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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."
To what extent have studies like this modified governments' behavior?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to friend and foe alike. Public display of Nazi symbols is still against the law because it outrages so many. People who lived through the East German Police state have more recent and personal reasons to fear this kind of monitoring. Domestic spying is about eliminating political opposition and the only way to save yourself from that is to run away. Eventually, even those who manage to keep out of sight by doing nothing are destroyed by the schemes of those in power. States that do this are out of control.
If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided, citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.
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Because anything and everything my doctor writes down is reviewable by some nitwit risk analysis agent who's performing an analysis of my background and medical history that was originally written to standards associated with middle class, heterosexual, white christian males.
not poor minorities from the ghetto. and certainly not poor fags.
it's no wonder gov't has no respect for private citizens when the folks that are hired have to open up their life history and medical record and thus _must_ have nothing to hide or be very good at hiding it.
My wife was recently in the hospital in a large city. While driving home after visiting her, I spotted a man lying on his back across a sidewalk. His groceries or whatever were in bags and scattered around him. I had no idea how this came to be, but knew this was not a normal and expected sight on a city sidewalk. No one was around and no one seemed to care. And it was raining, hard! I reached for my cell phone to dial 911 to report seeing the man laying on the sidewalk. Then I thought a minute. My wife watches crime programs all the time. In those programs the police, the purported 'good guys' violate citizens rights as an everyday mundane and expected matter of course with the feelings, rights, or property of those citizens cavalierly disregarded as insignificant and disposable, just like those citizens. Welcome to fascist America! I put the phone back down thanking myself for never having even turned it on. Cell phones, my cell fone, report 'caller ID' to all those called, and a 911 call would certainly retain MY identity. On television, all reporters of incidents that may or may not be found to have been crimes are the first suspects to be considered by the police ministries to maybe have 'committed' the crime or whatever. So by being a 'good samaritan', I would in reality be denouncing myself to some gestapo in this day and age? Get investigated! Or worse! Spend useless time justifying to the grubby hands of some ambitious cops and prosecutors that I was 'innocent' or whatever! Spend maybe thousands literally down a rathole, and for what? Being a 'good samaritan'? The guy on the sidewalk for all anyone knows was a druggy or a drunk that had fainted or whatever, but given the opportunity might have a penchant for ill gotten gain if some cop made a deal with him for both of them to lie and finger some innocent fool for whatever when all he wanted was to try to help. OK maybe I listen to the wife too much, but that is what husbands do. In any case, in this case especially maybe what I have to hide is my hard earned savings in my bank account, and all I have to do is shut up, keep the damn cell fone off, and leave whoever that was laying on the sidewalk in the rain to his fate and let God sort it out. If I had an anonymous cell fone, it would have been a different story, but cell fones are not anonymous now, especially with the demise of analog fones that had no Gee Pee Esss in them that was used by northeastern university recently to track over 100,000 of those tattle tale digital fones to see where the users went in all hours of the day without their knowledge or consent. When forced to use a digital cell, I will only use one with an easily removable battery, so when I am not using it, I will remove that battery and wrap the thing in foil approximating a Faraday cage. All fones are recorded and all movements of those fones are recorded as well. One day soon I expect road signs to have active content screens. Just think, Joe drives down the highway and a huge billboard suddenly lights up in front of him: "Joe Crow, you are two days late on your buy here pay here car payment, ya bum. Pull that car over as we will remotely use 'On Star' to disable it in 20 seconds...19...18...17....16..."
There is an ocean of difference between having nothing to hide and nothing to lose.
If you asked me my bank account averages that's one thing, to hand you the information it would take to drain them is another.
Generally when people say they have nothing to hide they mean within a legal context. In other words: I haven't broken the law.
The bottom line is that I know that the government does (or could) know my bank account information, my medical history, my cell phone calls, etc etc.
And saying I have nothing to hide from the government is also different from saying I have nothing to hide from you. Unlike most of the tin-foil cap brigade I'm pretty logical about the concept that if the government really had that much of an interest in me or that much intent against me there pretty much ain't but jack and shit I can do about it. But you on the other hand? I could probably stop you from whatever it is you think you're going to do.
The recent debian thing was caused by some developers who thought they knew better than the upstream provider, and they ended up SIGNIFICANTLY DESTROYING security in the process.
That wouldn't have happened if they couldn't modify the source in the first place.
See? Having the source isn't a utopia, idiots still screw things up.
Neah, it is just the 11% that have an account in Lichtenshtein or a villa on Majorca in the name of their great grand aunt.
After the Euro changeover the German Tax office had a large contingent of their officers seconded to the Balearics and Canaries for a couple of years for a reason. Based on the submitted tax returns the burgers were poor as church mice. At the same time the construction industry in Spain was undergoing a multibillion euro boom with German money appearing out of nowhere. Most of it is still untraced by the way (though some taxes have been collected).
In any case, it is the country where tax evasion is so ripe that tracking evaders has escalated to the point of being the secret services. And on top of all they actually dare bitching about black market economies and such in Eastern Europe. They should fix themselves first.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Now before I start IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist) but I did read a bit on the topic at one point, to try to understand how people work, so to speak.
