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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

He actually has a point, sadly. Visiting a "Jihadist" website, based on some arbitrary definition and interpretation from some cyber freedom fighter in DC, VA, or MD, is enough to get your "metadata" added to their graphs. You think Iranian sites with posts about hacking the US aren't on that list? I don't.

It's not enough to get you a visit from the feds or anything, but it's almost certain that any competent intelligence agency is storing anything that touches that website. Whoever posted it likely has links in their social graph to very high value targets.

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Is this really the point we've reached? Where people with no intention of being a terrorist are bothered about visiting a site because they know everything they do is being observed?

If we've reached the point of self censoring behaviour, then we're definitely in the Panopticon.

The harder it becomes to break out of our filter bubbles, the more foreigners will look alien, strange and scary :(

Very interesting idea. So NSA's spying was exposed, everyone noticed, talked about it, and it seems like a good thing. But spying didn't stop. Operations didn't change. Neither NSA, White House, Google, or Facebook said they'll stop participating. No apologies.

So all that changed so far is that everyone starts behaving or acting keeping in mind that they are watched. Self censoring is very powerful. It would be interesting to see the rate in filter hits NSA gets on "terrorist-y" keywords before vs after the leaks. That would indicate the amount of self-censoring. We'll never see those statistics anytime soon, but someone is seeing it. Wonder what they are thinking or how they are interpreting this.

Isn't this self censoring one of the main goals of a Orwellian society?

Yes, but to be Orwellian the self-censorship must be borne out of government intimidation. In this case the government hasn't intimidated anyone, we were just leaked information.

Unless you want to argue that Snowden intentionally leaked the PRISM slides so that society would be intimidated by the governments reach, thus giving way to society censoring itself without them having to publicly punish people that were guilty of thought crimes. But that's getting into Alex Jones territory.

>In this case the government hasn't intimidated anyone...

I disagree, with the government having the 'you're with us or against us' polarizing attitude since 9/11 along with Gitmo and an official kill list I think the U.S. gov't is pretty intimidating for anyone who doesn't fall into line.

Just look at what happened in Boston. A whole city shut down, house to house searches, an unprecedented reaction in the west for a bombing. No where else has that kind of reaction been seen, even in the UK when the IRA was blowing shit up, at no time was a curfew imposed and houses illegally searched by a militarised police.

The US is an incredibly intimidating place at times.

Sorry, instead of anyone, I should have said "average citizens".

Yes after 9/11 the government has a "your with us or your against us" attitude, promoted by Bush. However, your examples of Gitmo and kill lists are not evidence that this has continued. Those two examples only pertain to the ongoing war effort, not an intimidation campaign aimed at the average citizen, and the Americans that were involved were in the current warzone, not shipped off to Gitmo from the US.

I would address the Boston situation, but I don't think it is relevant. Sure shutting down the city is intimidating, but so is any other active shooter situation like a school shooting. You might feel intimidated by the police presence but ultimately the police are not focused on you.

But more to the point, of course the US is an intimidating place at times, everywhere is, but the key is that the intimidation is not focused on citizen self-censorship, which I think is the key to saying that we live in an Orwellian society.

Whether or not the US is an intimidating place, or debates about the validity of the Boston searches and curfew is a different discussion. They are not forms of intimidation aimed at self-censorship, and thus not valid reasons that we should assume that we live in an Orwellian surveillance state.

If you would like to have a debate about the role, or non-role of self-censorship in an Orwellian society, and you believe that some other form of intimidation is a valid criteria then I am all ears, but the discussion isn't about intimidation in general, only intimidation whose ultimate goal is self-censorship.

> not an intimidation campaign aimed at the average citizen... > but ultimately the police are not focused on you.

This is exactly what is wrong. As long as these massive injustices don't affect the 'average' middle class unit it's all ok. As long as the military police thrashing through your house on their latest manhunt aren't actually after you, that's ok. It all seems pretty Orwellian to me, right down to the citizens actually justifying it all.

Anyway to be more on point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident

This seems pretty intimidating to me. It would certainly make me think twice about attending even the most peaceful of protests. Pepper spray and tazing is a common response to people objecting to the status quo. Hell, if you want to protest a political rally you have to actually go to a 'free speech zone', if that isn't Orwellian enough for you I don't know what is. Than again, the 'average' citizen probably is ok with a two party 'choice' and so doesn't need free speech.

And then you have Obama's HR347 'anti protest' bill which could potentially be used to lock people up for many years for protesting in an area which the Secret Service/DHS etc. has secretly declared a heightened area of security.

It's really frightening how much potential leeway there currently is for arbitrarily locking U.S. citizens up. All these loosely defined laws are sitting around just waiting for someone to come in and abuse them. While things are quiet and everyone is behaving it all seems ok, but as soon as there is a bit of trouble, another Occupy protest for example it will be a different story.

