
Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior - mo
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2412564
======
sentientmachine
What Snowden did, or more specifically what the faceless, unaccountable and
un-nameable NSA directors did was what George Orwell was trying to capture in
his famous novel.

The notion of thoughtcrime and crimethink being the punishable event in the
minds of the people. Where people are afraid to research something because of
the perception that the secret unaccountable police will come take you away if
you give the idea too much thought. And there is nothing you or anyone can do
about it because the entity doing the enforcing is completely hidden. Even
asking for the names of the directors and writing about what they've done is
crimethink. Thinking about or asking for the document describing which
thoughts are crimethink is also crimethink.

But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization
would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm
others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about
how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how
to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put
a stop to it there?

We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and
all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The
problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the
rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper
classes.

~~~
7952
Strangely the creeping Orwellian scenario may be the most optimistic view to
take. If the monitoring is unnecessary it can be rolled back one day. The
threat can be removed.

But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent
crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as
technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?

~~~
Ygg2
> But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent
> crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as
> technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?

We can look at data in regions where monitoring is most egregious and see
whether improvements correlate with monitoring, or if they could be explained
by other factors.

------
greenyoda
_" Using panel data, our result suggest that cross-nationally, users were less
likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in
trouble with the U. S. government."_

Since their data is based on Google Trends, the only conclusion they can
validly draw from their research is that users were less likely to search for
such terms _on Google_. People with sensitive search topics may have moved to
a search engine like DuckDuckGo, which doesn't log users' searches.

------
sigzero
I doubt it changed the search behavior of "Joe User" at all.

~~~
aluhut
It propably at least changed the search behavior of the Bad Guys.

~~~
Tloewald
Stupid bad guys. Smart ones already assumed the NSA was poring through
everything.

~~~
csandreasen
Take a look at the average violent criminal. The stupid ones are just as
dangerous as the smart ones, and there's a lot more of them.

~~~
bediger4000
Terrorists aren't much like criminals. For a start, they're ideologically
motivated. And that's the argument for why we as a society, need to treat
terrorists differently than criminals in the first place.

There's only a very, very few terrorists, even when the US government has done
its level best to create as many as possible. I doubt we can take a
quantitative argument like yours and get decent results.

~~~
csandreasen
The term "bad guys" is much broader than just terrorist. Feel free to
substitute "drug smugglers", "human traffickers", "members of organized crime
groups", "militant extremists", or, yes, even "terrorists". Nor did I make any
argument as to how to handle any of them. The point is that you don't have to
be smart to cause harm. The smart ones were presumably harder to track
beforehand; the not-so-smart ones are likely a lot smarter now.

------
Holbein
How about "how the Snowden relevations changed the behaviour with online
porn"?

Because I'm considering leaving all that behind. Some creepy organisation
going all peeping tom on me? No thanks.

Sure this has been researched as well?

~~~
chippy
actually the study looks at other searches which would get them in trouble
with friends, neighbours and colleagues. So yes it has been researched,
partly.

------
rscott
The quality of writing in this paper is quite terrible. I'm not sure what kind
of review this went though, but I'm kind of shocked it got approved with data
points named "After Prism Revelations". Revelations is an emotional word for
that data descriptor.

~~~
logicallee
Your comment is extremely bizarre. The paper seems exceptionally clear and
well-written! It's rather short. It gives the necessary background and states
its assumptions, it is very easy reading.

Can you quote a paragraph you didn't like? Is your main issue that the data
descriptor is defined elsewhere (as opposed to a date range)? I don't think
the descriptor itself is emotional at all.

By the way, I thought based on the abstract that the effect would be rather
large. For anyone who downloads the PDF, go to the graphs - the effect is
actually a very small difference even on search terms rated to get people in
trouble with their governmetn, as well as on personal-privacy related search
terms.

The effect is clearly there but rather small compared to what I was expecting.

Granted I only spent a few minutes with the PDF and could be misinterpreting.

