Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations | Hacker News Reader

Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations

reuters.com

260 pointsjonbaer140 comments

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.

Me too. How common is this? I deliberately avoid certain topics of conversation and often don't speak the way I truly feel out of fear it will hurt me down the line. I hate this reality.

My Muslim friend who is otherwise a nice guy told me how after Snowden incident some of his friends are avoiding him on all electronic media.

I don't follow him on Twitter because I don't want to get hassled when I go through US customs since I'm from another country (NZ).

Exactly. If fear of handful of terrorists have made our communities this corrupt then sadly looks like the terrorists have won in shaking the very foundation of western societies. This decay is slow but more like cancer it gives slow death to a civilization.

It's pretty clear that Al-Qaeda etc accomplished at least some of their goals. The 9/11 attack drew the US into Afghanistan and Iraq. And chaos in Iraq has been a huge factor in the growth of ISIS. 9/11 has also corroded respect for the US Constitution. The CIA got into torture, and the NSA maxed out its intercept and analysis capabilities.

So yes, it "sadly looks like the terrorists have won" :(

Edit: Deleted "('just a piece of paper' according to W)".

mirimir, that W quote is false.

http://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-god...

Please check your facts before spreading false rumors. Thanks!

While we're all busy checking our facts, the site you linked to does not state the quote is "false", it says it is "extremely unlikely".

It says it is "extremely unlikely" in the second line. If you read slightly further you will see:

> We judge that the odds that the report is accurate hover near zero. It comes from Capitol Hill Blue...

> Update, Feb. 21, 2011: The author of the Capitol Hill Blue story has now withdrawn it.

> If you read slightly further you will see:

Good point. Because I mentioned two words that appear at the top of the page, that means I obviously didn't read any further.

If you read the article you'll know that nowhere does it say false, as the other poster claimed.

Why don't they say it's false, if it's false? What's stopping them?

The fact that someone eventually removes something from their site does not mean it was false.

Someone using the contrived sentence "the odds that the report is accurate hover near zero" - rather than just saying "it's false" - also does not make it false.

I don't believe it happened either - sorry if you used your 500+ karma because I didn't issue a disclaimer to that effect - but that also doesn't mean it's false.

My point was about someone whining about getting facts right, by linking to an aticle that bends over backwards to not say what they think it says.

So, 5-10 years on, will people be claiming that Romney didn't diss Obama supporters in 2012? There is that video clip. But by then, it could probably have been faked. Reality is such an ephemeral thing.

I'm going from memory. That quote was in the news, at the time. But yes, http://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-god... tells me that it's probably bogus.

Thanks :)

[nevermind, was confused, sorry]

I think he meant he doesn't follow Snowden

I don't think so. Who was following Snowden before the leaks?

CBP has hassled me over having a book on Korean and a documentary about Hitler.

It's not necessarily racist if someone was overly nervous and hid friends, especially if they were non-Arab and notably Islamic (since Muslim isn't a race). Though the chance of a random CBP agent having a bad day probably dominates your threat profile unless.you're otherwise really notable.

If I was going to, say, China, I might hide friends that were pro-evangelizing their religion. Fortunately I don't use social media.

Two million people follow Edward Snowden on Twitter... media personalities and people the US government are definitely watching anyway, and plenty of "normal" hangers on. I haven't seen or heard stories of anyone getting harassed over it.

I think maybe you're engaging in a ridiculous level of paranoia.

If they do harass you, you won't know that it's related to this. Also, it could only trigger I'm certain combinations with other things.

Paranoia is an entirely healthy response to this heinous intrusion into our human rights.

My anecdote - I'm Australian, lived in USA for decades, moved to Europe after 9/11. Every time I visit the USA it is an hours-long ordeal to explain, in fine detail, why I have the views I have, why I follow Snowden, why I participate in European hacker cultures, why my laptop is covered in security-conference-related stickers, etc. etc. During this process there is always the implied threat of imprisonment without due process. All my stuff is gone through. They find nothing, because I am not a threat in any way, other than that I freely associate with those aspects of society and culture which 'the mainstream' find mysterious, confusing, and scary.

