A newly
published study from Oxford’s Jon Penney provides empirical
evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the
mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and
stifles free expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post
this morning described this phenomenon: “If we think that
authorities are watching our online actions, we might stop visiting
certain websites or not say certain things just to avoid seeming
suspicious.”
The new
study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of
which 87% of Americans were aware), there was “a 20 percent
decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism,
including those that mentioned ‘al-Qaeda,’ 'car bomb’ or
‘Taliban.'” People were afraid to read articles about those
topics because of fear that doing so would bring them under a cloud
of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well by
Penney: “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about
important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this
is a real threat to proper democratic debate.”
As the Post
explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass
surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study
examined Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden,
“users were less likely to search using search terms that they
believed might get them in trouble with the US government” and
that these “results suggest that there is a chilling effect on
search behavior from government surveillance on the Internet.”
Full
report:
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