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Writers Say They Feel Censored By Surveillance
schwit1 writes with news about the impact of government surveillance on authors and their work worldwide . A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result. The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as "free," 84 percent in "partly free" countries, and 80 percent in countries that were "not free" said that they were "very" or "somewhat" worried about government surveillance in their countries. The survey, which will be released Monday, was conducted anonymously online in fall 2014 and yielded 772 responses from fiction and nonfiction writers and related professionals, including translators and editors, in 50 countries.
It's working exactly as it should. People are learning to restrain themselves out of fear. Soon nobody will dare challenge the system. Victory is ours!
I'm not a professional writer/journalist/etc., but as a normal U.S. citizen, and *especially* after 9/11/2001, I have felt like certain topics must be tread upon very carefully when conversing with others online. My own Facebook posts, comments and even "liking" something that might be considered contreversial seemingly spawns a new process in my brain that wants to ask the question, "Should I really?"
This is probably the most powerful aspect of a surveilled people. If you want to control minds and mouths, you make them hesitant to speak or even think thoughts that might be viewed by others as risky. When people feel constantly judged, whether its by thoughts written, spoken or simply within their own minds, you have them "under control".
So what's the answer, then? IMHO people simply need more courage to say, 'Fuck you, I don't care what you think of me' because they are brave enough to stand up for themselves (and others). Once this mentality is in place, people start being normal again. Genuine, caring, loving and unjudgemental. Maybe the people who search XKEYSCORE will have to start to understand that peoples' words don't necessarily reflect future actions.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Your naivety is cute. And yes, that's meant to be demeaning.
The problem with the current level of surveillance is not that the current government can or will use it for "Evil"
The problem is that everything you do. Everything you say. Hell, everything you think but don't say but can be gleaned from your Internet searches... is being recorded, all the time, and will be stored forever.
Lets say you're an avid Gun rights advocate. And you write to your friends about how asault rifles should be legal. Then lets say 20yrs pass by and public opinion takes a radical turn... There are some terrorist attacks or something... Guns become not just heavily regulated but the entire idea of suggesting guns should be unrestricted suggests that you support whomever perpetrated the afore mentioned terrorist attacks... and all your communications are still in that database... You try to get a government job... you try and run for office... you want to get health insurance... But you're blacklisted everywhere.
Sound far fetched? This is exactly what happened in the McCarthy trials. Those people didn't attend secret communist meetings and plan to overthrow the government. When the idea of communism started to get popular it was a new and interesting political ideology. Lots of people attended meetings. There was a lot of discussion, both good and bad. You could see your neighbor who'd ask where you were headed and say "Oh, Johns throwing a party and going to tell us all about communism, want to come?" and that would not have been weird. But... there were records of all that... A few years passed by, and communism became the enemy of freedom. Suddenly people started looking up all those old logs... Who attended those meetings? Who supported that subversive ideology?!?!
If everything you do, all day, every day, is recorded. Eventually some of it will become the new enemy of the people or illegal, or who knows what. It is impossible to live your life without eventually saying something that will one day become horribly offensive or even outright illegal. This is also why 24/7 tracking of your driving habits or any other thing is a bad. You can not get through a day without committing a felony. If the government or anyone else has the ability to troll through everything you say and do every second of your life they will invariably be able to find something to hang you with. This is why the justice system requires a complaint accompanied by evidence before authorities area allowed to search your person. Because if they were allowed to search your person in search of evidence of a crime before suspicion, they would always find something.
It's passive-aggressive form of censorship, but freedom of expression is stifled all the same.
Especially seeing that that was the goal of the surveillance, not an unintended side effect.
... the best way to do it is to get to know some of those extremists to understand their ISLAM OR DIE pov
And in order to get to know those Islamic extremists I need to go to some of those Islamic extremism sites and start posting
Under present circumstance, if I were to do that, automatically I am under the radar of the so-called 'security agency' and everything I do, online or off, will be monitored
How many writers that you know would want to go through all that troubles in the first place?