How does a government's covert digital surveillance of its citizens' private communications affect the citizens' digital technology usage behaviors? Building on the "chilling effects theory," we expect covert digital surveillance to increase citizens' risk appraisals about sharing sensitive information in the digital medium and lead to selfrestrictions and self-censorship on the use of digital technologies. We also expect this relationship to be moderated by three personal characteristics of a

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... itizen: (i) trust in government, (ii) privateness versus publicness, and (iii) awareness about government's counterterrorism surveillance activities. Edward Snowden's June 2013 revelations about the U.S. government's covert digital surveillance program serve as an exogenous shock that could potentially change digital technology usage behaviors of U.S. citizens. To test our hypotheses, we use a dataset that was collected in the aftermath of the Snowden's 2013 revelations, in four waves of surveys of a nationally representative panel of 607 U.S citizens. We find that U.S. citizens significantly changed their use of digital technologies in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations. They self-censored the sensitive topics and keywords in online searches, and self-imposed various restrictions on the use of a variety of digital technologies. A citizen's trust in government and awareness about the counterterrorism focus of the government's surveillance activities reduced the self-censorship behaviors. Privateness of the citizen increased selfcensorship further. We discuss the implications of these findings for IS research and practice.