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Data Retention Proven to Change Citizen Behavior
G'Quann writes "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% would not use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.
This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation. Surveillance is not only bad because someone might discover some embarrassment. It changes people. 11% at least."
There are tons of studies showing that people act differently when they know they're being watched or recorded. I'd say that the 11% figure is a huge understatement, 89% of users are clueless, or, most likely, most folks have been assuming a lack of privacy all along. I'm in the 'lack of privacy from the beginning' camp. hanzie
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
But I had never questioned my privacy over telephones or online until I started hearing rumors about Echelon all over the internet.
Then Carnivore was announced and basically confirmed all the suspicions. Everything that's happened since is just in the wake.
You're nothing; like me.
"This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation."
There's more than that. Even if you have nothing to hide, you can still be mistakenly thought to have something to hide. All it takes is one false positive to ruin your day.
People who say "I have nothing to hide" realize they have already lost the argument and so try to turn it into a veiled personal attack to change the discussion.
The perfect counter to it is "so why would you tolerate someone spying on you if you have done nothing wrong?"
I know you didn't really mean that, but the misconception will rise and must be addressed.
First, No surveilence should exist that changes people's behavior. That is a definition of tyrany.
Second, if a drug dealer did modify his communications, it was in the direction of using a more secure way to send information.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I understand your whole argument except the 'free software' implication. I don't see how paying for software, or getting it for free, has anything to do with one's ability to preserve privacy and political security.
Maybe you meant to say "Microsoft allows politicians to open backdoors" or "Linux programmers would not care what politicians want." But since you said neither, your vague comment leaves me wondering how 'free software' relates to 'preserving privacy'.
If you have complete control over your software, as free (as in freedom) software guarantees by definition, you can enforce your own privacy and security. If you have a solution you cannot modify, you are completely restricted to its ideas of privacy and security.
Human freedom has to extend to freedom of information and freedom of control over our own tools, including software and hardware. If we allow our corporations and governments to control our tools, they move on to controlling our media (DRM's already here) and eventually our legal freedom (DMCA raids?!)
Sam ty sig.
Sure, criminal behaviour has changed. Instead of using regular cell phones, professional bad guys now use nice untraceable prepaid cell phones (and discard them regularly). So, the data retention has indeed brought on a change - but the change makes the data retention useless.
What the data retention does do, is to trip up the only-vaguely-criminal acts of the amateur. For instance, it is now much easier to track down the affairs of an unfaithful spouse, and to win a nice fat divorce settlement. Somehow I doubt that was the original aim of the data retention.
The thing is, the vast majority of people have no way to verify that their software is secure, even if it's open source. And even the people who do have the ability aren't going to. Are you really going to read through every line of code in the Linux kernel looking for backdoors? What about the compiler you use to build it? And the same for every application you use. Even for widely used pieces of software you can't assume that someone would find a backdoor that had been inserted -- look at the recent Debian SSH key bug (yes, I know that wasn't a backdoor, but it could just as well have been). Open source isn't a guarantee of anything.
In light of the people deciding that people don't have anything to hide, I ask that everyone answer the following questionnaire:
1) What is your bank account PIN number?
2) What is your annual salary?
3) What is your Significant Other's phone number?
4) What are your passwords to various email and web accounts?
5) What is the length of your penis?
normal good people have things to hide, confidential and private matters that need protection. If you think you have nothing to hide you are abnormal, and may need psychiatric help.
Yes, look at it. Luciano Bello found it. He's a Debian developer. Please don't go off about how long it took to find it. Think about that: it makes GP's point for him.
And ook at the rest of the argument. ~Are you going to read every line~? C'mon: strawmen don't get much more blatant than that. Similarly with "Open source isn't a guarantee of anything." As compared to what, please? Another strawman.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
If one out of every nine citizens is a criminal then you're doing something badly wrong, and electronic surveillance is not the way to fix it.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
So bother them and only if they pose a problem. People can worry about the slightest things getting out, not because it's illegal, sometimes not even because it's damaging to one's reputation, maybe it's just because no one has any right to know.
So yes, if you suspect me of being the leader of some crime ring and have more than a hunch, then by all means, track my every word and move. Go ahead and make my house one big mic if you want. If you want to find potential criminals, then piss off and take the time to do some research to demonstrate that you actually need to know my every word.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Of course we all have something to hide. In a litigious society, nearly everyone has broken a law. When was the last time you ran a red light? Jaywalked? Downloaded a movie? Used drugs? More pointedly, is it really the government's business if someone is cheating on their spouse? The danger isn't that the government will find out about these things and prosecute everyone responsible for them. The danger is that you make an enemy in a position of power, and that person decides to hang you out to dry for your crimes or embarrassing incidents for their own political gain. Law stops being used as a tool for order, and is used as a political tool.
> ..the vast majority of people have no way to verify that
> their software is secure..
Doesn't matter. So long as we are ALLOWED to possess Free Software it keeps em honest. How can you enforce a backdoor when there are hundreds of distribution points? When anyone who wants to can replace/rewrite a major codebase at whim?
Now compare to closed commercial software. First off remember that all closed shops utterly depend on the government to grant and enforce the monopoly they depend upon for their revenue. As a practical matter there are only a handful of closed shops still in the operating system game, leaving a few pressure points we would all be left depending upon.
Democrat delenda est
Why does the mention of hiding something make everyone assume it is illegal or immoral?
Maybe I'm hiding my plans or ideas for a revolutionary new produce or service so I can patent it and develop it. Maybe I'm hiding the fact I sneak off every night to night school to get that high school diploma so my friends don't think less of me. Maybe I sneak off to the gym to improve my self and only I will know if I fail. Maybe I want to hide the gift I got my girlfriend and the running around I did to get it.