Watch how you see your right to due process being eroded away next, it's already not needed when hunting down suspects on foreign soil. You watch as language is changed, terms subtly augmented to make it ok to execute US citizens with a drone - you know, for your protection. Maybe you, the average citizen, aren't intimidated yet, but perhaps tomorrow you might be.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-08/obama-s-drone-attac... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/19/us-usa-security-dr...

Again... the key thing that makes it an Orwellian society is self-censorship, not just intimidation.

Ok, here's a real life example then. My parents were on Skype to me today, and my Dad was talking about some controversial topic or another - a couple of times my mum said "you can't say that over the internet, people are listening".

Furthermore I actually disagree that self censorship is the key component of an Orwellian society. I think surveillance itself is the key component. Reading the interpretation below I challenge you to deny that the US and many other governments aren't well on their way to the dystopia described by Orwell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian#Meanings

Police charging through your house without permission whist you sit back and say 'they are just doing their job' is the epitome of an Orwellian society.

I'm not quite sure about that, people feel quite intimidated when they see how this government treats people like Snowden and Manning. I would argue that the self-censorship is one way to avoid being treated like them.

While I agree that the government is trying to intimidate people with their treatment of Snowden and Manning, I think the goals of the intimidating are very different. In these cases the people they are trying to intimidate are potential leakers, not average citizens. The goal is not to promote self-censorship, but keep existing government employees from leaking classified information.

My political ideals happen to align closely with the Founding Fathers, and I've been vocal enough about that to assume that if the feds care, they already know. So I just don't really care what they know about me anymore. If it comes to the point that it looks like they might start rounding up people like me, I'll flee the country, like a German Jew ideally would have in 1930s Germany. If it doesn't come to that point, it doesn't really matter what they know about me.

If you ideals aligned closely with the Founding Fathers then the very fact your government is spying on the citizens would be something to care about, it would matter.

The 'it doesn't really matter what they know about me' attitude misses the whole point. The point is, it really matters that they are collecting data on citizens. The Founding Fathers would be disappointed to know that apathy was the downfall of their vision.

And where will you flee to? What kind of life do you think you'll have in a world where America sets the standard and all other governments follow suit? Citizens around the world shrugging and finding ways to tollerate the new paradigm whilst still living as comfortably as possible, because being monitored doesn't affect them.

My point wasn't that I don't care, my point was to give an alternative to self-censorship in terms of what you say and what websites you visit.

I've repeatedly asked for advice on HN in terms of what I can actually _do_ to improve the situation. I also recently posted a long rant asking for personal advice on leaving the country so as to not provide indirect support to what's going on [1]. If you have any suggestions, I'd really appreciate it.

I was really puzzled about what to do, because the Founding Fathers would NOT put up with this shit. Then I realized the key difference. The Founding Fathers started the American Revolution _because they could win_. They didn't worship freedom like some kind of religion. They were not self-sacrificial. They were trying to make their lives better. They were egoists.

What can I do, that has any remote chance of success? I can't think of anything. A revolution today would be a huge disaster, not that I'm even capable of starting one. All I can do is keep advocating a bit, and wait it out, and hope it gets better. To cease producing and go on strike at this point would not make any difference, except to be self-sacrificial.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know. However, I don't think suggestions like "Call your Congressman" are viable, and that's what I often get.

If we could get all the productive people in the country to refuse to put up with this shit and go on strike, we could do something. If everyone in the NSA and the military had the scruples and moral principles of Snowden, we could end this shit overnight. But there is too little agreement. Such a strike will not happen, and if it did, whatever these people came up with next would probably be much worse than what we have now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=QFgl37XVMgSe59KGmzDlnj (though I don't recommend you waste your time reading it)

So a bunch of us boring old HN types clicking on it are just going to make the haystack bigger. Let them add all of us, it'll just make more work for them.

It's not enough to get you a visit from the feds or anything, but it's almost certain that any competent intelligence agency is storing anything that touches that website. Whoever posted it likely has links in their social graph to very high value targets.

It makes me wonder, if one were to inject an 0x0 iframe with this site on a decently trafficked page (a couple hundred visitors per day) that tends to attract a niche, one could potentially create more noise?

Referer headers would make that sort of thing easy to filter out, so chances are that they're already doing so.

You're already in the graph. You can't escape it any more than Kevin Bacon, and you'll go crazy trying.

So link to it from your Facebook and Twitter, encourage its spread, it'll get thousands of visits, and if the government is adding its readers to a list then there will be far more people who end up complaining.

You know what's really sad? People whining about the NSA every single day on Hacker News. It's really unbearable. I'm quite sure that the NSA has a filter for people who bad mouth America on hacker sites. I really wouldn't worry too much. You're classified as impotent. Unlikely to do anything more than whine.

Let the downvoting begin. What a bunch of losers.

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