is just conveniently forgetting to log more of those terms so that they don't have to do as much work snooping on people? I mean, if you don't have as many terrorist suspects showing up on your search engine you surely wont have as many illegal search warrants to process.
Brilliant! The desired effect is achieved!
Remind me again, wasn't the Internet hailed as a game-changer that would bring people together, make us better human beings, or at least different.
Where is this profound change? It did not happen. Perhaps the optimists have underestimated people's distrust for the different? So, even though James and Ivan could chat while being 10000 miles away, and learn how for instance the media that feeds them is biased diametrically opposite, most of the time they didn't.
But just to make sure, you know just in case the impossible happened, all governments in the world made sure we won't talk with each other. Let me not recount the endless torrent of censorship all over the place across the whole world - this is /. after all. But in line with the topic, let me just remark - if I want to speak with someone from, say, an Arab country, to discuss the situation and gain the others side view - how many words we would use in the discussion that would be in those lists? Tens at least, I am sure. Now I have to be afraid of being flagged, and it is not paranoia - do you want to bet your ass in Gitmo that Buttle/Tuttle thing won't happen? @#$% that!
when UUCP was used to move mail and news, it was common to see signatures with things like 'NSA Fodder' followed by a long list of things that would get you in real trouble these days. /old, I am.
This was back in the 80's so this NSA snooping is nothing new, just rehashed and warmed over for a new generation of folks.
They will protect my right to free speech no matter what.
I can post all kinds of crap safely:
BOMB!
!%*!@$&!%!!!>>>>>
[NO CARRIER]
Because if someone thought you liked the band, that would be horrible.
Oh the embarrassment! On your permanent record, no less.
I've stopped searching on the word Constitutional.
Uranium-235
Uranium-238
Enriching Uranium
Plutonium-239
Caesium-137
Iodine-131
Cobalt-60
Strontium-90
Those are the ones I could think off the top of my head. Anyone want to add to the list?
Why a drop in certain search terms and not a drop in the actual companies infected with NSA-ware?
i lol'd. :D +1funny
google (et all) are the government's bitch.
they will do as they're told.
or else.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
searches for terms deemed to be sensitive to government or privacy concerns have dropped "significantly" in the months since Edward Snowden's revelations in July.
It is hard for me to find this shift to be acceptable. The government's oppressive surveillance must not lead to people changing the information they consume. That is the very epitome of cultural programming, the cost of which is far to great for our society to suffer.
I think we have a solution; decentralized distribution of the very kinds of information that is being chilled. Copies of Wikipedia, Eroid.org, The Anarchists Cookbook (OK, I'm dating myself, and showing my ignorance of modern anarchist material online, but whatever the modern equivalent of that book is), and similar materials, written to 16 Gig USB sticks, and available for purchase at your local hackerspace for $20. Pop it into your computer, and read whatever you want without the goverment spying on you. Maybe even make it a bootable distro, with networking disabled, so you can be truly locked down (except for airgap-jumping attacks, of course, but those are still pretty esoteric). Maybe call it "Thoughtcrime On A Stick". Hmm, actually, I like that name so much I'm grabbing the domain names.
Don't get me wrong, I don't relish the idea of making that sort of information more readily available; what peaceful minded person would? But if the alternative is chilling human knowledge, and the empirical evidence shows that it is already happening, what choice do I have?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Don't forget that regimes from North Korea and USA don't like their enslaved people having too much "search" freedom.
Whoever been lately to any US cities will be terrified by number of security forces everywhere. This is too ensure people don't gather in groups.
Any unhappiness and demonstrations are forbidden in the USA. Do you remember Afro-Americans or dock workers standing against bullets from the state security.
Now is even worse, balance has unfortunately tripped with no point of return. Lesson learned from North Korea are implemented everyday.
One day US and North Korea comrades will dance together on the graves of American people.
Post Snowden? Can we stop blaming the one guy that did the right thing for uncovering the mountain of shit our government had piled up for itself? He didn't even release it all, a lot of the revelations have come from FOIA requests!
It'd would be like calling "Post Woodward, Nixon was impeached" That Woodward jerk! How could he do such a thing!
I'm fairly certain this "Post Snowden" line was written wholesale by the NSA. Way to perpetuate propaganda Slashdot.
I for one have only increased my search phrases to include "fundamentalist terror victim shoves anthrax-laden biochemical warheads into buttocks to appeal to president obama porn"
Guys, if you don't want the NSA scanning your websites, just set up a robots.txt. Duh.
Fuck the government
Ovaltine
Mr and Mrs Thrax thought seriously and decided not to call their first daughter Ann.
