Raison D'être

The mission of the Journal of American Thought Crime is to consider the effects of a culture which tolerates the unregulated surveillance of its people, and to spread knowledge of the tools which can shield them from unwarranted government scrutiny.

The idea of "thought crime" comes from George Orwell's novel 1984, published in 1949. That disstopian vision of a world dominated by surveillence and unbridled government reach into the minds and private lives of its citizens was formed in the midst of the now defunct cold war. But today the technology of surveillance and deterioration of commitment to both privacy and civil rights gives us reason to reconsider this term and its relevance to our current situation. That is what we hope to do through the journal.

By an attempt to use technology to create a safe space, we can think about why the space we are in might not be safe, and what it would take to make it that way. There is certainly some effort involved. But we hope there will be equal rewards. We want to create a new literature of freedom and unfreedom – a literature of ephemerality and memory, a literature that is resistant to the tentacles of governmental intrusion.

Who are we?

The creators and editors of this website are concerned citizens just like you. We are artist and writers and technologists who suspect that thinking is unduly fettered by the threat of surveillence and are willing to do what we can to reclaim a space for private thoughts and intimate conversations.

Colophon

The technical functioning of this website is dependent on a raft of free open source projects:

• Drupal 6 (Theme based on "AD Redoable" by Aviso Designs )
• Mailman 2 (SSLS, GPG/SMIME-enhanced patch by Joost van Baal)
• ReCaptcha
• GnuPG
• GnuPGInterface
• Apache 2
• PHP 5
• Tripwire
• Snort
• Base

A hearty thanks to the thousands of people who made this possible by contributing their energies to free open source software.