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The words we use to talk
about a topic strongly influence
how we perceive that
this might seem like an obvious
statement.
But when we look at the news
and what's happening in the last years,
this is something which is so true.
We just think about seriously
a so
this is something we see come true.
Words have a lot of meaning when you
think a Trump what's happening there?
It has a lot to do with speech.
These are it's a linguistics
student and she would talk to us exactly
about this topic.
She would tell us how words can be used
to shape our perception of a certain
topic.
In this case, the
snooper's charter of the UK,
a charter which forces
I speak to save your
browser history.
This is scary.
So please welcome Lisa
was the big round of applause.
Thank you.
OK, so let's begin.
Hi, I'm Lisa, and I'm a linguist.
Welcome to my talk.
This is not a proposal about mass
surveillance, analyzing the terminology
of the U.K. snoopers charter.
So many people interested in linguistics.
So this is amazing.
Thank you very much for attending my
talk.
I hope all of you had a wonderful
Congress so far.
Are there any linguists in the audience?
One
and maybe some more yet
in the back.
Nice. Very nice.
OK, um, let's begin,
um, in this talk,
I'm going to take a closer look at the
Snooper's Charter and its terminology
from a corpus linguistic point of view.
So what is
the Investigatory Powers Act, also
known as the charter?
It is a new legislation which extends
the surveillance powers of the state,
and it would allow the security agencies
to keep so-called Internet connection
records for up to one year
and to hack mobile phones and laptops
on a large scale without any suspicion.
It was previously
known as the Investigatory Powers
Bill.
And to make it a bit clearer.
A bill is a law
which has only been proposed but
has not passed both
houses of Parliament.
The Investigatory Powers Bill
has received royal assent
and was made into an act in
November 2016.
It was nicknamed Snooper's Charter
due to the extensive surveillance
to give a bit of history.
First term Snooper's Charter has been
around for a while and
it is not new at all.
It was used for the communications
data bill. Previously, a
previous surveillance bill
and a newspaper article
refers to this bill as
the most draconian piece of surveillance
legislation ever proposed in a
democracy.
Wow.
So this bill was blocked
in 2013,
but a new bill, as we can see, is
on the way.
So, um,
now I'm going to talk briefly about the
methods I used to give you
an impression of what I was doing.
Um, as I want to find
out how certain expressions are used in
the parliamentary debates and in
the media coverage, um,
my focus will be on the context
of certain words and words,
as you know, do not stand on its own,
but always have a context around it
to explain the meaning and to
give an impression of what the word is
actually about.
OK, so
I'm going to make use of methods
of corpus linguistics.
What is corpus linguistics?
Linguistics is the study of language
based on examples of real life
language use.
What is real life language?
Well, newspaper articles, leaflets,
student essays, transcripts
of spoken data and so on.
Corpus is a collection of machine
readable texts and corpora
can come in various sizes
ranging from several thousand
to millions, even billions of
words.
To give an example,
Wikipedia, everybody knows it
can also be regarded as a corpus
and contains around one point
nine billion words.
It's really a large corpus,
whereas the British National Corpus
is a bit smaller and contains
around 100 million words.
So why
is corpus linguistics useful?
Well, it allows you to work with
large amounts of data and
linguistics. Examinations have
been carried out using software, for
example. And in my case,
and it allows you to work with
amounts of data which which would
take years to analyze by hand, and you
can just do it with
a lot easier.
Um,
why is it also useful?
Well, it helps to reduce research,
a bias that means that
there is a tendency the researchers
tend to pay more attention to things
they encounter at an earlier stage of
research than at a later stage.
And if you're working with
millions of words, it's a lot harder
to be biased about your results
compared to only work with, let's
say, two or three newspaper articles
which are analyzed by hand.
So.
OK, this analysis I used
to methods of linguistics,
concordance analysis and
colocation analysis,
both methods of very
useful to examine the context of
keywords in the corpus.
OK, concordance analysis
gives you several words around
the key word you were searching for,
and the span of words can be adjusted
and usually it's around five words
to either side of the keyboard.
So this is a screenshot from
the corpus analysis program I used
in the middle and low script.
You can see bug data.
This is my keyboard, which I ended at
the very bottom, if you can see.