So, I don't go to the USA much. Its about as much fun to get there as driving into a brick wall.

I've heard these stories before but every time I stand in awe as if it's the first time(I've never traveled to US and I'll never will).

Do they ask you about your FB/Twitter account or do they already know them?

They look me up on Facebook right then and there .. just type in my name, look at my friends, see my connections. I'm connected, in some ways, with quite some movers and shakers in the security space, and I suppose there are alarm-bells in such a scenario. I dunno, it just feels so rude, intrusive, and backwards. I had a great time when I lived in the USA - now I just think of it as a sad, sad place. It lost its soul.

Wow. I'm getting infuriated just at the thought of it. And yet, were I in the same spot, I'd suspect I would shut my mouth and take it, out of fear I might end up in Guantanamo or whatnot :D

Its surely no fun when all you've thought about for 30+ hours of traveling is that great American burger .. I don't know if it will ever change in my lifetime, but it sure is a pity that I remember a kinder, gentler America.

As a citizen of the US, I find this subthread a bit 'crazy town' and nobody I know would believe this story. Perhaps you are an extraordinary case? To be clear, I'm not saying your story is untrue, but such claims require some proof before you will get people to make an issue of this problem you allege.

Part of the problem with your state is that its citizens are too gullible and too naive and don't dig deeper because they've gotten used to things having a 'normal state', and all of this is all 'too fantastic and weird'.

You may not ever have experienced what I've described, but it happens every single day, time and again. You can find others' reports if you care to look for yourself .. my anecdote only has relevance if it serves to make you, an American citizen, truly contemplate what you have allowed to occur in your name. The security nightmare is real for a lot of people.

I don't mean to be rude, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's the best we have and it won't be easy, but my neighbor thinks there are aliens hovering over our houses once per month (his phone can't record it for some reason)...

Your condescending attitude is worse than being rude. Your ignorance is astounding too.

BTW, I left you the, surprisingly hard(took me 3 minutes) to find, evidence you asked in the other comment.

The problem is, your states' security apparatus has all the means it needs to hide the evidence... by design.

As a citizen of the world I'm stunned that nobody you know would believe that story.

A 5 minute search on the Internet would be... enough?

As if all similar stories are part of some global conspiracy?

Like... you only know how good, efficient and super cool the people at the TSA are?

Really?

There are many things claimed on the internet, but they are not all true. If you would like to explicitly link to a claim you think is valid, please do. Otherwise your comment reads like, "Oh yeah, I read it on the internet!"

As an American citizen, you have the responsibility to get educated about the simple facts and not ask of others to do that for you.

Laura Poitras is an American citizen too. Is she credible enough for you? Can you tell me what are her thoughts on the TSA?

No? Do you even care? If you do care, then put the effort to learn what is already accessible to you. Otherwise what's the point in engaging in discussions with comments "oh yeah you read it on the Internet derp derp"

Here, have a freebie from Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/hacker_detain...

EDIT: it seems, when facts come in, downvotes are cast! Ouch. It burns

"I think maybe you're engaging in a ridiculous level of paranoia."

But this is the whole point... people change their behaviour because of fear of being persecuted, it may seem irrational and paranoid to some looking in with certain beliefs about what constitutes a risk, but it is entirely understandable and this is the negative effect of governments that spy on their citizens to mark them as threats.

For someone who is on H1B and under GC processing this matter a lot more because they are under additional scrutiny.

> I think maybe you're engaging in a ridiculous level of paranoia.

One of the interesting effects of the Snowden revelations was how what is considered "paranoid" changed.

Pre-Snowden, if you thought that the USA government was definitly spying on everyone, you'd be considered a bit paranoid.

And well... Snowden told us those paranoid people were right...

Rewatching "Enemy of the State" a short while ago reminded me of this idea.

