Writers Say They Feel Censored By Surveillance 130
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.
Feel Censored? Not Me. (Score:1)
I feel complete free to write about XXXXX XXX XXXXXX. I don't feel censored or restricted in any way.
How? (Score:2)
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woops, meant to mark this as funny, misclicked to overrated, commenting to reverse.
Travel with paper in U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I wonder if your laptop at home is any safer @home?
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From LEOs? Almost certainly. LEOs are much less likely to break into homes than to confiscate something on you.
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Hiding is not effective (Score:2)
This isn't about how you or your mom use explorer or finder or midnight commander to traverse the directory tree, reading file names and/or looking at icons.
This is about how someone actually trained to find stuff, finds stuff. And aside from outright encryption or sophisticated codes, you can't hide something from such people. Heck, you can't even hide the encrypted result; all you can do is prevent entry (and that, only until a judge says "you will open that door" because at that point, if you don't, the
Re: Hiding is not effective (Score:2)
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You said:
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Depends on who is searching. (Score:3)
How deep of a search do you imagine at an airport screening though?
Depends on who is searching. Depends on the on site equipment they have to conduct the search. There are a lot of factors.
For example, if I wanted to see most recent documents, and I had appropriate workstations available, in about 10-15 minutes, if I though you were worthy of a deep search, by looking at date stamps and sector sparing tables for las sectors pared, and which files they are attributed to, I could likely find everything that changed on the disk from 5 days before you booked the ticket, up t
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For example, if I wanted to see most recent documents, and I had appropriate workstations available, in about 10-15 minutes, if I though you were worthy of a deep search, by looking at date stamps and sector sparing tables for las sectors pared, and which files they are attributed to, I could likely find everything that changed on the disk from 5 days before you booked the ticket, up to now.
Even if things are encrypted, that's information, and there are exposed timestamps that could tell me if I should copy/confiscate for further examination, and/or find something incriminating to hold you personally on, or hold you on the suspicion of having done.
Bulk File Changer by NirSoft. howtogeek.com says "BFC was created to help you build file lists from multiple folders then edit their creation, modification, and last accessed times. You can also adjust the file attributes (Read Only, Hidden, and System). It also integrates seamlessly with Windows so that you can copy, paste, and move files around."
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html
Also from Nirsoft is Folder Time Update http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/f... [nirsoft.net] They are less than 150KB for the two of them.
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If your disk contains a larger number of large files with the names entropy$N (of which, the vast majority are actually full of entropy) the ability of the judge to distinguish a door from a wall declines to epsilon, at which point the judge might elect to sweat it out of you nevertheless (you're entirely screwed in this eventuality once you have no more passwords to divulge), but then so is the judge who gives a shit (some do) about the logical justification for his abuse of power (h
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Sorry, but no. The assertion was that putting a file somewhere unusual in the directory tree was an effective means of hiding. In that context:
The "judge" in this case is going to be software, and such things are excellent at discriminating actual jpeg images and text and document files from files filled with random garbage. Likewise at scanning the contents and determining very quickly if anything falls within the designated detection metrics, and dropping the borderline cases into a list for human perusal
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I should also have added: If you actually want to keep a secret, then:
o Tell no one
o Don't write it down or otherwise create a record of it anywhere, in any format
o Participate in no action that would even hint of it
Because at this point in time, that can actually work where absolutely nothing else will.
Of course, the day they can read your mind with a machine, that path will be closed off as well. There might be as much as a few decades left during which the word "secret" will have much meaning beyond "no
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Why? Has your laptop ever been confiscated or read by police? I seriously doubt it.
Your home internet connection, however, is. Constantly. Every packet.
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When traveling, especially international (which is what the OP said), customs DOES have a right to search electronic devices. They have a right to impound your laptop, at that.
Sure, perhaps the TSA goon can't seize your laptop while you're traveling domestic, but considering anyone can seize your laptop internationally, well, it's potentially risky.
And no, hiding your porn a few folders deep is pointless if int he end the sea
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On the other hand, when a publishing deadline required me to take my comics-making work with me on a family vacation out of the US, I chose to go 100% digital with it, to discourage any fishing expedition. Because paper's easy to skim, and constitutional rights won't halt a search that's already begun. I was working on a story that included some drawings of adult-but-young nudity, and I could easily imagine an overzealous border agent on my return to the US jumping on that to justify ... who knows what leve
Perfect (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
No waiting required (Score:3)
Orwell was an optimist. [fyngyrz.com]
I wouldn't worry about it (Score:3)
The government doesn't have a panopticon.
