
Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations - jonbaer
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikipedia-usage-idUSKCN0XO080?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
======
mjfern
Of course mass surveillance leads to a chilling effect. Personally, I'm now
concerned about what I say in email, in text messages, in discussion forums,
and in telephone calls. I fear that if I use the wrong words or visit the
wrong websites, I'll trigger some automated system and will be put on some
kind of watch list that will change my life. This is a very scary state of
affairs. And unfortunately I don't see a near-term solution. The interests of
government and corporations are aligned (reducing pressure to enact any
serious privacy regulation). They're both looking to vacuum up as much
personal data as possible for national security on the one hand and to develop
new and improved revenue/business models on the other.

~~~
trhway
>Personally, I'm now concerned about what I say in email, in text messages, in
discussion forums, and in telephone calls. I fear that if I use the wrong
words or visit the wrong websites, I'll trigger some automated system and will
be put on some kind of watch list that will change my life.

well, if you read Stanislav Lem, you'd immediately see that not using "wrong"
words and not visiting "wrong" sites may also be a trigger - like "this guy is
deliberately trying to stay under radar, why? what he is hiding/planning?" If
you try to behave following average pattern for your demographics, you may
trigger another one - "he is trying to blend in" :) You can't win that game
for the simple reason that the game rules are decided upon strictly after your
moves had already been made.

You see, the issue isn't extra collection of data by government - this is
already lost cause due to technological progress, the main issue is the
ability of government to oppress using that data, ie. absence of due process.

~~~
noja
If the op is altering his behavior in the same way that matches everyone else,
he should be fine... Right?

~~~
dingaling
In the army they call that behaviour 'the grey man'; trying to stay out of the
upper and lower quartiles to avoid (1) being assigned difficult and / or risky
tasks due to competence and (2) being assigned punishment tasks due to
incompetence.

Usually grey-manning involves trying to do things just well enough to be
signed-off, but not quickly enough to be commended and noted.

~~~
antihero
Basically being "too normal".

I guess the lesson is to just be yourself and try not to piss anyone off.

~~~
eumoria
Maybe the lesson should be if you're a law abiding citizen you should be able
to go throughout your day without being spied on for any reason whatsoever.

~~~
antihero
Yes but that's not the world we live in is it.

------
slg
You know what happened "shortly before" Snowden's leaks, two terrorists killed
3 people and injured hundreds others in a terrorist attack in Boston. Is that
a good time to establish a baseline for number of page views?

I'm not saying there isn't a chilling effect, just that I am highly skeptical
of this measurement of it. Wikipedia pages on these subjects are practically
news articles. They are going to be pretty highly linked with whatever is
going on in the world at the time. Considering that, I would fully expect
terrorism searches to be high after a recent terrorist attack and to drop as
terms like "Al Queda" become less newsworthy on a global scale.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
CTRL + F "shortly before"

0 results.

Putting quotes around shortly before makes it seem like you are drawing from
the linked story, but you aren't. A quote that is actually from the article:

>In the 16 months prior to the first major Snowden stories in June 2013, the
articles drew a variable but an increasing audience, with a low point of about
2.2 million per month rising to 3.0 million just before disclosures of the
NSA's Internet spying programs. Views of the sensitive pages rapidly fell back
to 2.2 million a month in the next two months and later dipped under 2.0
million before stabilizing below 2.5 million 14 months later, Penney found.

They did not use the day or week of the Boston Bombing as their baseline.
Don't misrepresent the research.

~~~
slg
You are right on the quoting thing. I could have sworn it said "shortly
before" but it said "just before". My mistake. Although those are almost
semantically identical so I am a little confused on why you are calling it out
in such specificity.

>They did not use the day or week of the Boston Bombing as their baseline.
Don't misrepresent the research.

Snowden's leaks came out less than two months after the largest terrorist
attack on US soil since 9/11\. Since they are measuring monthly stats, they
are using either the month of or the month after the Boston bombings as part
of their "just before" time frame. If you look at all those number, the 3
million is really the biggest outlier. Isn't it possible that views for these
terrorist related pages generally falls between 2 and 2.5 million with 20-50%
jumps in page views in the aftermath of large terrorist attacks?

