Surveillance craze in the European Union

[Number Theoretic]

When reading some news on the Internet this morning, a thought struck me:

So, we have that Italian dude Tiziano Motti, who wants to install a sniffing black box on every citizen's computer, we have the EU-wide funded Project Indect, which is basically drone surveillance coupled with massive data mining from the internet (Link to official website), the French Government censoring a website which documents police violence and the infamous German federal trojan horse, which was already discussed here and now, the German government even checks, if it can criminalize the Chaos Computer Club for detecting the trojan horse and making it public (as the german IT news website Golem.de knows. If anyone knows an English version of this news snippet, feel free to post).

Is it only me, falling for overblown hysteria against mass surveillance or is there something reeally foul going on in our glorious European Union? And if so, what can we do? Can we do anything at all?

[Crateria]

A similar situation with CCTV cameras in Airstrip One Britain is occurring.

[Purple]

It's not only you, something is going wrong and has been for quite some time and no we can't do anything at all.

[Number Theoretic]

we can't do anything at all.

Execpt for stashing crypto software and looking out for ways to circumvent the system as good as possible as long as it is still possible and keeping our head down, i agree.

[Rabid]

This isn't particularly "new", you know ? It's just the establishment trying to turn technological progress to its own profit to better control the masses. It happened before, and will happen again.


More seriously, though... The worrying part is that the Europeans governments today have more tools than they ever had before, as far as I know, to try to impose "order". Normally, I wouldn't be too worried about it, but the thing is, the circumstances aren't exactly "normal". First there's this fuckin' "War on Terror" that we are being constantly sold, albeit more subtly here than on the other side of the Atlantic. Next there's the constant chase against pedophile circles and things like that. Then there's the case of the copyright issues that has lead France's government to pass a law (keyword : HADOPI) that could have allowed a private firm to gain judicial power outside of the control of the Judiciary System [1]. Fortunately, the Conseil Constitutionnel (the French equivalent to the Supreme Court) deemed it unconstitutional... But still : the will was there.

What I'm getting at is that they are making so much noise nowadays it's becoming hard to expose all their bullshit and force them to act on it. Moreover, when a piece of legislation come from Bruxelles, it's awfully hard for the common citizen to makes his voice heard : too many request are being made made to the European Justice Court, and not enough resources are given for the Court to run all these investigations at the same time. The result is that all these cases finish piling up on one another, waiting for a resolution...


To answer the OP though, it's not that there is much more attempt to "control" the citizenry now than before ; but the fact that information happen to flow faster and in bigger quantity now than yesterday. This results in us hearing more about these stories than before.
BUT, I agree there's a worrying trend going on since the beginning of the 00's with the Internet Revolution and the changes it forced on society... The vast majority of the political dinosaurs than govern us understand jack shit about modern technology, which makes them that much more vulnerable toward the pressure of interested lobbyists. THIS is what y'all should act on, instead of bitchin' on them' politicos cunts !



[1] : In short, this private firm was to spy all electronic communications on the web using .torrent, .mule and other P2P protocols, detect those who where illegally downloading copyrighted content (Nevermind how they where supposed to tell which content is copryrighted, which is not, and which is being legally downloaded or not), send a mail to the culprit the first time (Nevermind how they where supposed to have the mail address of the culprit when almost no-one use ISP-furnished mail address these days), a letter the second time (Nevermind how they could be sure of who to send the letter to, when several people can share the same internet access), and the third time, they were legally authorized to cut the Internet access of the culprit (Nevermind this could allow them to cut the Internet access of a whole University in the "right" circumstances). Basically, it was a political and mediatical shitstorm.
The CC fortunately made a point, and so today they can't cut your internet access by themselves, they have to bring the case before a court... *shrug* This doesn't address the fact that cutting someone's access to the internet in an age where having access to it is a vital thing... Thing reeks of Human Rights violation.

[Thanas]

The German constitutional court has all but trumpeted aloud that internet denial is a constitutional violation over here, so I am not worried. However, the UK seems indeed to be having a surveillance craze, what with all the cameras.

[Flagg]

The cameras don't bother me, but this computer black box is atrocious.

[K. A. Pital]

Fuck them. I'll use i2p and the like. And never buy computers in the EU if they pass that bullshit "black box" law.

But it is natural they have a hissy fit since people aren't as complacent nowadays as they used to be.

[Edi]

That black box thing has no chance of hell in passing. The current traffic data storage requirements are one thing, but this is something else altogether.