And uncuffing
allows you to
analyze three levels.
Four is, in this case, one word to
the left of the keyword is the red
section and
the second and the third
word to the right of the keyboard.
You can see in green and
purple.
And in this version,
it's sorted alphabetically.
Then you can scroll down and have a look
at the other concrete answers and
all the contexts around type data.
It's the second method I used
is called colocation analysis,
and this method is very useful
to examine the connotations and
associations between words
of the relation to other words is crucial
for understanding the meaning of a word
we already had. That and
the location is defined as
the above frequent occurrence of
two words within a predetermined
span. Once again, it's usually
around five words to either side
of the search term, because if you
make the span larger, you might
have two or three,
two or three sentences
which are not even related to a key word
anymore.
Hmm.
And to give an example,
the two strongest collocations and
the British National Corpus for Juice
are orange and lemon.
So, OK.
And in order to indicate
the strength of a colocation mutual
information is used, it's
calculated based on
the expected probability of two
words appearing in each other,
their relative frequencies and
the overall size of a corpus.
Then you compare the
expected probability and the observed
probability, and this difference
is translated into a number.
And the higher the number, the stronger
the location.
But if you use a
corpus analysis program, all this
is done for you. So
here's a screenshot and
you can see the Concord collocations
of surveillance.
And this is quite unusual
that so many birds have the same value,
same value.
You can see it in the section with
such statistics.
And usually articles,
prepositions cetera, are not
taken into consideration
because the frequency is
evenly distributed across the corpus.
OK, so
in my analysis, I used to
cover up the Investigatory
Powers Act corpus and the news
on the Web corpus.
So the Investigatory Powers Act corpus
was compiled by searching for
the expression investigatory powers
bill on Hans-Gert, the
official documentation of parliamentary
debates and my
corpus consists of sixty three
debates, some written statements
and the final legal text of the
Investigatory Powers Act until
it has a size of one million
sixty thousand two hundred and nineteen
words.
So it's a relatively small corpus,
but still it's like it's large enough to
show some patterns
and it's not too small to not
be able to do an analysis.
The second corpus is an online corpus
called Nese on the web,
and it consists of newspaper
articles from the English speaking world.
And it was
started in 2010 and it
is updated every 24 hours.
So it is the most recent
corpus you can find because it covers
all the articles until yesterday.
And in order to
be able to compare the two corpora
I restrict restricted the time span
of the searches to the time span
of the parliamentary debate, that
is from July 2014
until November 2016.
All in all, in this timespan
I was interested in the corpus
had four billion,
350 million words.
So it is roughly four thousand
times larger than the investigatory
powers that corpus.
So with such a vast amount
of data, you, of course, can do a lot
of different analysis.
And this is how I will pick out three
keywords.
And this is going to be the term
snooper's charter mass surveillance,
everyone's favorite word and thought,
OK, let's begin.
So in order to find out what
to Snoop means, I consult the dictionary
and the Oxford English Dictionary
to Snoop is to find us
to pry into matters one need not be
concerned with.
Keep that in mind for that list.
So let's have a look at the concurrences.
Usually, as you've seen on the
screenshot, you have 50
or even 100 concrete answers.
But in this talk, I will only give you
a small excerpt,
so.
In my view, it will knock out completely
that lazy label of snooper's charter.
I was not going to use the phrase stupid
charter because it is counterproductive,
nor was I going to use the phrase mass
surveillance.
I was about to attack him for the phrase
snooper's charter, but
he managed to get out in time.
I also hope that the politically loaded
and seriously misleading phrase
Snooper's charter has been removed
from our lexicon snooping,
hence the populist phrase snooper's
charter.
So what is striking about
the expression Snooper's Charter
is that it's either accompanied
by a direct form of direct
negation or another form
of denunciation or disapproval,
such as lazy label,
misleading phrase, populars
phrase, conspiracy theories
and so on and so forth.
And all this aims at
invalidating criticism of the bill.
In addition, it conveys the
message that everybody who refers
to the bill as a snooper's charter
is neither trustworthy nor
informed, nor appreciates the
work of security agencies
and have a wonderful quote for you.
In my view, it is lazy to label the
bill a snoopers charter or a plan
for mass surveillance.
In fact, it is worse than lazy.
