Surveillance craze in the European Union

[Skgoa]

You think they would let you of the hook that easily? We are talking about a (hypothetical) orwellian state. I don't see a reason why they would stop just because you defected to the enemy.

[Number Theoretic]

I could at least try, as long as it is still possible

[PeZook]

By constructing a system with a watched populace and the unseen watchers, you create a nationwide Panopticon.

You know, it kinda works the other way around, too.

Police cannot be everywhere at the same time, so many small infractions remain unpunished ; However, people are aware there is always a risk of being caught for whatever. Thus, they tend to do what the state asks (like driving with lights and seatbelts on), with the tacit agreement that if you forget every once in a while, you will probably get away with it.

Now, since everybody's human, they tend to occasionally cross regulations about speeding or littering or seatbelt laws etc. even with the best of intentions. Being immediately fined for every minor infraction they possibly commit would automatically breed mistrust and resistance and resentment towards authority, because there is no human way you can perfectly obey every minor law 100% of the time. People would start covering their license plates, resisting arrest, contesting tickets and doing hundreds of other minor but annoying things that use law enforcement resources and thus cost the state money and legitimacy.

So, in a way, it is beneficial for law enforcement to be imperfect, at least in minor cases ; It is a silent admission that the state thinks its citizens are human, and will let them continue being human if you just don't overdo it. The fact it's a silent admission means the state doesn't throw away authority (they are doing what they can!) amongst the citizens while not breeding resentment.

I hope this rant reads coherently...

[bilateralrope]

PeZook, what about the law making an allowance for people slipping up a few times ?

Say, the first x times someone litters in a year they get nothing beyond a warning. The fines only start with the x+1 time they get caught.

[someone_else]

Hm, it's not the first time some Italian politician none heard of before says crap like that (and to protect children, nonetheless). Most of them ignore that ISPs do already that kind of logging as a matter of course and keep the records for some years in case the police shows up and asks for them (with the appropriate court mandate, of course). Has basically eradicated pedo sites, locks down access to some selected sites like piratebay (google it to find out why), but cannot really do anything about P2P, and knows jack shit of what you did on those sites.

Besides, even assuming that abovementioned previously-unknown politician gets away with this nonsense, Tor or similar systems would basically fuck sideways the proposed logger and any other regardless of anything, since they use a different transmission protocol (one that does not tell the site who is the user, and one that does not tell the user who is the site).
Another measure anyone with slight skill would laugh at? Yes, another measure that jails only retards.

I really love Internet.

Can somebody who is anti-surveillance please explain their views and reasoning to me so I have something more to go on than the pro-surveillance "nothing to hide" argument?

A few things off the top of my head:
-You can bet your backside that the data gathered will be handled by poo-throwing monkeys. Like say some time ago a bunch of fuckwits downloaded buttloads of passwords used to access private areas of sites of our universities. Besides, Italy's government's IT skills are pretty poor on average.

-The data gathered has a very high commercial value, if the sheer amount of crap sites that try to stealthily track me and what I do while I navigate (and get locked away by firefox addons like ghostery and flashblock) means anything. This means the pressure to sell it legally or not will be high. And I don't exactly trust them to say NO.

-The data gathered can be used ala thought police, by simply listing all the people that connects to certain places the government does not want them to. Less of an issue for relatively civil places, BIG issue for less-civil ones. And there is also the possibility that these systems backfire horrendously if poorly implemented, think of the US's "no fly lists" where even 3 year olds get tagged as terrorists, or that German Trojan that works only on Windows. You want to risk that screwup with pedopornography or whatever? (i.e. you end up jailed as pedo/rebel/Black Block, whatever just because the logger system is stupid)


It basically boils down to "I do not trust the Government to do things right", I wouldn't mind having everything I do logged if there was Jesus Christ in charge of the place and cops were angels, but that is not going to be the case.

You get much more benefits by just hiring more cops, paying their equipment, and making sure there is no dumbass among them than enacting these IT wankings.

[PeZook]

PeZook, what about the law making an allowance for people slipping up a few times ?

Say, the first x times someone litters in a year they get nothing beyond a warning. The fines only start with the x+1 time they get caught.

Possibly that could work, yeah. I was thinking more in line of management theory, in that there is an amount of control that people respond well to and that actually improves their job performance and makes them happier.

Too little or too much control makes people either slack off and hurt the company/unit/group, or resent the lack of freedom, even if the rules set are actually pretty fair. Different people obviously have different tolerances et al...

[Skgoa]

-The data gathered can be used ala thought police, by simply listing all the people that connects to certain places the government does not want them to. Less of an issue for relatively civil places, BIG issue for less-civil ones. And there is also the possibility that these systems backfire horrendously if poorly implemented, think of the US's "no fly lists" where even 3 year olds get tagged as terrorists, or that German Trojan that works only on Windows. You want to risk that screwup with pedopornography or whatever? (i.e. you end up jailed as pedo/rebel/Black Block, whatever just because the logger system is stupid)

That reminds me of something that happened a couple of years ago: The media was full of anouncments about how there had been a huge roundup of pedophiles. IIRC 30k cases worldwide, with thousands of houses searched in Germany. Halve a year later, all cases were quietly closed with not a single convction. As it turned out, the law enforcment agencies had just crawled credit card transactions for one specific price. Anyone who paid that price at any time in the prior years got searched, their computers seized, etc. Let me repeat that: thousands of people were publicly identified (well, accused, put you know how perception works) as pedophiles, without a single actual guilty person to show for it. People followed up on these cases: hundreds of destroyed marriages, lost jobs, psychological issues... for absolutely nothing.
That was one of the big incentives to get the new privacy/civil rights movement going over here.

Another telling case is the one where an employee was fired and charged with downloading child pornography on a work computer. As it turned out, it was an image in a pop-up.

Or the case of Andrej Holm, a sociologist who was under surveilence because (and I am not making that up) he is intelligent, educated, had access to a library and uses the word "gentrification" in his work. Oh and they knew they had the right guy when he switched his mobile phone of during important meetings.
They eventually arrested him, because he got a job offer in the Netherlands and was discussing moving there with his wife.
At one point, the police seized their own files from him during a search. And their son's computer, that he had been given as a present only hours before.
They were looking for the guy(s) who put a couple of cars on fire, btw.

My personal favorit though, is the all time classic "police find an unmarked cd during a random search at the central station and immediately search the owner's home without warrant, because they declared it an immediate danger." The guy this happened to looked like a hippie, that might have influenced things a little. The search was ruled unlawful, of course. But that doesn't really help.

It basically boils down to "I do not trust the Government to do things right", I wouldn't mind having everything I do logged if there was Jesus Christ in charge of the place and cops were angels, but that is not going to be the case.

You get much more benefits by just hiring more cops, paying their equipment, and making sure there is no dumbass among them than enacting these IT wankings.

At this point, I think these big projects are just a way to embezzle public funds. In Germany, it almost always turnes out that the politicians who approve them either are somehow financially connected to these companies, or turn up on the board of director's after they are no longer government ministers/powerful in their party. I.e. Schily, Schäuble, Stoiber, Schröder, Merz...

[Number Theoretic]

News from the frontlines: I read today, that the Berlin fraction of the german Pirate Party wants to move their servers to Iceland after they have been snatched by police who were after some other people who used those servers to store data.

But Skoga's examples is exactly the kind of authority error that i'm afraid of. True, the odds are not that high. But apparently they are higher than one would think. And as soon as they do a crackdown on me, because i like to buy discrete electronic parts and soldering equipment, i leave Germany for good.