To many people, I'm sure. But to anyone following certain organizations (the EFF comes to mind), Snowden basically "pulled the curtains open" on what was somewhat known for quite some time (perhaps not to the depth that Snowden revealed, but people knew that there was some computer surveillance going on before Snowden.)

The EFF has a timeline of quotes / stories that basically extend back to the September 11th attacks.

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

I personally don't think paranoia, though. To me, this whole collecting data on everyone instead of targeted individuals is more this: a huge data storage that is both subject to both internal abuse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT) and data leaks (Snowden); a wasteful process that didn't really stop a lot of terrorist attacks (eg, San Bernadino, the Boston Marathon bombings, Fort Hood, the Charleston church, etc.); a process that damaged America's reputation considerably (even from a pure business perspective); etc. Honestly, the NSA spying appears to end up being a colossal waste of resources and a general failure overall.

If some NSA database records this opinion, good. :)

> I think maybe you're engaging in a ridiculous level of paranoia.

Not at all, what we're trying to do is quantify what is the appropriate level of paranoia. As others have pointed out, (see sibling comment by rmc) it turns out that some people why were previously considered far too paranoid turned out to be right.

Most of the people got me wrong. My muslim friend said that people stopped following him (muslim friend) and not about Snowden.

According to him the immigration can look at your social graph see how many Muslim friends your have can their system can raise red flags for you based on that so a lot of people avoid muslims.

I think the op meant they were avoiding the Muslim friend and not Snowden's Twitter.

I don't go to the US because I don't want to get hassled when I go through US immigration. Shame, as my father, cousins, and half-siblings live out there - he's a US citizen and has been held at immigration over my facebook posts.

I cower in fear every day cause my grandparents were born in a foreign country.

Oh, I don't so much fear travel to the US so much as I'd just rather not reward their behaviour with my oh-so-esteemed presence.

Very. The panopticon works.

For example, there are lists of words the government provides payment companies, and they have to take your money if you mention them in relation to the payment.

Try and pay someone using Venmo and say Achmed or Cuba revolution. *(it's not just venmo)

For some context

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/venmo-cuba-sanctions_us_...

Or perhaps more amusingly, http://zakitakubu.com/2014/12/09/nico-nico-niii-is-not-allow...

Oddly enough, I've been less worried about that sort of thing since the Snowden revelations for reasons I can't adequately explain. I _think_ that I subconsciously assumed 'suspicious' searches would be flagged and lead to tracking, but post-Snowden just assume it'll be tracked regardless so don't bother self-filtering (I'd love to know if the hours I spent researching anthrax and dispersal methods [saw it on TV, was curious if it was plausible, and fell down that rabbit-hole for a couple of days] a few months ago caused a blip on security services RADAR).

That said, it is a terrible state of affairs, and I do completely understand the impulse to self-censor to avoid future issues. Likewise, I don't see a near-to-mid term solution - mass surveillance appears fairly entrenched, is not a single country issue (which would at least make it somewhat avoidable), and very few people even near positions of power seem to be addressing it adequately (or even see it as a problem).

>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.

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

There's a mean behavior for a large number of traits. One of those traits is tendency to blend in. Someone who blends in on every trait may be just as exceptional as someone who is well outside the typical range for a dozen of them.

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.

Basically being "too normal".

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

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.

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

The existence of such a behavior seems a clear indicator that the organization surrounding it punishes excellence--or at the very least, does not reward it in any meaningful way.

They have the pre-Snowden & post-Snowden behaviour to compare, the diff of these highlights what individuals now want to hide.

Chillingly, 'Grey-man'ing would require a fresh identity - if that is even possible.

> the main issue is the ability of government to oppress using that data, ie. absence of due process.

ie harassment and government justified theft while traveling.

Apparently "driving just under speed limit, when other cars drive faster" is the predictor police in some states uses to choose cars to check for drug trafficking.

So yeah, Lem was probably right.

