Freedom of expression is one of the issues I write about as a scholar. So these are interesting times on more than one front.

One is the matter of privacy and surveillance. Here the interesting thing is the Pres-o-Dent's NSA initiative. Today's WashPost has a piece with significant new information in it that's getting a lot of attention in the b'sphere. The part that caught my attention came toward the end, discussing the sorts of "acoustic" information the NSA's mechanical surveillance analyzes:

A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.

This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Frankly, we'll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time," he said, "but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions."

Egad. Is comment even necessary? Suffice it to say that I don't know anyone who doesn't show "paralinguistic" evidence of "intent to deceive" on the phone. And really, hasn't the culture already decided that 1 in 100 is not worth the price? Or am I misreading all the history I know?

Still, the pollyanna in me must speak: we're still not back to Nixon.

And, as Juan Cole pointed out today, we're still not back to Ayodhya. That is, the ruckus over Danish cartoons of Muhammed still hasn't produced riots where thousands died, which what happened in India a dozen years ago when Hindus rioted over a dispute over a religious site and thousands of Muslims were killed. A sense of proportion, please.

In cases in which the exotic threaten the freedom of expression of the media, an outsized reaction always follows IN THE MEDIA. Sometimes this outsized reaction in turn produces an outsized reaction in the world. The spiral of outrage-inflation will usually exhaust itself in a couple of weeks with minimal bloodshed, though sometimes with an authentic martyr.

But in the meantime there will be (welcome) affirmations of the right to free expression (often from the same people who will instantly condone suppression in the interest of national security or who don't give a shit about the way markets stifle expression) and (unwelcome) contrasts between the civilized and uncivilized portions of the world. About which I'll make a couple of points I've made elsewhere. First, everyone draws the line somewhere. Second, everyone thinks everyone else's line is arbitrary. Third, even though the media are increasingly sensitive about threats to the safety of journalists, writers, etc., in any historical sense those professions are safer than ever. And finally, if you look at the actual threats to journalists and other professional communicators, it's still the governments and their armies that are at the top of the list, and then movements of the right come in second. Certainly in the US it isn't Muslims that journalists need to fear but neo-Nazis and others on the extreme right--and you're still more likely to get killed with (or by) the army.

I was surprised to see the US State Department coming out with a (soft) condemnation of inflammatory cartoons yesterday; I haven't found the text of that announcement yet. The State Department's website isn't transparent to the novice....