The U.S. government engaged in unprecedented forms of mass surveillance in the twenty-first century. Users of the The Onion Router (Tor), an anonymity-granting technology, mask themselves from state surveillance and can gain access to illicit content on the Dark Web. Drawing on theory regarding “exposure” to surveillance, this study examines how two issue-attention cycles (related to the Edward Snowden state surveillance revelations and the Dark Web respectively) are associated with public interest in the Tor browser in the United States. Using data at the state-year level from 2006 to 2015, this study estimates fixed effects models, controlling for sociodemographics, the presence of journalism, tech, and political jobs, as well as multiple measures of state political ideology. The results indicate that state-years with greater popularity of Google searches related to the Snowden story had significantly higher popularity of searches for Tor. By contrast, there was no association between Dark Web search popularity and Tor search popularity. These findings are consistent with the notion that the Snowden incident increased Americans’ sense of exposure, leading to interest in anonymity-granting technology.

The U.S. government engaged in unprecedented forms of mass surveillance in the 21st century. Users of the The Onion Router (Tor), an anonymity-granting technology, mask themselves from state surveillance and can gain access to illicit content on the Dark Web. Drawing on theory regarding “exposure” to surveillance, this study examines how two issue-attention cycles (related to the Edward Snowden state surveillance revelations and the Dark Web respectively) are associated with public interest in the Tor browser in the U.S. Using data at the state-year level from 2006-2015, this study estimates fixed effects models, controlling for socio-demographics, the presence of journalism, tech, and political jobs, as well as multiple measures of state political ideology. The results indicate that state-years with greater popularity of Google searches related to the Snowden story had significantly higher popularity of searches for Tor. By contrast, there was no association between Dark Web search popularity and Tor search popularity. These findings are consistent with the notion that the Snowden incident increased Americans’ sense of exposure, leading to interest in anonymity-granting technology.

Sociological interest in post-reform China has burgeoned since sociologists such as Victor Nee and Andrew Walder had initiated a debate of whether the market transition of former socialist countries benefit the direct producers of the market rather than political elites. Informed by the market transition debate, stratification theories, and intergenerational mobility studies, this study aims to examine whether under the party-state political structure, ruling party membership is a substantial exogenous source of social class stratification. Data in this study is drawn from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey (n = 2,209). The ordinary least square (OLS) regression suggests that for non-institutionalized Chinese adults who are born during the reform era (1978 -2013), their parents' Chinese Communist Party membership is a statistically significant factor in determining their social class measured by their income and education, when holding constant sex, age, region, urbanity, and ethnicity. This study contributes to the sociological understanding of how political institutions shape individual socio-economic status and how state intervention perpetuates or diminishes social inequality on the individual level.

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