~~~
garrettgrimsley
Because the "just before" is referring to the overall trend, not the single
month before the Snowden leaks. The actual highest single month view count is
found in November 2012 with around 4 million views. The months around the
Boston Bombing are not outliers. November 2012, as well as July 2014, are
outliers. Eliminating these outliers from the analysis _strengthens_ the case
for the existence of a chilling effect. See pages 28-39 of the paper [0] for
their methodology and findings. If I'm being unduly short it is because the
sort of low-effort skepticism [1] that you offered is all too common with any
article involving a statistical analysis.

[0]
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645)

[1] "Did the researchers account for {{obvious factor}}?" Yes, they did. Check
before commenting.

------
tn13
As an immigrant in USA who loved to read about religions,mythology and history
I have stopped buying books about Islam and middle eastern history on Amazon I
buy them in cash at B&N. I stopped using Quora completely too.

My fear is that not just people who might be interested in Islam or middle
east might get targeted but I am sure government will also target the
Libertarians and anti-authoritarian people.

------
steve19
Wikipedia stats are painful to browse, but here are some numbers:

Al-Qaeda / US Army / ISIS in January 2016

[http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-Qaeda](http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-
Qaeda) (~ 3k / day)

[http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army#](http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army#)
(~ 2.5k / day)

[http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Islamic%20State%20of%20Iraq%2...](http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Islamic%20State%20of%20Iraq%20and%20the%20Levant#)
( ~15k / day)

Al-Qaeda / US Army / ISIS in May 2013 (before Snowden's revelations & before
ISIS/ISIL was known in the West[0])

[http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-Qaeda](http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Al-
Qaeda) (~ 5.8k / day)

[http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army#](http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/United%20States%20Army#)
(~ 3.5k / day)

My conclusion, traffic is probably changing due to what is in the news rather
than anything else. If the US Army is sent in to invade another country, their
wikipedia page will be back on top.

ISIS was way higher last year, average about 25k/day in the middle of 2015,
but the news media are tiring of them and they are also fading away.

That said, I was about to send a completely legit email yesterday that had the
keywords "pipe bomb", "suicide vest", "IED", "Al-Qaeda" and "Mali" in it (a
friend just lost two of his men in Mali), but I decided to self-censor for the
benefit of the recipient rather than myself.

[0] ISIS was technically announced at the end of April, but they were not well
known and the page was just a stub. It fell below threshold for collecting
page view stats.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Islamic_State_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant&oldid=125623633)

~~~
machrider
> My conclusion, traffic is probably changing due to what is in the news
> rather than anything else.

I appreciate you throwing some data for a few keywords together in your
comment, but you'll excuse me if I lean toward trusting the published paper
instead.

FWIW, paper is downloadable here (at least, for now):
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645)

~~~
steve19
Did you read the paper? They did not even track the ISIS pages. They had a
small group of pages which they tracked and a control group (see the appendix)

They did not compare it to the news cycle, or consider that people are reading
different pages about the same subject (AQ in Iraq for example being
superseded by ISIS).

Sorry if I sound harsh but this study was terribly executed.

Doing it properly would require a lot more resources than Wikipedia daily page
view dumps. I think the NY Times would be well placed to do a study on this
using Wikipedia page views, their page views and their mentions of topics
overtime.

~~~
Baghard
> They did not compare it to the news cycle

Such as the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Or the rise of ISIL and Boko
Haram in early 2013.

I still think the study was well executed, but the instant effect seems to
disappear when you remove the 6-7 months before mid june 2013.

The long-term effect they claim to observe is more shaky. (I think one can
find "statistically significant" groupings of say, Harry Potter articles, that
show a similar peak and decline around the Snowden revelations.)

Can we find more flaws in this paper?

------
jlubawy
Anyone else find the photo's caption amusing? "A man is seen near cyber code"

~~~
mancerayder
I did after your comment lead me to it! There's more than one thing that's
funny about it. Is it the word 'cybercode'? The man 'near' it, whatever that
means? Or the nonsensical photo? Great stuff. They should have left out the
caption for their own good.

------
marricks
Most illuminating is how this documented chilling effect can be used,

"Penney’s work may provide fodder for technology companies and others arguing
for greater restraint and disclosure about intelligence-gathering. Chilling
effects are notoriously difficult to document and so have limited impact on
laws and court rulings.