It violates the constitution of at least half the countries in the EU (if not all of them) in at least three or four places. On top of that:
- Who and what is going to implement the monitoring system? At the top level, at the country level, at the operational level?
- Who is going to pay for it? (yes, the taxpayers, but the question is relevant)
- And what are the gains to be had from that?
- Who is going to operate and have access to the central storage of the monitoring?
- Who is going to analyze all of the alerts that it will generate, many of which are going to be spurious?
- Who is going to get exempted from this? Would be a fine pickle if every police investigation of pedophiles generated an alert for every image...
- Is this black box supposed to be a separate piece of hardware in the computer, or is it integrated to the motherboard or something else? If it's separate it's useless because it can be removed. If it's integrated, that's a new set of problems entirely.
- If it's not integrated, what's to stop people from building their own computers without it?
- If it's integrated, what's to stop people from ordering things from a part of the world where such integration is not the norm?
- To stop that, trade barriers etc?

No, that shit is not going anywhere and at least not on a timescale less than 15 years if for some reason that moron Tiziano Motti were to be able to gather significant support.

Seriously, try to think a little before you run about like headless chickens screaming about how the sky is going to fall on you.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't think that law has a chance of passing. Hence why I said that's a bullshit law.

[open_sketchbook]

Before I make this post I'd like to say for the record I don't actually agree with either side of the pro- or anti-surveillance debate. It's an issue I don't actually have an opinion on because I've never heard a compelling argument either way. I'm actually sort of hoping to fix that.

The argument goes that anyone concerned over their privacy has clearly done something wrong; if you had nothing to hide, you wouldn't care. I know this isn't how humans actually feel about that sort of thing; privacy has to do with concepts of identity, self-narrative, social politics and separation of self as much or more than it has to do with secretively hiding shameful or illegal actions or thoughts. However, I can't actually see off the top of my head a logically consistent anti-surveillance argument outside of cost-benefit analysis. 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?

[K. A. Pital]

Yes I have something to hide. I don't want anyone to know about my anti-government activities. Neither government nor private corporations. That's my argument. End of line.

[JointStrikeFighter]

And yet you openly post on forums that you are engaged in anti government activities.

[K. A. Pital]

And yet you openly post on forums that you are engaged in anti government activities.

Yeah, since I don't specify what I'm doing exactly, and nobody knows what sort of people I'm contacting and the like. Because all that is something I don't post here. It is pretty much pointless to try and hide my general anti-government actions since I ran an anti-government blog as well for quite a while. The exact nature of the actions, contacts and the like are not to be discovered.

Duh.

[JointStrikeFighter]

So you admit to contacting anti-government persons of interest as well as facilitating anti-government propaganda?

[K. A. Pital]

So you admit to contacting anti-government persons of interest as well as facilitating anti-government propaganda?

Sure, sure.

[madd0ct0r]

I used to be distinctly mixed about the pro and anti-surveillance stances.

then I moved to Vietnam. Frankly, I wouldn't trust an authority to be competent to watch me, let alone not malicious.

[evilsoup]

The argument goes that anyone concerned over their privacy has clearly done something wrong; if you had nothing to hide, you wouldn't care.

Anyone who makes that argument should be banned from having curtains.

WRT the OP, on the face of it I'd be more worried about the French blocking access to that website reporting police brutality. Mostly because the Italian case listed is clearly a crackpot (who you get everywhere), the German case is clearly illegal, and project Indect sounds like a typical over-ambitious government IT scheme (all that for $10m? Suuure...).

[Number Theoretic]

then I moved to Vietnam. Frankly, I wouldn't trust an authority to be competent to watch me, let alone not malicious.

Although i would consider myself only mildly anti-surveillance (after all there is no point in a toothless police who can't run any investigations because of overly strict privacy laws) this is exactly the point that worries me. People saying they have "nothing to hide" tend to overlook two things:

1) they assume that the authorities are competent and almost never make mistakes (like for example chasing the wrong guy). Unfortunately, the authorites are run by humans who naturally tend to make mistakes and these mistakes can ruin your career or your life (if all of a sudden you have a criminal record).

