What Snowden did, or more specifically what the faceless, unaccountable and un-nameable NSA directors did was what George Orwell was trying to capture in his famous novel.<p>The notion of thoughtcrime and crimethink being the punishable event in the minds of the people. Where people are afraid to research something because of the perception that the secret unaccountable police will come take you away if you give the idea too much thought. And there is nothing you or anyone can do about it because the entity doing the enforcing is completely hidden. Even asking for the names of the directors and writing about what they've done is crimethink. Thinking about or asking for the document describing which thoughts are crimethink is also crimethink.<p>But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?<p>We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.
<i>"Using panel data, our result suggest that cross-nationally, users were less likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in trouble with the U. S. government."</i><p>Since their data is based on Google Trends, the only conclusion they can validly draw from their research is that users were less likely to search for such terms <i>on Google</i>. People with sensitive search topics may have moved to a search engine like DuckDuckGo, which doesn't log users' searches.
How about "how the Snowden relevations changed the behaviour with online porn"?<p>Because I'm considering leaving all that behind. Some creepy organisation going all peeping tom on me? No thanks.<p>Sure this has been researched as well?
The quality of writing in this paper is quite terrible. I'm not sure what kind of review this went though, but I'm kind of shocked it got approved with data points named "After Prism Revelations". Revelations is an emotional word for that data descriptor.