It is insulting to people who work at the
police and security services.
So thank you, Bill.
And the term to Snoop is highly
undesired.
Remember the definition?
It implies that the government
overstepped its bounds and that
the bill legalizes
activities which are otherwise
unacceptable.
The strongest case of
snooper's charter, a label,
phrase and court.
And all this suggests that
a snooper's charter and the genuine
nature of the bill are two
entirely different things.
So Snooper's Charter is
nothing but a hollow phrase,
and it lacks an element.
It signifies.
OK, so
let's have a look at how Superchargers
use in the newspaper.
Kobes
reintroduce a beefed up version
of the Snooper's Charter,
the superchargers discredited
unlawful and treats us all
as suspects,
saying that the bill is neither a
Snooper's charter nor a plan for
mass surveillance. A renewed
effort to pass the snoopers charter bill
of increased surveillance powers.
The Home Secretary will try to sweeten
the pill of Revived Stupas
Charter.
OK, so roughly
one third of
the concrete answers mentioned
that the investigatory powers bill
is named Snooper's Charter,
and more than one third mentions
the existence of a previous snoopers
charter, the communications data
bill. And to be honest, this
is how I knew about
this communications data bill, because I
did some research only
due to reading about it on
a newspaper, not by doing research
on parliamentary debates.
Corbetts So
this is why newspapers report about
renewed effort to reintroduce
a beefed up version of the snoopers
charter.
So as a consequence,
the negative overturn of the previous
communications data bill is transferred
to the current bill.
In addition, it is pointed out that the
bill is made to seem less unpleasant
than it actually is, for the
home secretary will try to sweeten
the pill of her revived snooper's
charter.
So it's
not a sad reality occurs
with the allegation and the newspaper
articles.
And if it does occur within the
negotiation, it is a quote from
the parliamentary debate.
And the strongest colocated of
snooper's charter are so-called
and.
OK, so.
What can we learn from the concrete
answers about this expression?
So in the investigatory powers,
that cop is 70 percent,
75 percent of the occurrences
are negative or contain some
form of disapproval or denunciation
of terrorism.
Now, Corpus.
The term is hardly negated.
The Investigatory Powers Bill entirely
lacks reference to previous supercharger.
But the newspaper Corpus, many references
are given to the previous judge.
And the parliamentary debates criticism
is used to refer to
people using the term
where it's in the newspaper corpus
criticism is directed at the implications
of the bill.
So all in all, the
snooper's charge is burdened with
negative associations from the previous
communications data bill
and as a consequence, it is strictly
avoided in the parliamentary debates and
if it is used at all, it is negated.
OK, so
second term, I had a look at this
mass surveillance.
It is not important, is it not important
for us to continue to reassure the public
that this is not a proposal for mass
surveillance and to restate the
essential need for the bill?
Not accept that the bill is a plan for
mass surveillance.
Neither is snooper's charter nor a plan
for mass surveillance,
a snoopers charter or a plan for
mass surveillance.
Neither is stupid charter nor a plan for
mass surveillance.
So altogether,
the term mass surveillance
does not appear very often throughout the
entire corpus, about
28 times per million words.
Is not a lot.
And in over 50 percent of these
occurrences, a firm of negation appears
in several instances mentioned
snooper's charter and mass surveillance
in one negative sentence in
order to suggest that both terms
are equally inadequate to describe the
Investigatory Powers Bill.
Strong Colgate's of
mass surveillance plan
Chaja.
And of course, not
OK.
So and
here's some excerpts from
the news on the Web, corpus
open court hearing into whether
J'accuse alleged mass surveillance
of private communication breaks,
human right laws, major U.S.
technology companies suffering from the
fallout of the NSA
mass surveillance programs
under criticism for its mass surveillance
practices.
Reports about the NSA mass
surveillance programs
carrying out mass surveillance as their
critics have claimed.
So the concrete answers
reveal a strong negative connotation
of mass surveillance.
It ranges from breaking human
right laws to
even the nuclear fallout.
And by drawing these comparisons,
it is implied that the consequences are
harmful, long lasting
and not easily to overcome.
So mass surveillance is dangerous.
This is a message, and
this was only an excerpt, but other
concrete answers mention mass
surveillance in the same breath as war
crimes and totalitarian
institutions such as the Nazis
and the East German secret police.