More immediately, the research could aid a lawsuit filed by the American Civil
Liberties Union on behalf of Wikipedia’s nonprofit parent organization and
other groups against the NSA and the Justice Department."

A study over a long period of time on many articles helps avoid the noise of
news.

------
belorn
This is a good start and I hope it will encourage additional studies into the
chilling effect of mass surveillance. The only previous study that I have read
is from Germany, and it looked at the effect from the then new Data Retention
Directive. That survey showed that people would start refraining from calling
help-lines, lawyers, doctors and priests as a direct result of mass
surveillance.

------
camillomiller
I would need to read the paper to be sure, but from what I gathered a simpler
SEO explanation hasn't been given.

With the Snowden leaks each and every media outlet started publishing reports
on those topic. That means that the Google SERPs of relevant keywords started
to be clogged by relevant articles and editorial contents that displaced
Wikipedia entries from the first positions. I've done my share of editorial
SEO stuff during the last few years and I've seen that happen many times for
even smaller events.

A more meaningful way of testing this would have been to have a similar
sampling of entries from another topic to test against the key group. Maybe
that's in the paper, we'll see when it's out. Still, the numbers are
consistent with the fluctuation of positioning in Google results.

~~~
vanderZwan
That's a good point, although to nuance it a bit:

> _suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary
> pursuit of information_

... while they might be wrong about the cause (which is important of course),
you could argue that the consequence remains the same; that depends on whether
the articles and editorial are good replacements content-wise.

~~~
camillomiller
Well, in that case we could also discuss whether Wikipedia could be considered
the best information you can read. Also, would Wikipedia be as updated as,
say, an investigative report about NSA misconduct published by the New Yorker?
I mean, the absolute value of the medium has not been taken into account nor
weighted in the study. Editorial worthiness is certainly something we can talk
about, but I wouldn't consider it as a meaningful replacement for the lack of
a statistically and numerically relevant point in the study.

~~~
vanderZwan
Agreed on all points; I guess my point was that while flawed, the study at
least highlights that traffic dropped to Wiki articles, and triggers this
whole discussion.

------
mirimir
Perhaps related: The number of "VPN privacy services" has increased greatly
since mid 2013. And I've heard informally that subscriptions have increased
dramatically for some older services.

One might think that Tor usage would also have increased. However, a large
botnet installed Tor in late 2013, so user counts since then are entirely
unreliable.

------
Aelinsaar
All I see are governments creating a vast global market for encryption of
EVERYTHING. The more people feel threatened, and react through encryption,
matters start to become really difficult if you want to spy on anyone.

~~~
bobwaycott
And yet that provides just the right set of circumstances to push hard for
laws that outlaw it or demand companies be able to bypass it.

~~~
mancerayder
That, or it creates a nervous impetus in the authorities to pass those laws
before more sophisticated encryption and adoption move faster than they can
respond to it.

~~~
Aelinsaar
It's an arms race where the only thing that really matters is sheer numbers of
minds working on the problem. It's hard to beat the latest and greatest highly
motivated teenager after all, when there are hundreds of millions of them, and
your track record needs to be perfect.

------
sugarfactory
You can read Wikipedia articles without letting them know which article you're
reading by downloading the database dump of Wikipedia, which can be obtained
at dumps.wikimedia.org.

------
jernfrost
I do not feel comfortable about expressing my views about American security
policy. Sure I say whatever here, but I planned on demonstrating outside the
American embassy here in Norway, but I decided it was too risky. It has been
uncovered that the American embassy films and photographs all demonstrators. I
travel frequently to the US because I am married to an American and because of
work. I don't want to risk getting on some secret list and getting problems
when visiting the US.

And let me tell you there is nothing I dread more than American border
authorities. They are the worst of any country I have visited. My university
or american authorities made some mistake when I left the US after a masters
study. I got all sorts of shit because of that years afterwards on every
visit. I got interrogated for probably an hour with all the same stupid
questions repeated again and again. It didn't matter that I thought the issue
got cleared up the first time. It was back to square one the next visit, while
my wife and kids had to wait a long time not knowing what was going on.