This is why I keep my full 1992 set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia handy. Just incase I need to look up Anthrax, or Bomb or Detonator.
I can do it safely, without anyone knowing.
Or, one could go to the public library and look at the stuff in the Reference section, one cannot even check those books out! ..Or, just go to the regular stacks and read the books on-site, bring tracing paper for the diagrams.. oh man, there is a whole world of information outside of the internet! and the NSA subpenas
Someone set us up the... the ummm... hmmmm... the thing.
I recently considered getting back into model rocketry, but using more high-end rockets rather than little Estes kits. Since I've read plenty about rocket chemistry (read "Ignition!" if you like chemistry at all - it's worth it), I quickly figured out that a relatively easy* one to build would be a hydrogen peroxide monoprop - H2O2 decomposes into H2O + O2 in an exothermic manner, which can be used for thrust. It an also be used as an oxidizer with most fuels. For both you'll need high-strength peroxide - the CVS stuff is just a solution of like 1% H2O2 in H2O, but you'll want 80% or higher for rocketry. I decided to see how readily available it was, and how expensive it would be. It wasn't too expensive, and could be found fairly easily, but I wonder if I'm now on a watch list just for looking at a chemical that honestly wouldn't make a good terrorist weapon at all.
* This would be easy in comparison to, say, one using nitric acid or liquid oxygen. It would still be a very difficult thing to build, which is why I'm probably not going to actually build one.
you are _last decade_ or better, you are are a bloody nsa spook who put the thermite to the twin towers
Actually, the results here are important legally. One important persuasive argument in free speech cases is the chilling effect on speech. Empirical data showing that people do *not* engage in certain speech because of a government practice is useful for lawyers arguing against the illegality of those practices.
google (et all) are the government's bitch.
they will do as they're told.
or else.
Exactly. What if this is their way of conveniently getting out of having to do more work? "Oh look at that, our flags on anthrax bomb searches only turned up 50 people this month instead of 100, yay, half as much snooping to do!" Surely the more clandestine parts of Google's infrastructure would be so far from scrutiny that no one would have any way to tell if the flags only worked half the time.
This risks too much damage to their revenue model. If they were found to be doing this, one could reasonably suspect they were cooking the numbers on traffic as well.
Please explain then how the NSA got thermite, how the hell we missed blinding white light and holes burned though concrete, etc. And why there is a perfectly reasonable method to explain why the towers collapsed when you take into account the materials used in the construction and the temperature jet fuel burns along with the impact of planes knocking loose the fire-proofing?
I don't want to be flagged just because the latest OS from MS is a total bomb!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Nobody admits to searching for "Nickelback"
So, let me get this straight.
The same search engine we are actively not using, out of fear that someone is watching what we're searching, is used to run a search to generate a report to reveal what we are not searching for.
Uh, you know that chilling effect we're all talking about here? Yeah, that would be Mr. Don't-be-Evil over there...
and "Worship Music" is the best thing they've done since "Among The Living".
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The amount of benign references (or false positives) to sensitive terms in network traffic makes any surveillance less valuable without having a human parse through them all, which makes it more expensive. If the only people who search for sensitive terms are legitimately "bad people" then it places much more value on doing automated network traffic surveillance.
Listen, I'm not saying I"m the NSA employee that has to read through all this crap to see if its a real threat or not. What I am saying is that I'm sure whoever that person is, could be getting really pissed that they have to spend thier valuable time reading through your snide right-wing comments instead of trying to find real terrorists who are ruining our everything. "Whoever" that person is, may be wondering why they got an advanced degree in mathematics from Purdue just to read this crap. "That person" is probably really feeling under-valued having to read this jerk-off list of responses.
Just saying, its not me though. Really.
Oddly spook e-mail configs (to add random terms to generate false positives to big brother) were popular 20 years ago when there was almost no traffic and no reason for surveillance. They don't appear to exist now that there is a huge volume of e-mail and known government surveillance.
Rebellion is so much easier in the absence of repression.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Anybody remember the story in the past year where a family home was raided because one spouse searched for backpacks for kids while the other also searched for a pressure cooker for the kitchen? Yes they got raided. I've wanted to link that story to a few friends but frankly and quite honestly I am too scared of the government o actually try and search for it.
The current suite of equipment on the Traditional Media desk includes one Dell Optiplex GX620 workstation (232 GB HD/2MB RAM),...
To quote Chris Rock: "What? Huh? No! You don't say! ... I told you that bitch crazy!"
Please explain then how the NSA got thermite, how the hell we missed blinding white light and holes burned though concrete, etc. And why there is a perfectly reasonable method to explain why the towers collapsed when you take into account the materials used in the construction and the temperature jet fuel burns along with the impact of planes knocking loose the fire-proofing?
