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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.
When I took an airplane flight to Las Vegas a few years ago, I left my laptop at home and took a notebook with me for writing. Although a notebook can be confiscated and read by the police, you have more constitutional rights with dead-tree data than digital data.
I understand the sarcasm, but there are tons of other ways that cause self-censorship:
1: Religious extremists. Salman Rushdie. Enough said.
2: The fact that one's future in a lot of lines of work can hang on what one has written. There are quite a number of businesses who snoop on people's FB pages, and regardless of settings, can get both private messages, wall, group posts, and other items... then present it to a user. Slashdot had a post about this a year or two ago about a private message about "press '1' for English" being enough to flag someone as "racist" and thus cause them to not be able to be hired.
3: The fact that there are LEOs out there, domestic and foreign, looking at posts and will happily use that as grounds for arrest. Not just LEOs of one country. With extradition treaties, handing out church bulletins or a picture posts of eating a BLT can be grounds for being arrested, hauled to Saudi Arabia and burned/beheaded. A good example of this are the Aussies and New Zealanders who committed no crimes domestically, but are shipped across the pond to face trial for crimes in another country. It only is a matter of time before this reverses, and someone who makes fun of the Thailand royalty in the US gets shipped over there for lese majeste violations, as per the signed and ratified extradition treaties.
4: Extradition treaties aside, one can be arrested when they set foot in another country for something they wrote years to decades ago.
5: A major complaint against some big companies almost always results in a "pay for this to be retracted in every national newspaper or expect to be sued into the ground" notice. They have the battalions of lawyers to make this actually work.
6: On a smaller scale, even a one star Yelp review can result in lawsuits. They don't even have to have merit... a place can file until a judge smacks them with a vexatious litigant tag... and this can cause the guy who had poor service to be ruined completely.
7: The local gangs. Someone mentions a local gang on social media, it can get back to the shot caller pretty quickly, who can do a reply with a drive-by.
I'm not a professional writer, but I think this age of social networking must have a chilling effect on speech, even if you discount government surveillance. I personally have become very careful about what I say online, and I'm not eager to have my real name associated with anything I do say. I've had someone (who was sort of a friend) pick up on the wording of some random innocuous Facebook post, interpret it in a way that made it sound misogynous, and then harass me and badmouth me on Facebook. I've had stuff like that happen a few times.
It also makes me think of another incident, and I'm just glad I was using an account that was unconnected to any of my personal accounts. I was talking on a public web forum, and voiced an opinion to the effect of, "even child abusers deserve due process." Another anonymous user responded claiming that the only reason I would say something like that is if I were a child molester myself. I didn't think much of it, because who cares, right? By the time 24 hours had passed, I had 50 messages in my Inbox from different people, yelling at me for for being a child molester and threatening to track me down. This was literally based on nothing except a random comment in favor of following the law, which was interpreted as being sympathetic to child abuse.
Now, it might sound like I'm just a complete asshole who says terrible things, and then gets upset when people don't like them. And yeah, every once in a while I do get pretty aggressive in arguments, but I don't think it's too bad. I suppose you can look at my post history and judge for yourself, since I don't censor myself too much on this site. I've had a few people attack me a bit on Slashdot for things that I thought were pretty innocuous posts, but oddly nothing as aggressive and offensive as some of the attacks I've gotten on Facebook from supposed friends, so I'm not very careful here. However, I have had someone get annoyed with me and use some kind of bot to mod down every single post that I made.
But speaking less about myself, and getting back to the point, I'm worried about the effect these kinds of things have on communication. We've developed a mode of communication where we can talk to each other and publish our thoughts very easily, but meanwhile we've fostered a culture around that communication that's very aggressive. Everyone's picking apart everything you say, looking for a way to be harsh and critical. You have reddit and 4chan lynch mobs trying to find and punish people without having their facts straight. Public figures are being brought to disgrace due to personal communications they thought were private-- which isn't always so bad, but also isn't always productive.
I don't know. I feel it. If you gave everyone free access to all of my communications, I would honestly not be worried about my friends or family or the government reading it, as much as I'd be worried about the masses to stupid people who might take offense to something that isn't a real problem and isn't any of their business. When I post something publicly on purpose, my biggest concern is that someone I barely know will find some meaning in some little throw-away phrase, take it completely out of context, and use it as a basis as some kind of crazy vendetta.
Wasn't it the same thing then, with the Red Scare? Hollywood saw it's blacklisting of suspected communists, nevermind actual validation of those accused. I'm sure the 'pen' community treaded carefully then, possibly more so than now. With the age of information we're in, I'd argue the 'Streisand Effect' would guaruntee a certain measure of success, counter to any fears one may have about given content. Unless you were actively tied to a specific event, terrorism... beyond that of a guilty media verdict, I'd venture it's far safer now than ever to push the envelope.
its referred to as 'the chilling effect' and actions like the edward snowden witch hunt and warrantless detention of journalists in the UK are performed intentionally in order to ensure it remains an effective tool of the state. The things you write about, including the things you research, have enormous consequences. Become too curious about government policies and procedures? The government will have you quietly added to a secret list of people who cannot fly on a plane without meaningless scrutiny. Write a book on how to defeat pseudoscience like polygraph tests? You'll enjoy more than a few nights in jail. People forget that Theo De Raadt was once not only defunded from, but barred entirely from his own conference for speaking out critically of the US governments involvement in iraq. and its not just confined to literature, but code as well. Did you write any ToR code or the exploit to detect cellular phreaking devices secretly used by the government? Maybe bluetooth code to access passports?
it comes down to this: Anything that cannot be marginalized, or trivialized as unamerican and antipatriotic becomes a direct threat to the ruling establishment and while they arent comfortable silencing your freedom of speech, theyre more than capable of making your life a living hell. Ask Chelsea Manning about her christmas.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Feelings are rather important when it comes to expressing oneself. If I feel like what I say will be twisted and used against me, I will be less likely to express myself. If everyone feels like what they say has no impact, or worse a negative impact, they'll remain mum and docile.
The "study" has many, many problems, but the fact that they are concerned by how writers "feel" is not one of them.