Some articles refer directly to
mass surveillance as bulk
collection, and I give you a quote,
weaseling their way out by calling mass
surveillance terms like bulk collection.
Very few instances bring up mass
surveillance in a negative sentence
that most of these instances are quotes
from politicians or even from the
debates regarding the investigatory
powers bill.
Strong as a case of
mass surveillance, Tempora
GSB, which is which stands
for New Zealand's Government
Communications Security Bureau
and GCE HQ.
So mass surveillance is
inevitably linked to modern governments
and the surveillance programs.
And if you omit acronyms
because they do not really count as
lexical, um, the
most the strongest
collocated are revelations,
indiscriminate and interception.
So
what can we learn from the conferences?
Well, in the parliamentary debates
and over 50 percent of the occurrences,
mass surveillance is negated
and now it is hardly negative.
And now Corpuz also reveals
the full extent of mass surveillance
and its negative connotations.
So the last term I'm
going to have a look at is park
data, and
once again, I consult the dictionary to
find out more about this word.
So the Oxford English Dictionary
is defined as a great a considerable
volume mass.
The collective mass of an object
is usually used in the
context of cargo and commerce
in bog lying loose
and heaps without a package
and so on.
So let's have a look at the concrete
answers.
The ability to acquire Bogda is
necessary.
The ability to collect data
is essential.
The bill supervises entirely
the ability to collect bulk data,
despite his attempts to conceal his
activities.
The agencies were able to use the data to
identify that he had recently traveled
to a European country.
It empowers our services to access
and analyze data, a tool
that has become more important than ever
before.
So the context of bulk
data can be split up into
three major sections.
The majority of the conferences,
as we've seen in this in this excerpt,
stresses the necessity and
proportionality of data.
A common strategy is to list
incidents of when and how
big data proved useful,
16 percent referred to by
date on a rather neutral contract text.
That means stating amendments
which refer to bulk data.
And only 12 percent
mentioned Baghdad on the critical
context and exemplify
this really abstract term
and its indiscriminate approach by
referring to
a massive combine harvester.
But of course, such
using such vivid imagery is
undesired.
So
let's have a look at the following quote.
I appreciate that both powers are
controversial, but I am absolutely
sure that we do not conduct mass, that
we do not conduct data harvesting in
this country.
It simply does not happen.
The use of powers is not for
that purpose, but for the purpose
of examining material, even
though that may be done and all
it is done in a way that does not amount
to the generalized harvesting of data
for the extermination.
It simply is not,
says Mr Greif.
So the Speaker does
not clearly define what distinguishes
data harvesting from the
use of powers
for the purpose of examining material
in bulk.
So
everybody knows this man.
And he talks about
double thing in the following way,
the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one's mind simultaneously
and accepting both of them.
So what does this tell
us?
This unshakable faith in
the good intentions of mass surveillance
makes people actually believe that
measures which correspond to the
definition of mass surveillance
are actually not mass surveillance.
So maybe there
are other things to worry about
than Russian. But I don't know.
Um, there's a general tendency
of redefining mass surveillance
as part data collection.
And this aims at redirecting
attention from mass to data,
which means, in other words,
it directs attention from a tomb
which denotes a large group of people or
items to a term which
denotes something very abstract and
depersonalized.
So.
Replacing a surveillance with
collection further disguises
the ongoing process collectors
are very neutral and fuzzy term.
Just think about people collecting stamps
or coins or stuff like
this where surveillance
is very straightforward
and unambiguous.
Bug or in bulk.
Maybe you remember the definition is
usually used to denote merchandise,
and this thinking further emphasizes
depersonalization.
It is constantly stressed in the
Investigatory Powers Act
for mass surveillance and
data collection are not to be equated.
Collection of data, most
of which I never even read,
does not constitute mass surveillance.
Oh.
Unfortunately, we cannot
grasp from the debates what constitutes
mass surveillance, if not the collection
of communications data.
And Doug.
And this also
throughout the entire corpus, there's
a prevalence to refer
to the investigatory powers bill
and its measures in terms of what
they are then,
rather than saying what they actually
are.
So the strongest color
codes of data are harvesting
and and collection.