One thing that stuck in my head was that there's a relatively large disconnect between what people say in surveys and what they actually do. What people as in surveys isn't as much deliberately lying, or even being aware that they lie, but basically describing an ideal "self" that they'd like to be or were taught to be. They describe someone who's more socially acceptable. E.g.,
- A (formerly) hunter-gatherer tribe had traditionally a martial culture glorifying brave hunters and warriors. So in a survey almost all males described themselves as hunters and warriors. The problem? They had actually gradually switched to agriculture some time ago. Most of them didn't even have a weapon, and hadn't hunted or fought in their life.
- A community prided themselves in helping each other and doing stuff together and things like that. So in a survey they said that, yeah, verily, they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, etc. Except in practice the last time either actually happened was some half a century ago.
- At one point where meat prices went up, they asked people whether they eat more or less meat. Most said, basically, "screw this, I'll eat less of that until the prices come down. That'll show 'em." Except they also looked at sales data, and actually rummaged through that town's garbage to see what packaging people throw away. Meat consumption had actually gone _up_.
It turns out that you might be better off observing them, whenever possible, than asking people to describe themselves.
What I'm getting at here is, basically, yes, the same applies to "I have nothing to hide" declarations in survey. If people are under the impression that a nice person wouldn't do stuff they need to hide from their neighbours, they'll adjust their perceptions of themselves to think they are (closer to) that ideal nice person.
Additionally, I'd say that a lot of such behaviour changing is probably subconscious anyway. Probably the 89% just didn't spend much time analyzing and second guessing their own actions and conversations, nor asked themselves "exactly why am I not calling my old pal Mohammed Abd Jihad any more?" They just don't, and don't spend time navel-gazing and wondering about it.
For some probably cognitive dissonance kicked in a long time ago, and manufactured an acceptable model and an explanation anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I believe surveillance, when universal, and when the feeds are available to all, can be an extremely good thing. This essentially emulates small town life, but with the benefit that you have so many people out there, that odds are excellent that you're going to find lots of other people engaging in your behavior, and even better, people will see the context in which your behavior is marinating.
I think this creates a glass house society where you quickly realize that everyone is human, can much more easily sympathize with the poor, and the rich and powerful cannot get away with quite as much.
There are lots of other benefits of doing this, from law enforcement (in a non-Orwellian way) automation, to the relaxation of the executive branch, to having perfect forensic details of all kinds of events that would teach us about human society much faster than we've ever been able to learn about it before, to providing a vast source of entertainment and education.
The only issue with surveillance is when it is not universal and when the feeds are not available to all.
but as long as SOME people CAN do that we're OK. Look at how the DMCA works where even the tools to look at something like De-CSS would be considered illegal. Consider the FCC really wanted to pass the broadcast flag that would REQUIRE all TV decoding software to be locked against the user for public broadcasts! That means no end Users could record the nightly news... the start of re-writing history every few years with nobody to even legally defend against it.
Yup, that's for example this Airbus spying by americans I mentioned in my other post.
If you are able to sufficiently distance yourself from your government in terms of feelings and day to day routine so as to allow yourself a chance to clearly think about stuff, than it's usually quite funny to decompose official arguments for something the government is doing and finding a real motive.
Like some instances of those red light cameras you mentioned.
Or strict gun regulations, "free" services provided by state to its citizens and so on.
Right now, in Slovakia, current champion in this regard is new press law: Officialy the purpose of the changes is to allow all the people (including politicians - they're people too, at least so far :) to demand the publication of their reply to any article if the article is about them. It does not matter whether the article is telling the truth or not. Of course a lot of people clearly see it as a way for current ruling parties to limit the amount of articles about them because ussualy they are criticizing them (because ussualy there is a lot of bad stuff to write about). Newspapers will then either fight it or at the (ridiculous) end will (for the fear of litigation) simply write only about entities which are not able to demand the publication of reply. :)
hany
I'd imagine that the signal to noise ratio is steadily climbing since games became a mainstream form of entertainment, given that even a short conversation with a friend about any number of modern games would contain otherwise 'suspicious' keywords.
Discussing the best use and deployment of military resources in a RTS, how best to use weapons, bombs etc in FPS's. Discuss how you keep on crashing your plane in the latest flight sim and find yourself on a no-fly list...
I don't think the GP's arguments are as flawed as you claim.
A freedom is only worth as much as what you can do because of it. Since most people lack the resources to audit source code and change anything they don't like, the only advantage open source software offers them from the perspective under discussion is that they are trusting an anonymous group of people who talk up freedom a lot rather than trusting a group of people working for a company who have commercial interests.
This most certainly does undermine the original argument, because it contradicts the claims about all the things you can do just because you're using "free" software.
In short, you could make an argument that open source is a necessary condition for the personal control under discussion, but that is not the same as demonstrating that it is sufficient for the same. And realistically, you ultimately get a "who watches the watchers" problem either way, so I'm not convinced that even the necessity argument is a particularly strong one in practice.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://www.answers.com/topic/hawthorne-effect?cat=health/
"This behavior was documented by a research team led by Elton Mayo in the 1920s at the Western Electric Company Hawthorne plant. In studying the effect of lighting on productivity, the researchers found that, regardless of the lighting conditions introduced, productivity improved."