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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!