They also bust folks for DUI using this technique as well. My rule of thumb has always been to drive a bit slower than the fastest car on the road, even if that means going faster than speed limit. Worked very well for me.

I'd say the secondary issue is the ability of quangos and non-government entities (including organisations such as companies, 'criminal' orgs and individuals) to access this information officially or unofficially.

Whatever bad a government can do, others can do the same or worse. Simply collecting such information means that 'bad' actors will gain access at various times and in various ways, so while the collection itself can be painted as innocent, in reality it's highly dangerous.

I try to be as noisy as I can be, so my profile is as much of a blurry mess as possible. Google thinks I'm a fortysomething woman into latin american disco music and chevrolet - and I can only hope that I come up with a similarly freakish profile in surveillance databases.

There's also another chilling effect which we are seeing happening but I don't think the correlation has quite been drawn - trust in law enforcement. I recently had my house vandalised - but opted not to contact the police, as I don't want anything that looks like a law enforcement datapoint, as in the future it could be used against me - suppose I want to run for political office - all you'll see in the papers is "IN 2016 HE HAD POLICE AT HIS HOME FOR UNKNOWN REASONS. PROBABLY DRUGS AND MURDER!". Hell, Roscoe Arbuckle. It's nothing new, but the new tools are sure as hell making it worse.

"In 2016, he was the victim of a crime, but feared calling police to his home. What was he afraid they would see?" :)

To a certain extent, we have to live our lives and damn the consequences.

I'm coming to live in the US for a year in August and currently going through the visa process. I can definitely say I have typed and then not submitted a few different comments on Reddit because of this.

Sadly, this is probably still trackable.

To me this is so bizarre. Now that I'm living in Asia (mainland China) it's even more bizarre. Because here ofcourse the government has the ability to look at everyone's communication - but no one has the ego to think they personally will be looked at. People appreciate that there are millions of people and no one actually cares about you unless you're really making waves.

Look back at the US, my home country, I feel like a lot of people are on the off-the-grid-survivalist spectrum of paranoia. The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?

Anyways.. just a different perspective from the other side of the globe

I'm guessing that's what the jews and other "untermensch" in the netherlands thought before WWII, they had records of religious beliefs of every citizen. Just imagine what a NSA database full of information can do if/when a fascist is elected. Democracy is not a protection from fascism.

So everything was fine in countries that didn't keep such records when the Nazis invaded?

IIRC, there was less genocide, yes.

> Because here ofcourse the government has the ability to look at everyone's communication

Maybe that's the thing: in China, everybody expects the government to watch everything. People were born in this society, it is normal to us. In the US, people believed the government wasn't invading their privacy, Snowden's revelations is new information to them (I'm talking about the majority of course).

Yeah, just like people before Google Maps thought it was weird to have photos of everything - and now it's totally okay.

From my limited experience it's also true for Singapore and Japan - so I'm inclined to believer there is an East Asian cultural element to it. When I tried to explain to some Japanese colleagues that a lot of Americas believe we should have the right to have firearms so that people have a mechanism to overthrow the government they looked at me like I was insane (b/c why the hell would you want to overthrow the government? Are you a psycho?!)

>Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?

How long did it take Germany? Maybe 3 or 4 elections then.

Germany just lost the first world war, with a significant fraction (~20%, or 13M of 64M) of the population having directly experienced the horrors of that catastrophe. To add insult to injury, Germany in the interwar years was subject to incredibly punitive treaties and experienced significant hyperinflation. The U.S. is not subject to the same foreign influence, and our economy is stable enough to keep the masses from starving.

While we're certainly disillusioned here in the U.S., our bread and circuses aren't seriously threatened yet. Once that does appear imminent, I'll agree with these dire predictions.

It doesn't really matter how many elections you think it might take to transform into a fascist dystopia. If you say it will take at least N elections to get that far, there will be people out there that will argue that we are already N-1, N-2, or even N elections on the way down that path.