So we now
have a look at the concrete
answers in news on the
Web.
A year ago, a presidential
advisory board and privacy concluded
that the bulk data collection was illegal
and unproductive
and business already faced
by data collection of a different
kind, as demonstrated by the hack
and theft of millions of talk to our
customers.
If you're looking for a clear and
comprehensive guide to how communications
have been intercepted from
cable cutting in the First World War to
bulk data collection exposed
by Ed Snowden, this is it.
I have used the recent attacks to argue
for broader surveillance and bulk
data gathering bulk data
collection, neither lawful nor
effective.
So as you can see in the context of
bulk data and the news on the Web, corpus
is very diverse.
The majority of concurrences refers
to the Snowden disclosures, the USA
Freedom Act.
Some articles express a very critical
attitude and actually
equate bulk data with mass
surveillance is a quote
about data retention, what anyone
else would call mass surveillance.
But the collection is referred to as
the lawful more effective.
Also seen that from the excerpts,
several articles highlight the utility of
data.
Here's a quote.
GQ analyst trawling bulk
data spotted suspicious activity
which turned out to be a Syrian jihadi.
So only a very small number.
Two out of 100 concurrences
of the articles refer directly
to the Investigatory Powers Bill.
And this actually surprised me.
The strongest color codes were to
HQ and NSA.
And once again,
this indicates that bulk data
is linked to modern governments.
Similarly, as mass surveillance,
so disregarding
acronyms
outside most strongly colocated
with interception, collection and
interference.
OK, in
the Investigatory Powers Act, the
majority of concrete answers highlighted
the importance and necessity of bulk
data.
There is in the newspaper Corpuz,
the majority of concurrences
referred to the Snowden revelations
are the USA Freedom Act.
And in the parliamentary debates,
we have this tendency of redefining
mass surveillance as part data
or bulk collection.
OK, so
let's give a short summary.
Snooper's charter and mass surveillance,
where the two keywords
which were used most
diversely and they were used in
two completely different ways.
And the two corpora,
super shadow and mass surveillance were
also the two least
frequent keywords in the Investigatory
Powers Bill and the
two most frequent keywords
in the news on the Web corpus.
So as I pointed
out before, there's a general prevalence
to refer to the Investigatory
Powers Act and as measures in
terms of what they're not.
And as a consequence, the
debates are no longer concerned
with the nature of these
things because things that only defined
X negatively
so and
the Investigatory Powers Act, you have
a strong tendency for rather non
descriptive terms.
But in the news, in the Web corpus,
there is a stronger prevalence
for negatively connoted words such as
mass surveillance, and this might
be rooted in the nature of the two
spheres. I had a look at
a newspaper has an interest
in translating legal language
into language its readers understand,
whereas political language is often
designed to disguise
unpleasant facts.
So that's
Paternalists.
I did a lot of reading while I was
compiling this analysis and I love
reading through all sorts of
debates. And I compiled a top
three of my favorite quotes
from these debates when
you already know.
So I sincerely hope that as the book
proceeds, we have a way to go.
Yet we will explain that we
do not conduct mass surveillance in the
UK.
Indeed, it is not done in the USA.
Collection of data, most
of which I never even read, does
not constitute mass surveillance.
Oh, yeah.
And second one,
however uneasy we may feel
about Internet connection records
or thematic warrants,
that does not compare to the infinitely
greater unease we also feel
about our intelligence agencies
being unable to use those tools to
keep us safe.
And once again, most of
the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one's mind simultaneously
and accepting both of them
to tell deliberate lies while genuinely
believing in them to forget
any fact that has become inconvenient.
And then when it becomes necessary
again to throw it back from oblivion
for just as long as it is needed
to deny the existence of objective
reality and all the while to
take account of the reality which
one denies all this is indispensably
necessary
and.
Appreciate the bypass, a controversial,
but I'm absolutely sure that we do not
conduct data harvesting in this country,
it simply does not happen.
The use of powers is not for that
purpose, but for the purpose of
examining material, even
though that may be done in bulk.
It is done in a way that does not amount
to the generalized harvesting of data
for the extermination.
It simply is not.
OK, so
a few words on the bibliography,
if you're really interested in Curbers
linguistics, I would recommend
Mr. Paul Baker and
pretty much everything he has written.