2) If you have something to hide or not depends entirely on who is looking. For example, i'm positive that most people indeed doesn't have to hide anything if someone is looking for child pornography or other equally apalling material. On the other hand, the number of people who have something to hide increases, if the content mafia is looking for evidence of copyrgight infringement. And if they know people in the government who have access to massive surveillance gear one thing can lead to another.

edit: corrected some spelling mistakes

[Samuel]

1) they assume that the authorities are competent and almost never make mistakes (like for example chasing the wrong guy). Unfortunately, the authorites are run by humans who naturally tend to make mistakes and these mistakes can ruin your career or your life (if all of a sudden you have a criminal record).

Cameras also help to decrease this though- regular police make plenty of mistakes and having more evidence should reduce the risk.

I think the best anti-argument is related not to the fact the government can watch protestors (they can do that with conventional means), but that they can easily watch all the protestors.

[Simon_Jester]

1) they assume that the authorities are competent and almost never make mistakes (like for example chasing the wrong guy). Unfortunately, the authorites are run by humans who naturally tend to make mistakes and these mistakes can ruin your career or your life (if all of a sudden you have a criminal record).

2) If you have something to hide or not depends entirely on who is looking. For example, i'm positive that most people indeed doesn't have to hide anything if someone is looking for child pornography or other equally apalling material. On the other hand, the number of people who have something to hide increases, if the content mafia is looking for evidence of copyrgight infringement. And if they know people in the government who have access to massive surveillance gear one thing can lead to another.

Combining (1) and (2) makes things particularly bad, because it gives a huge range of people access to tools which can be used to harass you and potentially wreck your life. I've never understood why we would even consider accepting a high false positive rate from tools like that- why would we be willing to live with ruining a few people's lives to make it marginally easier to catch a few other people committing crimes?

It's this kind of random state power that falls on everyone which makes things like the secret police of a totalitarian society so terrible- you can't avoid them just by saying "I won't try to overthrow the system." Because if someone denounces you for some petty reason or if you do something that even vaguely flags their suspicion, they may arrest you and beat you and interrogate you anyway, even though you've done nothing.

The innocent have everything to fear from overzealous enforcement agencies that get carte blanche to run around scouring the world for evidence of crimes, because if you spend enough money and labor looking for crimes, you'll find them whether they're there or not.

1) they assume that the authorities are competent and almost never make mistakes (like for example chasing the wrong guy). Unfortunately, the authorites are run by humans who naturally tend to make mistakes and these mistakes can ruin your career or your life (if all of a sudden you have a criminal record).

Cameras also help to decrease this though- regular police make plenty of mistakes and having more evidence should reduce the risk.

Theoretically- but they greatly increase the risk that the police will use this mountain of information to tag and flag people who act "suspiciously" and single them out for more intrusive and hostile police attention. A lot of people will get harassed under the new order who wouldn't be harassed under the old.

[Skgoa]

So you admit to contacting anti-government persons of interest as well as facilitating anti-government propaganda?

I am a member of an anti-government party and many of my friends are anti-government. It is vital for a functioning democracy that we can communicate and do our political work without the government getting advance warning. That's not the single strongest argument I would use, though. It's this:
When people feel they are being watched, they behave very differently from what they would normally do. If you don't believe me, take a look at surveys of female sexual behavior: participant's average number of sexual encounters and partners correlates with their confidence in the anonymity of the survey. Or if you want a tangible example, go to ANY small town in the world and ask the people what would happen, if they suddenly deviated from the norm.
This pressure-of-surveilence* can lead to massive health, and psychological, problems**. How can you lead a happy or productive life, if you have to fear that any wrong word could have disastrous effects?

If you need an example of what happens to such a society, look at the SU. Or compare the two Germanies.


* I made that up, since there doesn't seem to be a good word for it in english.
** Most psychotics think they are being watched, followed, etc.

[ComradeClaus]

Yes I have something to hide. I don't want anyone to know about my anti-government activities. Neither government nor private corporations. That's my argument. End of line.

that's why i love you man!

this reminds me a bit of the bbc's spying vans in the uk i read about.

of course, they'd never go after spammers, just innocent pirates & lolicons & commies.

[K. A. Pital]

This pressure-of-surveilence*

Focault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison makes a very strong argument as well:

surveillance also functions to create in everyone a feeling of always being watched, so that they become self-policing. This allows the State to control the populace without having to resort to physical force, which is expensive and otherwise problematic.

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

[Number Theoretic]

That and nobody likes being watched. It's the reason why we find stalkers to be creepy and want to get rid of them. Now think of the state stalking you 24/7 and all you can do about it is to live abroad, in exile.