Even if it did, it shouldn't make a difference what you write anyway. Writing for any sort of career is public to begin with, if you were only writing love notes to yourself, I doubt the government would care unless it had a very specific interest in you particularly.
Point being, there is the irrational sense that since they know the government is watching, writers may be outed or made a target somehow. Problem is, they don't need to be monitoring you in real-time for the government to eventually pick up a book or essay of yours from the archives and find out what sort of an anarcho-pinko-terrorist you are.
Aside from performance artists, writing is one of the original ways for you to get your ideas out there, and it predates the Internet by millenia. Writers have been discovered and imprisoned or harmed for their writing long before Internet surveillance, so I am not sure how this is new, except that it may now be somewhat more efficient.
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Perhaps they were gonna publish under a pen name... but now they can't be that anonymous anymore.
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Rights (Score:2)
The idea of rights is a lovely philosophical butterfly.
The actuality of rights is that they are only rules that those in power agree to enforce and are able to enforce.
The direct consequences of these facts are obvious. Act accordingly.
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Act accordingly in this case means choosing whether or not to live in fear as a quisling cowards or take the attitude 'FUCK EM' and live brave and independent (like many Americans only pretend to do whilst doing the exact opposite) and defend yourself and especially defend others when they are attacked. Most of the crap only works when so many people only pretend to behave or like things to be acceptable, rather than public declare the things they like or prefer because of the potential of public persecuti
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Yes, that's one of the choices. Others include deciding whether putting your family and friends and those you love at risk for a fight you almost certainly cannot win is worth the candle; determining if the act is cowardice, or the best of a set of poor choices; dealing with the knowledge that if you manage to irritate those in power enough, and you fail to take them down, they may crush you -- without even noti
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Sorry dude the risk does not go away by avoiding, it keeps on and on and on. You pass that risk on from generation to generation, you left that fear and suffering as your heritage. You just have to try else you will force others in future generations to do it and you suffer anyhow, the random torture and death of you and yours because some individual in power took a dislike to you or one of yours and sought to exercise the power by eliminating your lives in the worst ways possible. A hero dies once and a c
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I didn't say, or imply, that it did. As for the rest, it is adolescent fantasy, no more. Those in power are working as a huge team. You aren't going to make even the slightest dent in their operations, the system, or the status quo. Were you to come even close, they'd destroy you in whatever venue(s) they wanted to.
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You really don't understand those in power at all. They are not a huge 'team'. They on the whole are a pack of psychopaths and narcissists. Even though they readily collude together to exploit the rest of us, to them their greatest threat is each other, it is bound to their very nature. Often by far the easiest way to defeat them is to subtly prod them into making mistakes and getting them to destroy each other. The might seem all powerful but things like greed driven mistakes, where regardless of what the
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Of course, I don't want to downplay the potential for the government to affect you. They certainly could make your life difficult if they wanted to.
The point is exactly the opposite, I think. Governments have been harassing people who write certain things for centuries. Indeed, that's one reason we know to fear secret polices and the like.
On the other hand, writers have always lived with that threat. Even in a supposedly free society. When they wanted to be anonymous in the past, they used pen names an
Re:I wouldn't worry about it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You can not get through a day without committing a felony.
Is this really true? (We could use a week without felonies instead, if you were exaggerating.) I'm sure people do sometimes commit crimes without any criminal intent, but at least one felony per day (or week) per person? And it has to be something that most people wouldn't think illegal, otherwise they'd at least try to avoid it doing it.
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You can not get through a day without committing a felony.
Is this really true? (We could use a week without felonies instead, if you were exaggerating.) I'm sure people do sometimes commit crimes without any criminal intent, but at least one felony per day (or week) per person? And it has to be something that most people wouldn't think illegal, otherwise they'd at least try to avoid it doing it.
Yes, its absolutely true. I know a lot of people dispute this, but lawyers and Judges and even the supream court of the unitted states all agree it's true:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
Justice Breyer - 1998
http://www.law.cornell.edu/sup... [cornell.edu]
No person can every know if anything they are saying could be construed as admission of guilt in a crime.
Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”
-James Duane, Regent Law School professor
Not even the federal government knows what is a violation of federal law anymore.
16 U.S.C. 3372 - It is unlawful for any person—
(1) to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law;
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc... [cornell.edu]
It is a violation of federal law to be i
Inadvertant criminality (Score:2)
Here's a bit, suitably edited, I wrote about this just the other day in the context of some fellow who rode in on the "just don't commit a crime and you'll be ok" horse:
The web of law is now so complex and deep that anyone is bound to make a miss-step fairly often or otherwise unexpectedly end up on the wrong side of the law and so turn out to be, regardless of intentionality (remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse), "a [darned] criminal."
From commonly ignored law (speeding, spitti
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Which is all true - and utterly irrelevant.
This is an article about writers. You demonstrate why ordinary people should fear government surveillance, but writers - that is, people who are deliberately putting pen to paper in order to publish the results - are no more affected than anyone else. They publish their material - the government doesn't need surveillance to snoop on writers (at least, as far as their writing goes), they just need basic literacy.
All this is clearly elucidated by the GP. But clearly,
Anonymity is illusion (Score:2)
They know your IP; they see the traffic and they record it and they will have zero trouble identifying you if they decide they want to. There's a trail of breadcrumbs that leads directly to your computer for everything you do on the net. That's without the tricks of textual analysis they can apply to your known writing style.
Anonymous posting on the net at this point in time shields you only from your average citizen's inclination to take action. In
So... (Score:1)
So they polled a group whose main focus is freedom of expression, and found out that the members are concerned about freedom of expression. Shocking. Next up, poll of members of the ARRL detemines that 84% of the people are interested in ham radio.
Re:They Feel? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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for the US i'd say. fuck the writer's feelings.
are they being threatened? are their colleagues being locked away for long periods of time for writing things they shouldn't? why do they feel the way they feel and is it the governments responsibility to make them feel better?
i don't believe it is. Judge them by their actions i suppose. I'm a strong proponent of all tenets of the first amendment, but i also believe that the US has the strongest protections for speech in the world. You can print whatever t
Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I try to put thought into what I say on the internet or otherwise in order to better communicate my intent, but on things like facebook I see a lot people {mostly younger} that just don't appear to have a filter they post hundreds of random thoughts a day as if they are trying scream over everyone else begging someone to pay attention.
I sometimes think that the way we are using technology to communicate is more harmful than it is good. I don't think a fear of surveillance has the ability to take root in soc
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I say "Fuck you, I don't care what you think of me". Big Brother then declines to comment and writes it down in his notebook and files it away. Despite what some say, we are free now in our actions. Government's tolerant response to political protests tell me this is true for now. Corporations are also free to collect information they shouldn't and government is free to spy on people it shouldn't. We are free, but if we wish to maintain that for much longer we must rein in the freedoms of corporations and g
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:) do you want the government reined in or the corporations? you can't have both.
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Have you seen a mental health professional for the evaluation of these symptoms - or are you just a garden variety tinfoil nutter? (That is technically sane
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I'm not saying that 'the government is telling people to judge', you obviously misread. The environment itself, whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, promotes judgement. If one feels that they are under surveillance (which in many parts of the world, including the good ole' U.S. of A., is completely and factually true in many different ways), they will be on the defensive. I mean, look at Facebook. You can't say that you haven't read something that you feel afterwards was TMI or
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The "tinfoil hat brigade" as you put it has gone from loonies to prescient given the facts from the last 20 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X... [wikipedia.org]
Just one example.
Oh, and hello there Cold Fijord.
--
BMO
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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?"
Then you need to seek professional help, because you're showing signs of mental illness.
Really? 9/11? Unjustified war/invasion of Iraq? The Pat
"Big Brother" isn't just the government (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I feel the same. See my post, "Yes.", it even starts with the same wording ;)
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You are not alone. Shows the importance of meta-moderating... Also, Soylent is taking the route of getting rid of the overrated mod, a mod bomber favorite.
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Also, Soylent is taking the route of getting rid of the overrated mod, a mod bomber favorite.