And if you want to play around with the
corpus is
you can find it online now.
Corpus.
OK, any questions?
Yes, please come to the
microphones
and I will tell you this first, and
so we start with microphone number one.
Thank you for the interesting.
What did you observe
a change in time
of the usage of words.
So this is basically is Tukaram
of the of the usage, but
something like the Times to in
this. So we had in Germany
the voting for start
to save something for later, which
is has a positive
connotation.
But in in in the discussion
it came that everybody knew
for a fact which is bad,
and then they changed
the voting.
So you mean in this discussion?
From what I know, the terminology has
not changed.
So I did not take a closer
look at this first snooper's charter
because the second snapshot
of the one I was talking about is a
milder version of the first supercharger.
But from what I know, the terminology has
not changed. It was always called
bulk data, but data collection
by data interception, stuff like this.
Thank you.
OK, question number three,
when you searched
in the law
in the last, you search for the term
Investigatory Powers Act.
But when you search in the online
newspaper, you search for snooper's
charter. Might that have introduced
some kind of bias?
The thing is, if you
if you can solve this
hanser, this documentation of
parliamentary debates,
the debates are only
found if you enter the
official term.
Yeah, but the thing is
that, you
know, if you
look for newspaper articles.
Sorry, can you ask the question again?
So basically, have you considered
Searching for Investigatory Powers Act
and the newspapers as well to see whether
these articles maybe have a different
language about it than the
articles containing Snooper's Charter,
which is a loaded term, I guess?
Yeah, uh, no, I didn't do that.
OK, no one.
Yeah. Say I campaigned against
the powers that be as part
as a member of Overwrites Rights Group.
And I was just wondering how
when we had the press very much on our
side, how you recommends
that we can actually improve
like we lost that one.
That quick, yes,
yes, so I campaigned with
open wide sweep against the steepest
charter, and we mostly had the press
on our side, but we still lost.
I just wondered if you have any advice
for how we could do better.
It's a very tricky question,
but I found many articles saying
that many
UK citizens don't
even know what the Snooper's Charter
is. And I think
a lot was done to.
I mean, these debates have been have
been going on for almost two years.
I think a lot has been done to
disguise the ongoing process of what
is actually being discussed.
But I
you're analyzing something afterwards,
the same a suggestion how to do it
better. But, yeah, it's
a nice idea to to perhaps use
this as a basis for next time to make
analysis this way.
So we come to you.
We have also a question from the
signal from the Internet.
Yes, we do what we're
told, but did you use
for the collection and analysis
and now they are available
for the corpus?
I can compiled myself.
I use open source
tool called and conc
a.
CEO and see.
And if you search for it, you can find
it and download it.
And the web based corpus
comes with a built in tool.
You just enter the search term,
you're interested it on the website
and it has its own
analysis tool.
But there are all sorts of concordance
programs.
I think the most known one is called
wordsmith, but it's
not free from what I know.
OK, OK.
Microphone number one,
thank you for your brilliant analysis.
No, sir.
My first part of the question would have
been similar to the last one.
So what narratives can we use to
hack the discourse on such
surveillance questions?
But yeah, and the second
part of my question is maybe
a kind of another term
that was very interesting in the
discourse security, because
security most often is used in a way
that it is like there
is a terrorist attack.
So we need more security.
So we need more surveillance.
But it can also be used in a way of
the Domestic Battery Powers
Act introduces restrictions on
encryption, which we can say to
security in our all collective
security and the Internet.
So, yeah,
maybe I would be interested in the use of
security in this particular
particular discourse.
Thank you. OK, thank you.
Um, well, as
I said before, if you have such a large
corpus, you can run endless analysis.
Uh, I thought about doing security.
One thing that is always
say, um,
it was not as striking
because it is used over and
over again.
And I wanted to pick out
a more specific term.
But you could I mean, you could
focus on verbs.
They use adjectives.
I mean, if you if you're into
it, you can just search for it online
and do your own analysis
and just have a look. I mean, even if you
look at a couple of concrete answers,
you quite quickly get
an idea of how this word
is used and.
OK, so that's it
for tonight or for this talk?
I think there's another one afterwards.
So please let
us thank Lisa again for this amazing
talk and so nice to.