And that is just me, but I have so many friends and acquaintances with horror
stories, some who swear they will never come back to the US due to their
treatment. One guy was dragged into interrogation because he didn't keep his
finger too long on the fingerprint reader.

I got a friend in the neighborhood who happens to be brown. That is not a safe
color in the US, because that is the terrorist color. He isn't a muslim and
have been living in Norway the last 15 years. But no the border guards just
started hurling accusations of him being a terrorist and that he was plotting
something in the US, seemingly just throwing anything at him to see what would
stick or get him off his balance.

Like most Norwegians he travels on vacation all over the world a lot. Yet
somehow this kind of shit only seems to happen in the US.

You know how they operate in the US. As a foreigner I have no rights in the
US, as is also evident from how they view collection about data about non-
americans. So I don't want to risk anything that will get me in serious
trouble.

I can tell Americans are affected to. When my wife talks about Snowden with
her family in America they get all nervous. They think it isn't something one
should talk about. They got very upset when she used encrypted email and said
that would get her targeted by NSA.

It is all sad because I would have liked to live some years with the family in
the US. It is a country which has a lot to offer. But police state feeling of
the US is just creepy. It puzzles me that American are not more aware of the
problem. How can so many be so convinced that America is a country with so
much freedom. People kept parroting this to me when I lived there, but it was
the lack of freedom that made me leave.

~~~
riprowan
> It puzzles me that American are not more aware of the problem.

Most Americans do not travel outside the USA extensively. They have no basis
of comparison.

> How can so many be so convinced that America is a country with so much
> freedom.

Americans watch TV, and it tells them that they are free.

------
feintruled
This makes me wonder. On occasion, I have read the IS magazine "Dabiq" just to
get some sort of insight into their messed up thinking (I think the CIA
actually mirror the files!) As horrible as it is to say, I assumed because I
was a white atheist this would be entirely fine and this explanation would
wash should it somehow ever come up. If I was a Muslim though I wouldn't dare
read it.

------
Gratsby
This is more a sign of the power of the media than anything else. The media is
looking for a story. There's very little that's compelling out there.
Terrorism keeps popping up because it gets clicks. Soon enough there will be
another Kardashian or another Adrian Peterson to take the collective mind on
to the next distraction.

------
nxzero
My guess is that for every person that goes silent, another that might not
have, speaks up. Just polarizing the issue more than anything.

~~~
jernfrost
It has certainly enraged me, but while I might rail more against the
surveillance state online anonymously I find myself much more careful in the
public space.

~~~
nxzero
Given the volume of data you're leaking online, you know that you're not
anonymous online, right?

~~~
mikeokner
This is a rather tired argument IMO. It's absolutely possible to be anonymous
enough online to mask your real identity, especially from bulk, non-targed
surveillance.

~~~
nxzero
My statement had to to with a specific individual who's posted a massive
amount of pii online; if you have a specific claim related to bulk data
collection, happy to address it.

------
PlzSnow
_" I fear that if I use the wrong words or visit the wrong websites, I'll
trigger some automated system and will be put on some kind of watch list that
will change my life"_

I'm afraid you've got caught up in a modern-day hysteria. Nobody is watching
you or cares anything about what text messages you type or websites you visit.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586218)
and marked it off-topic.

------
PlzSnow
There seems to be a wholescale hysterical neurosis around the entire issue.
The narrative on HackerNews is that every piece of electronic communication is
monitored and stored. The majority of HackerNews contributors _actually_
believe this.

~~~
DanBC
... While simultaneously building their own services which gather and store
huge amounts of data about visitors and users.

~~~
mirimir
;)

But it's a plain fact that the NSA intercepts and scans whatever it can,
wherever it can. And that it retains as much as it can, for as long as it can,
following an elaborate triage strategy. Or at least, they claim so in various
reports and presentations. It could all be bullshit, I suppose ;)

Also, isn't there some evidence that Google helped the NSA develop XKeyscore
etc?

------
PlzSnow
_" I am sure government will also target the Libertarians and anti-
authoritarian people."_

This is a wild and extreme accusation with no evidence whatsoever. Welcome to
HackerNews.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586264)
and marked it off-topic.