I don't know what this means. In my case, I contacted Slashdot and asked them to look into it, and then the modding stopped.
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My particular mod bomber(s) wait for a few days after I have posted, then fire off a couple of down mods. They figure, quite rightly, that most people have moved on, so there will be few who come along later t
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Oh, mine was different from that. I figure the guy must have hacked something, or else somehow had lots of accounts with mod points, because pretty much every one of my posts would get modded down pretty much immediately. I don't remember if I was being modded "overrated" or "troll" or what, since it was years ago, but it lasted a couple of weeks, during which I had something like 20 posts modded down for no apparent reason.
I never got an explanation, but the staff of Slashdot fixed it after I provided a
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He would know what a child molester says only if he was a child molester.
There are many social conventions that cannot be contradicted, however wrong they are: Some are very obvious manipulations like "Think of the children", "Why do you hate America?" and to a lesser extent, "The law isn't for criminals". But there are subtle manipulations too, like free-market economics or gender-specific bias: Try discussing the hypocrisy in school-girl sexuality, the reverse sexism in schools and workplaces, the femin
Mass Media (Score:2)
"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."
Like the media does on a daily basis....And the shame of it is that people are willing to listen to a sound byte and accept it as the whole truth, context be damned.
60 yrs ago? Anyone remember? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You had me and then you lost me.
To talk about the chilling effect of ubiquitous surveillance is one thing.
To conflate that with the experience of someone who knowingly, willingly leaked classified military information during a war is entirely another. Traitors should still be shot.
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You're being a bit more literal than the general populace on this one.
From Merriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com]:
Full Definition of WITCH HUNT
1
: a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft
2
: the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views
we ain't free. (Score:1)
The only surveillance may be acceptable... (Score:2)
...is when we can watch the watchers;
Let's explain this: 2-way circuits, where watched and watcher are in total symmetry in an unambiguous way.
It's not just the government (Score:1)
I write on issues of concern to my profession. Self-censorship arises more out of concern with how certain corporate interests will respond than it does to concerns about how my government will respond. It's not that I'll be thrown in jail, or renditioned or whatever that concerns me. It's that if I acted in the public's best interest and told it like it is, I'd become unemployable and destitute.
Surveillance is not censorship... (Score:1)
though it does tend to cause people think more carefully about what they'd like to say.
It sort of is. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
But anonymous publishing has always been a thing. (Score:2)
transfer your writing across sneaker net in some seedy cyber cafe and you are publishing your subversive thoughts to the chagrin of governments everywhere! you could even wear a fedora to m
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Pretty hard to be a writer on any subject, fiction or nonfiction, without research. Pretty hard these days to do research without the internet.
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still, there are, apparently, legions of people who are maintaining annonymity online while engaging not just in research, but outright hostile attacks. It would seem that it's possible to keep a low profile while researching sensitive subjects.
The actual report (Score:5, Informative)
Learned helplessness (Score:2)
Should Worry (Score:2)
Re:The latest trend... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Maybe you're missing the "why" of 99% of this .
The "Why" is the United States.
The economic impact on this is drastic.
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Its to the point we really don't have "rights", but "privledges", and there is no real clear line to cross, and we have a government that doesn't seem to diffrentiate between dissent and flat out rebellion.
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If I were to write about Islamic extremism ... (Score:2, Insightful)
... 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?
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Do you have any cases of extradition being successful over an alleged act that isn't illegal in both countries? I haven't heard of any. As far as "no crime committed domestically", what do you mean? If an Australian commits a crime in Australia, who's going to want to extradite him?
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Kim Dotcom is alleged to have committed crimes in the US, and I think New Zealand has the concept of criminal copyright infringement. Obviously the US authorities have pushed the NZ authorities to exceed their authority, but we'll have to see whether the NZ courts allow extradition.
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Replying to undo "Redundant" mod.
Parent heads off the practically inevitable trivializations of how universal surveillance produces a chilling effect, squelching dissent and suppressing critiques that would uncover, for example, corporate malfeasance and government corruption.
Additionally, the surveillance regime of early the early 21st-century United States is one of the greatest ideological errors and phenomenological atrocities of human history. I'm not sure there exist (nor can exist) a human institutio
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P. S. I meant to mod GP "Insightful", which it most certainly is.
Please mod GP up.