And until we have an election that signals a clear, unambiguous change in direction, the disillusionment will continue. The Bundy-style armed protesters will grow ever more convinced that time is running out, and those on the margins will view them less as crackpots and more as harbingers.

The "don't trust the feds; don't trust the cops" attitude is finally spreading to the median American. Our bread needs more butter, and our circuses need newer acts.

> The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?

Sure, but for the people who are actually abused by the government it is extremely important. If everyone else just ignores the issue then it only ensures over time that more people's lives are ruined. And it's a pretty callous and inhumane stance to take to just not care about people's lives getting ruined simply because it's a minority of people.

Not to mention the fact that the impact of invasive surveillance on certain people is far more impactful than others. If the surveillance state is out there harassing the leaders of government accountability groups or civil rights protesters or EFF supporters that can have a huge negative effect on social and political outcomes.

I think you're reading something I didn't write. The point isn't to condoning these governments' behavior. I'm just pointing out that the fact that people are systematically altering their online behavior because the government has the ability to look at their activity just reeks of culturally induced inflated sense of self importance.

Hopefully that makes a bit more sense =)

http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/01/innocent-couple-gets-visit...

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/long-island-woman-c...

>Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now.

I can see that having gone a totally different way if it wasn't a upper middle class family.

>cops show up at multi-family house in blue collar neighborhood >guy in tank top chewing tobacco answers door >"can we step inside and discuss some stuff" >locks door, steps outside, closes door >"ain't nobody with a badge going in there without a warrant and after what happened to Jim who lives upstairs nobody around here talks to you people without a lawyer" >cops escalate situation >guy they're talking to does something that plays into their trap >police beat him senseless, taze him a few times, arrest him, wind up charging him with everything and then dropping everything except some circularly defined charge

And all that could easily happen to a middle class white guy. God forbid you're not white or Muslim...

It is dishonest to represent this as an instance of "the search engine police" turning up as a result of NSA snooping. From the NY Daily News article you linked:

>“Somewhere out there, someone was watching,” Michele Catalano wrote on the “Medium” blog[...]

> The Suffolk County Police Department said it sent detectives to her East Meadow home Wednesday after a Bay Shore-based computer company reported suspicious computer searches by a “recently released” employee.

> “We found out ... that the searches involved also things my husband looked up at his old job,” Catalano wrote Thursday night in a separate blog post on “Open Areas,” her personal site.

In sum: Mr. Catalano and his former employer got into a flap presumably related in some way to the employer becoming "former"; said employer, which sounds like a pretty lousy place to work if this is the kind of shit they pull, tried to SWAT the Catalanos in the best 4chan style; Mrs. Catalano, seeing an opportunity to grab some headlines and maybe a touch of lasting notoriety for her otherwise entirely forgettable online presence, made this out to be something almost entirely other than what it was; the post-Snowden online media grabbed hold of it for five minutes, then realized how they'd been played and turned on Mrs. Catalano [1] for thinking she could put one over on them.

I don't see how the case against ubiquitous Internet surveillance can be effectively bolstered with dishonest representations of rather trivial events.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/08/pressure-cooker/

I don't and neither should you.

If their lists start to contain millions of people they become useless. They drown in noize. Well, let them drown.

Fly a lot?

For months, I've been making like a sniper, going to and from work by crawling through dense foliage wearing camo. I crawl slowly, making only about a couple of hundred yards a day but, once I get there, I am completely unknown. No one knows I'm there and no one knows I've left.

I encrypt everything and carry it all with me when I leave so no one knows what I've done. I make sure I muss up the trail behind me so I can't be tracked. If I get really spooked, I have a few drop off points where I can store material along with a change of clothes (though I probably shouldn't have said that here).

It's hard work but I know it's all worth it. I haven't seen, heard of, or had any problems since I started this. Not that I had any problems before. I just know that the only issue now is I haven't received my paycheck in months. I'm worried I may have slipped up somewhere and my funding is being re-directed elsewhere in an effort to find me.

