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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.
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.
That means 11% of the people were going to do something morally wrong and thought twice about getting caught. That proves survaillence is doing it's part to curtail the unwashed masses of wickedness on the interwebitubes. When more like 50% start censoring themselves then we'll know that people take their freedom of speech seriously and make sure only edifying things are spoken.
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.
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 am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
Yeah, the guilty 11%!
-Peter
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?"
Authorities believe 11% of Germans are hiding something.
Update at 9.
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.
Behavior changes when people are observed? Psychologists have known this for years. It's called the Hawthorne effect, and it's something you always have to watch for when studying behavior.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
These 11% (would probably be higher if more people actually knew what their governments could do) are proof that paranoid schizophrenia doesn't exist. It's not paranoia when people really are watching your every move, reading your email, and listening to your phone conversations. Paranoid schizophrenics, rejoice! You're just schizophrenic now!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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.
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.
That's a useless argument. Having the source and having a community built around the source is already infinitely better than having neither. The very tangible result of this is that Windows Vista is covered in DRM and privacy leaks from the ground up, while you can get a wide range of modern Linux and BSD distros with neither of those problems.
Sam ty sig.
Like I just replied to the other AC, of course you have no way to verify that it's secure, but at least with the source you still have power over it. If you don't want DRM integrated into the kernel, you don't have to have it. Go ahead and remove the DRM from Vista. I'll wait right here.
Sam ty sig.
Freedom means that you can do all of that and teams of people do for both cooperative and competitive reasons. All of the usual guards for non free software apply. People are watching their computers and will report suspicious communication. Then come all of the free software checks. The code gets checked upstream by the team that creates it and then downstream by many distributions that use it before finally being checked by the much larger number of users. The free software community is able to verify code from creation to desktop use and it's a fairly competitive place. For every kind of check you have in the non free world, you have more and better in the free world as well as greater competition and willingness to report wrongdoing. This makes it unlikely you will be caught by malicious code.
I learned here at Slashdot that Europe is perfect, so this couldn't have happened there.
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
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.
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.
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.
Free software is not about money, as is free in "free beer". It is about freedom as is in "free speech".
With commercial software you have no legal possibility nor adequate technical tools to deeply verify if software you use has backdoors or anything else you do not want to be there inside your computer, phone, videorecorder, anything. And actually it does not matter if such malvare serves to government mafians or criminal ruffians. Whoever they are, THEY have control of all your information interactions. You have no privacy at all.
With Free Software, if you care to train your relevant skills, you at least have a chance to affect what kind of software you use and how and this means indirectly YOU have control of your information interactions. That's privacy.
Implications of both situations to political security are obvious.
There you are, staring at me again.
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 currently work for a non-Free software company (not as a developer though), and want to point out that as not entirely true. It depends very highly on the industry and the customer. Being an employee I could get a copy of our software at no cost or close enough that it wouldn't matter (or so I assume; worse-case scenario, I re-generate myself a temporary key once a month). However I still choose to write my own applications where I could use our pre-built tool. Cost is not the issue: it's a combination of (my general lack of) experience with the
Back on topic though, we could still sell our software even if copyright law didn't exist or if it was open source. Why? We have a support department. Not a forum, but a department. When you're selling to companies, there's tremendous value to them to be able to pick up a phone and call someone when something's not working. Consider the paid versions of MySQL, for example. I'm not at all knocking FOSS for this approach to support, but rather pointing out that if your target audience consists primarily of large businesses, the ability to get in direct contact with someone who's paid to troubleshoot or walk across the building to find the developer who wrote the problematic code is a BIG selling point.
For software that costs under a couple hundred bucks, this isn't so much of an issue. However when companies are going to be making an investment in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, you can bet your ass that the support and maintenance of that software is very important. Don't get me wrong - we've lost deals to Drupal and Joomla probably as often as we've lost deals to our "real" competition, but more often than not those were very unqualified leads anyways.
I work in sales, so take it with a grain of salt if you will. But I'm not saying that commercial/closed-source software is better than free or open-source software (it goes both ways all the time and often is a matter of opinion), just that it's more than the existence of IP laws that keep us in business.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
ah, yes, Free Software. I can see the Jack Bauer scenario now.
Jack: Are we on a secure line?
Chloe: Don't worry, Jack. I'm running Free Software on my laptop. This makes me automatically immune from wiretapping of my cellphone...
Je ne parle pas francais.
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.
Unfortunately... I can't give it too you or even describe how I did it... that would be breaking our American DMCA law...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
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.
You asked ~are you going to read every line?~, as if he'd argued "if, and only if, you read every line, you can enforce your privacy and security."
Which he hadn't.
You refuted a flawed argument that he didn't make.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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.
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!
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'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 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?
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.
I'll try, but all I have are these rusty, blunt metal tools...
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."
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!