Whistleblowing or leaking? Public opinion toward Assange, Manning, and Snowden

Resilience Towards Leaking or Why Julian Assange Might Be Wrong

In his now (in)famous pamphlet "Conspiracy as Governance" JULIAN ASSANGE (JA) argues about the need for leaking as an efficient way to destroy "unjust" groups as the neo-feudalistic ones luring the conspiracy theory leaning hacker community into his belief system. Eventually, JA used a biologistic argument on the benefits and drawbacks that uncontrolled leaking might pose for "just" and "unjust...

The Advent of Surveillance Realism: Public Opinion and Activist Responses to the Snowden Leaks

The Snowden leaks provided unprecedented insights into the workings of statecorporate surveillance programs based on the interception and collection of online activity. They illustrated the extent of “bulk” data collection and the general and widespread monitoring of everyday communication platforms used by ordinary citizens. Yet public response in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has been cons...

Public Opinion Toward Legal Sanctions for Crimes of Violence

Public Opinion Toward CSSTA: A Text Mining Approach

Recently, the public of Taiwan has had a heated debate on the issue of Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). After months of simmering tensions between ruling party and opposition party strongly backed by the student-led Sunflower Movement, the debate has finally reached a breaking point on March 18, 2014, at which students occupied the Legislative Yuan. During this period, novel commun...

Deliberative Polls: toward Improved Measures of "informed" Public Opinion?

New research techniques have recently been developed to gather measures of public opinion that is better informed or more deliberative than that recorded in typical mass opinion surveys. These techniques include deliberative polls, educational surveys, and citizen planning cells. In view of what they set out to accomplish, what can we say from a scientific perspective about the utility of these...