But that will never happen.

aye man; embrace change

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.

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.

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?

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

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

I'd be interested to see the rest of their results, because I think you've just demolished that headline figure.

Reading the article I noted that an audience varying between 2.2 million to 3 million in the months before and 2.2 million to 2.5 million in the months after didn't look like a step change in user behaviour; the claimed "fall" was no bigger than the variance over the previous 12 months. And I think you've just explained why the monthly results peaked at 3 million in one of the months before.

I don't think the hypothesis is altogether implausible, but the evidence presented in the news article summary is less than compelling, particularly when this is the sort of research where researchers are at liberty to cherry pick their results.

In the absence of the actual paper, here's the underlying Google trends https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=al%20qaeda https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=terrorism https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=bombing

Clearly (i) the hypothesised step change in user behaviour post-Snowden doesn't exist for global web searches (ii) there are a lot of spikes attributable to individual events, not least one in early 2013 and (iii) there's a trend decline in searches for terrorism starting over a decade ago

>I'd be interested to see the rest of their results

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2769645

I can email a copy if that one goes down.

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.

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 (~ 3k / day)

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

http://stats.grok.se/en/201601/Islamic%20State%20of%20Iraq%2... ( ~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 (~ 5.8k / day)

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_...

There is a better (and more comprehensive and accurate) API for page view data now: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-ac... , API specs at https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc#/Pageviews_data

> 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

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.

> 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?

I read your comment half-way, then upvoted it. I mentally prepared a response with further arguments against the size of the chilling effect. Then I read the rest of your reply and saw all the keywords. "Oh no", I thought, "I showed my engagement with this post by upvoting it!"

Needless to say, I don't feel like arguing against the chilling effect anymore.

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

"Cyber code"... :-) https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cyber+code%22&tbm=isch

I couldn't help but laugh.

I came here to remark about it too. What is this "cyber code"? XD

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All it takes is one country not playing along with that, producing encryption software without backdoors, and they make... all of the money.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

Thats just simply not true. There are automated systems doing precisely this kind of tracking. Did you not dig into the Snowden revelations and see just how bad it is?

Because, its really, really bad. No, I do not want my data in some secret government organizations' computer systems, for secret analysis. Ever. It may not be of consequence to the current administration, but do we really want Trump to have the power that the NSA grants? Clinton? Do we really want anyone with that power?

I think the biggest problem with the Snowden revelations is that, even now years after the fact, people don't seem to understand just how corrupt and how crippling the NSA security apparatus is, truly. Dig into the details and you will see that one of the most technologically advances tools of mass oppression is now upon us - and not just 'upon us', actually - but has been in operation now for over two decades.

Just what effect it has had, we will never know. Maybe there are people who have been spirited away, detected by this system as the rising new radicals that will upset the apple-cart, and we have absolutely no idea who or what they were. Do you really trust the religious zealots in power over this machinery to use it appropriately? Really? Then you are a huge part of the problem.

That is if you are white and American, for everyone else the possibilities of getting harassed based on what you see, read or say are very real.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586218 and marked it off-topic.

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.

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

;)

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?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586689 and marked it off-topic.

"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.

It's not that wild when you read history about US government actions towards foreign/domestic organisations/individuals they deem have strayed to a point of challenging the status quo. The most obvious example is looking at how communism was treated post WW2. This I find amazing, not that I support communism, but that the government was so ready to act this way towards someones political choice, regardless of what that is. That's far from upholding democratic values.

Another surprising one people dont realise if the CIA probably organised the removal of an Australian Prime Minister because he wanted to take the nation to a more neutral standing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

So feeling this is a likely monitoring point seems a reasonable statement to me especially on any serious anti-authoritarian activity. As for evidence, that's always going to be a hard one, whether its happening or not.

It is not a wild and extreme accusation. The IRS is known to have targeted Tea party people.

More subtle propaganda is already in action too: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11586264 and marked it off-topic.

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