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."

Comments

Will it help?

[Iamthecheese]

To what extent have studies like this modified governments' behavior?

Re:Will it help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno... they try to hide the data retention practices better?

You've got it backwards.

The correct answer is "They expand the data retention practices, and they make sure their subjects know about it".

The unmonitored Internet was a way to make sure that any two people, anywhere on the planet, could exchange ideas (and spam, and political flamewars on message boards, and even LOLcats) with each other.

Users of the monitored Internet voluntarily restrict themselves to "safe" (government-approvable) media, and their acquaintances, friendships, and relationships to pools of "safe" (government-approvable) people.

It's been said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

That's not quite true. The unspoken assumption in the early '90s was that "censorship" meant "externally-imposed" censorship. Indeed, the Internet interprets externally-mandated censorship as damage and routes around it, but the Internet has no defense against self-censorship. Make the user scared to search for information about topic XYZ, and you've effectively censored the Internet where topic XYZ is concerned.

Pretty clever, and all it took to scare an entire planet into self-censorship was a few press releases and carefully-selected arrests and/or disappearances.

Wake up! Domestic spying is bad news.

[westbake]

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.

I won't even discuss things with my doctor

[Bored MPA]

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.

It's funnier than that

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Wake up! Domestic spying is bad news.

[mabhatter654]

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.

Re:Wake up! Domestic spying is bad news.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.