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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.
"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 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.
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.
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!
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