Privacy is the right to control the personal aspects of your life and who you share them with.
Yes, and that's still much better than when much worse mistakes are made in proprietary systems. At least in the open source case the mistake *was* found, and because of the heterogeny of the open source space, it only affected "some" distributions, and the fix was released in a matter of hours. I haven't heard of a single high profile target compromised because of that error. Many Windows bugs have affected over 80% of the world's desktops at a time, and there have been *plenty* of those, not just one.
And if you want to play this game, why not bring up the case where an actual blackhat tampered with the Linux upstream CVS repository and his clever backdoor was still caught before it was even released. http://kerneltrap.org/node/1584 Just because a single error occured in Debian's process does not damn the entire open source world.
Sam ty sig.
That's not the point. With open source you have the possibility of checking the source for things you don't agree with. If you're not a programmer you can hire one.
With proprietary software you don't even have that.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I actually trust my government for the most part. (It's not the US government, incidentally.) Having said this there's no way in hell that I support legislation that gives the government and its agencies power to snoop more on its citizens, at least without some very carefully designed procedures in place such as requiring warrants from independent judges, etc.
The whole nothing-to-hide argument seems thin. Personally I don't have anything serious to hide that I'm aware of, and I doubt I ever will. That said, I also have no reason to believe that I'll trust the government and its agencies in the future.
Simply trusting agencies not to abuse their power isn't good enough, because sooner or later someone will always come along who's happy to abuse their position and take advantage of it. (Communism's great until the corrupt people get to the top and then use that influence to change the rules and keep themselves there and push their own agenda.) By the same token, I have no reason to believe that if extra power is given to police and similar agencies to snoop on me and others, that they won't be full of people ready to abuse that ability in 10 or 15 years time.
Having a good and reliable government is as much about good design of its rules and keeping them firmly in place as it is about trusting the people who are in it. Sooner or later bad people will come along, but a good structure will keep the influence of those people to a minimum.
E-mail and phone calls are just conversations that happen to occur using electronic means. Requiring them to be logged is no more reasonable than it is to require that every face-to-face conversation a person has also be logged. (It's simply easier to log the electronic conversations.)
This is why I think that data retention laws are ridiculous in most cases. The main accomplishment of such laws is to make email and phone calls much less useful.
but to enforce DRM they are dependent on government guns! Once there is DRM everywhere backed by the shut-up power of the DMCA there's no legal way to even SAY (because it's illegal to distribute and use tools to even look!) that a piece of software has a backdoor. It only took the FCC goons about 5 minutes to realize they could use that to start locking "entertainment" down... public safety LOVES the combination that's eliminated public scanners of police frequencies.
Do I read every line? No. Do I randomly, check submitted patches? Yes. Not all the time, not really that often, but enough that, with enough people like me, the "many eyes" system will work. Not everyone has to check everything, just a bunch of independent people have to check a bunch of things.
Not a sentence!
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Question is: Do you trust your government?
If yes, then there is really no bad point in what you wrote.
Even if it is legal for me as a person to learn your secrets, I guess it would be still illegal to abuse them and get your money without your permission. So if I do so, you can fight me. And it would quite fair fight, man against man, some people on my side, some (I believe more) on yours, plus state justice will be helping you.
But if state takes your money, they can "rule" and "redefine" the nature of that act so it wont be a fair fight - you against government.
I guess that if you trust your government and this trust is justified, such data retention is still dangerous to you. Because it broadens the possibilities for criminal elements to do you harm. Criminal maybe wont be able to corrupt some clerk or official to get your data, but he can simply break into some computer. If the data is not there, no harm to you. But if the data exists ...
But if you do not trust your government ... because there are corrupt and/or incompetent people then it's much bigger problem. There is still this alredy mentioned criminal. But he has broader spectrum of means of getting to the data about you. Plus there are those corrupt and/or incompetent government officials which will (either by purpose or simply by accident) use tha data about you to cause you harm.
So to sum it: Trustworthy government should present some good argument for data retention which should outweight the risk I mentioned. Untrustworthy one ... can do whatever they can, we simply have to oppose them. If for nothing else than for our own selfishess - we do not what them to cause us harm.
And I for one do not trust my government. Based on what I know they do. Based on what I hard/red them saying. Based on what I see on the streets and in the country. Simply, based on what I see/hear/feel/..., based on my experience in my country.
hany
I don't see how your comment is insightful. It is pretty obvious that if you are willing to accept any kind of hypothesis then you will never be safe. After all, evil hackers from the government could hack into your computer and plant a backdoor. But on a basic level, if you want to have a greater amount of certainty that your conversation won't be "retained" in order to comply with your local (or with USA) legislations, don't use commercial software. On a medium level, you can google every open source software you are using and do some research, communicate to developers and people from the community to have a better idea on what are you dealing with. As your paranoia increases, you'll need more resources to make sure you aren't "being watched". But the level of certainty you can achieve with open source software is far greater than the level of certainty you can achieve with closed source software. Again, open source isn't a guarantee of anything. But what is anyway?
Ha, that is hilarous. I guess it is because some stupid European dared to critisise or question some US policy, that logically imples that Europeans believe that they are perfect. Very good.
Good to see you get modded so high as well. You clearly deserve it.
I usually prefer ha ha funny, to crazy funny.
A freedom is only worth as much as what you can do because of it.
That is not true. Even if a freedom is no particular use to you directly, you may benefit by other people exercising their freedom. I may never modify a single line of open source code, but I benefit immensely from all the people who have. Without them I wouldn't have a desktop with a powerful command line and virtual desktops.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!