
New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship - nomoba
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/new-study-shows-mass-surveillance-breeds-meekness-fear-and-self-censorship/
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bpchaps
I don't think I've ever been this paranoid around privacy in my life for a
couple personal and interesting reasons.

-I disclosed a major security failure at comcast yesterday. It was surprisingly effectively handled and fixed, but in the process I tweeted their CISO after not being able to find any contact for her or even their security team (their security team told me they're going try to fix process this now). She blocked my twitter account the next day, but followed/unfollowed me sometime much later in the day. I can't help shake a weird feeling from that on so many levels. [https://imgur.com/ghT0t8o](https://imgur.com/ghT0t8o)

-Suin' the mayor of Chicago next week for his phone records after struggling to go through FOIA for about a year and a half. In the process, they were willing to disclose phone numbers of non-government phones to me with the last four digits redacted. They won't give me government owned phone numbers dialed for "privacy concerns" (HAH). FOIA specifically mentions that their privacy shouldn't be considered for redaction/non-disclosure. Lots of other things and I'd like to write something up on it after it's all done, but I can't help shake a visceral paranoia when I walk outside or do internets at the moment.

I'm not going to let that paranoia turn into meekness, though, and if
anything, it's made me much more open about my concerns and has even thrown me
deeper into these rabbit holes. I've had lawyers, friends and family ask me
I'm afraid that something bad will happen, and the answer is mostly "yes, but
it's just a fear for the unknown and not for my life, etc". Being open about
it seems to reduce that fear.

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titzer
Long ago after taking a class on computer security that included more than its
fair share of stories of espionage and intrigue, a paranoid part of my brain
started to think that maybe they were indeed watching everything happening
online, all the time. But another part of my brain, let's call that paranoia-
self-restraint, pushed that back for years. After Snowden, that paranoia-self-
restraint voice doesn't get much airtime.

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and-can
So, it's working as designed.

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nomoba
Related: "Training" societies in tolerating interceptions
[http://bit.ly/1aDqyIP](http://bit.ly/1aDqyIP)

