But enough about me, let's talk about NSA. Are they watching me?

Another MacRitchie monkey. From the Singapore photoblog JustCapture.

Little did I imagine, when I suggested on Friday that They Might Not Be Watching Us, how soon and explosively it was going to turn out that a bunch of American writers disagree with me, as laid out in a new report from the distinguished and beloved PEN America under the title

Chilling 

EffECts:

NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor

which finds that

Writers are not only 

overwhelmingly 

worried about 

government 

surveillance, but 

are engaging in 

self-censorship 

as a result of which

• 24% have deliberately avoided certain topics in phone or email conversations;
• 16% have avoided writer or speaking about a particular topic and another 11% have seriously considered it;
• 16% have refrained from conducting Internet searches or visiting websites on topics that may be considered controversial or suspicious and another 12% have seriously considered it.

Putting it more in context, even more writers have censored themselves from dealing with particular topics (16%) than approve of the government's data collection (12%).

The superiority of writers over the general population is seen here in the fact that 22% admit they don't know whether they approve of whatever it is or not. (No snark, that would certainly have been my answer.)

But I'm not totally sure about those numbers, and I'll tell you why:

In October 2013, PEN partnered with independent researchers at the FDR Group to conduct a survey of over 520 American writers to better understand the specific ways in which awareness of far-reaching surveillance programs influences writers’ thinking, research, and writing.

The online survey was fielded as follows: An e-mail message from PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel was sent to 6,570 PEN members on October 10, 2013, and reminder e-mails were sent on October 15 and October 17.... Of the 528 PEN members who completed the survey, the vast majority self-described as writers (86%); the remainder are editors, translator, and agents. A comparison of the responses of writers and non-writers indicated no substantive differences in opinions or experiences.

According to the report, PEN America, the New York–based eastern conference of the organization, has 3,800 members, and Wikipedia allows 800 members for PEN USA, the western conference in LA, so I'm not clear where they got 6,570 American writers who are PEN members in the first place, including almost 2,000 writer-members who we are led to believe do not exist.

Supposing there is some good reason for that discrepancy, that 8% response rate is probably not too shabby by marketing standards, but does not give me a lot of confidence in the general validity of the response. PEN members are a pretty self-selected group to begin with, since it is really not merely a kind of writers' Rotary Club but an organization with a specific mission tied to

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression… and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (Wikipedia)

—which the organization helped to draft in 1948; and only a very small number of the 150,000 or so professional writers in the US are passionate enough about the cause to want to join and successful and/or social enough to go through with it (I'd definitely join if I had any reason to think of myself as a professional writer; as with the ACLU, of which I am a sustaining member, I believe strongly in the organization and its mission even though I also think they're being idiots about some things at the moment). Of those, the 528 who responded to the survey are more self-selected still. (When I think about it, it's just amazing that more didn't respond; a writer is someone who will grasp at virtually any alternative to working that presents itself, a serious-minded survey questionnaire being the ideal vehicle. My guess is that 6,000-odd writers assumed it was just another fund-raiser disguised as a survey, like those DCCC questionnaires.) So that they don't really represent anything in the statistical sense but themselves. If anything is truly significant it's that 73% of this deeply committed group sees no reason to panic.

Extraordinary photo by Peter Visontay,

And the 84.5 people who claim to have censored themselves from working on a given topic because of the harassment of the NSA—enough to easily fill a couple of rows of seats in an auditorium at Fordham Law School where they can congratulate themselves on being as brave as Ariel Dorfman—are a small number indeed. And not quite as brave as Dorfman but rather remarkably timid.

“The codification of surveillance as a new ‘norm’—with all different forms and layers—is changing the world in ways I think I fail to grasp still. And one of the things I’ve learned through repeat visits to another country with a strong police/military presence is what it feels like to not know whether or exactly how you are being watched due to some categorization you might not even know about. This is of great concern to me, the sense that this condition is spreading so rapidly in different nations now—or perhaps more accurately: that the foundations are being laid and reinforced so that by the time we fully realize that we live in this condition, it will be too late to alter the infrastructure patterns.”

“[D]uring the Nixon years, I took it for granted that the administration had an eye on me,
and if it didn’t, I wasn’t doing my job. For a political cartoonist, active early on against Vietnam, one expected tax audits and phone taps. Irritating, but not intimidating. In fact, just the opposite: I was inspired. I view the current situation as far more serious, and the culpability and defensiveness of the president and his people deeply and cynically disturbing.”

How are the mighty fallen! This is not even coherent. To "not know whether or exactly how" is everybody's normal condition. What you can learn from trips to police states or memories of the Cointelpro era is to know that it's possible and make a decision accordingly. It sounds as if this cartoonist made an admirable decision back then and is spooked now because instead of living on reasonable suspicion he's living on pure imagination, perhaps because of the daunting technical aspect ("they've got my metadata" sounds worse than "they're tapping my phone" because the word is so geekily threatening, if you can't quite grasp what it means).

“‘Selected’ for a special security search returning to the United States from Mexico twice last summer, I learned I was on a U.S. Government list. I was searched for ‘cocaine’ and explosives. I suspect … that I must have been put on the government list because of an essay I wrote … in which I describe finding a poem on a Libyan Jihad site, and ultimately express some sympathy for young men on the other side of the world who are tempted into jihad … one can see how [the poem] might be a comfort to jihadists.”

Well, who knows, but I wouldn't count on it. Border security officials are many of them born dicks, or underpaid and overmanaged into dickdom, and settled law since 1977 allows them to search and seize without a warrant or probable cause, so that

Pursuant to this authority, customs officers may generally stop and search the property of any traveler entering or exiting the United States at random, or even based largely on ethnic profiles. (Wikipedia)

I'm guessing that "random" dickishness is a lot more likely than the possibility that some official person looked at your earnest and soulful essay and put you on a list of jihadi sympathizers. Sorry, because I'm sure you put a lot into it. I argued at some length that the Tsarnaev brothers were sweet kids entrapped by the FBI (pretty sure I've changed my mind on that one, actually) but I get across the Canadian border in a carful of Asians with ease.

Finally, the FDR Group that managed the study (presumably the same people that put in a hard return after each line of text in the report so that I and anybody else who wants to quote it have to take the stupid things out again so we can format it in the modern way invented in the 1970s) is not necessarily the most professional outfit, if their website is any clue. Love the graphics, typesetting, and spelling of "curiousity".

Some of the firm's recent work takes 50 pages of survey research to conclude that

Although many teachers believe that much progress has been made already, their answers show important gaps in meeting many of the Common Core requirements. Teachers recognize the potential value of the standards, but they may be underestimating the amount of change that still will be required to reach these outcomes. Their answers, though hopeful, suggest that major changes still need to be made if these ambitious educational goals are to be realized.

Possible that they're doing some of that terrorized self-censorship themselves, only instead of being afraid of the NSA they're afraid of Arne Duncan and the Excellence mafia.