If anyone has access to thermite, its the government and the military (see military industrial complex) . The main support pillars were not open in the offices , they were hidden in the walls along with the elevators. Easy to miss blinding white light. Please explain why witnesses (fire fighters) saw molten iron / steel in the base of the twin towers after collapse.
I'm sorry but jet fuel DOES NOT burn at hot enough temperatures to weaken the steel. The fact that they put this down as the cause on the report is part of the conspiracy.
Get out of here paid cover up agent or sheeple.
For what wrong he has caused, more than you think, a certain lese majeste effect has surrounded him. People will try to disappear criticism, something that they think would happen to their idol.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
If there is no expectation of privacy, then there is no expectation of free speech. Snowden attempted to bring this discussion to the forefront of society. Unfortunately, some of the largest participants in these conversations are corporate and government entities with very specific ideas about that which they wish to accomplish. Sadly, those larger voices overpowered those that had a different opinion or flatly objected forcing them to retreat to the shadows or disappear entirely.
Taking some action is better than your suggestion of doing nothing. The best action would be to petition for people you know and trust, and get them into offices. Barring that, vote for people other than established politicians and change will begin to happen.
If you stop telling everyone they are wrong, and teach them to do _SOMETHING_ then things overall can improve. It's shitbags like you claiming that no action is the answer. How well has that worked out for people over the last 3 decades of shit ass politicians? Yeah, I thought so.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
...who are ruining our everything.
Those who would take our freedoms are the ones who are "ruining our everything." Those engaged in asymmetric warfare (including terror techniques) are definitely a concern. However, we've compromised our ideals (liberty, freedom of expression, freedom from government intrusion into the practice of our belief systems, etc., etc., etc.) with the focus on that small group, by allowing the government to intrude on our lives, our persons and our ideas.
You're still more likely to be killed by lightning than in violent attack against the general populace. You're many, many times more likely to die in or by an automobile than in such an attack. Strange that we're not allocating our resources to fit the probability of such occurrences.
That leads me to believe that the agenda of those engaged in curtailing our liberty is not one of preventing such attacks, but something else. What is that something else? A good question. It's possible that there is a nefarious plot to destroy our way of life (which, if true, is succeeding). However, I think Hanlon's Razor should be applied here.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?"
- George Orwell, 1984
Oh, right, the tinfoil demographic that characterizes Slashdot won't laugh because it plays right to their biases. When that happens, Slashdot's usual capacity for at least a little more critical thinking than the average Joe goes right out the window and the Two Minute Hate commences.
Seriously, the 'study' verges on being joke. The words used were determined to be "sensitive" based on whether or not a bunch of random people would be "embarrassed" or thought "it would get them in trouble" - about as unscientific as you can get. Further, the drop is miniscule, 2.2% below what would be "expected" (and thus presuming their expectations were correct rather than pulled from their ass). Lastly, since we have no idea who was performing the searches in the first place, there's no way to determine if the minor effect has been "chilling" - or "deterrent".
u mad, world, srsly umad?
haha it's not really a gun it's fake!!!!oneone
Pretty much anything can melt steel if there is enough of the stuff burning and nowhere the heat can escape. In building fires the burn gases will catch fire at some point. They burn easily as hot as 1000 degrees celcius in a normal small house fire. Several offices worth of crap plus an airliner wreck burning will collapse a steel structured building with ease. Steel will weaken at 500 degrees celcius. Melt at around 1300. The molten crap firefighters saw could have been anything. It's not like they went to examine it in detail. Or even could tell the difference between steel, iron, or any other metal. It's all a HUGE mess after a fire. For example, my bicycles steel frame was barely recognizable.
Any light during a fire that big would not have been paid any attention to. Visibility is generally really, really low. Smoke blocks everything. You are lucky to see a couple of feet into it, no matter how bright the things inside burn.
It's basically a book you are trying to spread. How much were the cheapest readers nowdays? Not to put down any hackerist dreams of distributing Raspis all around.. but.. you could include a screen while you are dreaming it up.
It is called auto censure, effect very well known to anybody from behind the iron curtain :/ Enjoy.
I just googled for homemade plague gun with bombs. We'll see what happens next.
A month from now you'll be looking proudly at the one in your yard going "Well I'll be damned"
obama thinks the 4th amendment is very useful as a piece of toilet paper apparently
And while the world cowers and censors themselves it makes the NSA's job easier.
Game over.
According to this article:
Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1500F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800 it is probably at less than 10 percent."
----
I'm sorry, but jet fuel DOES burn at hot enough temperatures to weaken the steel.