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Declan McCullagh On Geek Activism
die_jack_die writes "Declan McCullagh, formerly of Wired News, lately at News.com, has written an insightful piece about the realities of geek activism. Short version: spend your time coding, not lobbying.
(You might also want to check out Politech , his mailing list for this sort of stuff.)" This in contrast to Lessigs call for more lobbying.
1. Code
2. Start your own company
3. Get rich
4. Buy your own Congressmen, Senators or even a President!
Does this mean watching more Star Trek or something? Geek Activism... I'm trying to equate this with Gay Rights or Pro Abortion, but it just isn't happening for some reason...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Anyone who writes for 'News.Com.Com' doesn't have an opinion worth the paper it's not printed on.
Greek activism?
Laws come and go. Only the code lives on.
(But will be rewritten by some punk ass kid with too much time on their hands and then given away in some God awful NeoNapster-esque spyware app).
-Tom
Pretty soon, there will be little room for innovation. We are already seeing chilling effects from DMCA. If we don't fight, we are just digging our own graves.
Nobody from CMU takes Declan seriously. For good reason. He has a pretty sordid history.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Another reminder that I do not ever want to enter politics. I'd have to prostitute myself far too much to get elected in the first place, then I'd have minority opinions that wouldn't get listened to anyway. Heck, I usually have a minority opinion HERE.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Declan post and the spin on it are fascinating, especially since he heads one of the major efforts in geektivism at http://www.politechbot.com/ Obviously the greats of the Open Source movement shouldn't give up their keyboards and start lobbying full time. However, the number of people on the periphery of the Open Source movement far exceeds the number of people making solid and substantial code contributions. Many more people have compiled and installed Apache than will ever contribute to its codebase. These are the people who should be getting organized and participating in the political process! Open Source is a public good, but the public needs to be made aware of that fact. If the commercial and corporate lobbying efforts are not resisted, we cede the field to them and there will be no alternate voices or views. It's *your* government! Take it back! Join EFF or FSF! Keep infor me and aware of the situation. Retake your local party at the precinct level! Government is maladjusted because of the lack of participation. The negative buzz about this article just encourages that. So yes, code on, but make sure your voices are heard!
To me this seems like a typical elite D.C. response to almost any poltical movement - its all futile, misdirected, displays no proper understanding of the politcal process, etc. This, of course, is held up to about the time that the movement gains political significance, at which time it is held to be inevitable.
I am a little disappointed in Declan here. He suggests writing code instead of politcal activism to fulfill politcal aims, but he gives no clue how these politcal aims are to be conveyed to the code writers in absence. Code, like any other activity, code is not written in a vacuum. Activism (think of Richard Stallman) can help to motivate people to get out and write code and otherwise change things.
The main reason for this opinion is that marketing and public awareness are more powerful that coding; although coding is more important. Look at all the excellent products that have been coded and not marketed very well, which have died out because of a lack of market awareness (OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, and many others).
Microsoft is proof that lobbying is more important. Windows doesn't come close to the power, security and stability of nearly every other OS popular today; yet it remains solidly on top in marketshare.
Don't get me wrong, more coding is always a good thing, however, to do it at the detriment of lobbying is a sure fire plan to navigate your project into oblivion.
ye gods.
look, ever lived in a condo or worked in a union? the people who don't have lives gravitate to the elected positions. very few people with a homelife of any detail will contribute their extra time unless they feel immediately threatened. and the bit rot begins. the committees get controlled by the cranks and the con-men.
_do_ code like the man is suggesting, but then turn off your tv for part of your down time and do something about your social environment. yes, geeks make poor lobbyists. but they're good educators and agitators of other lobby groups and sectors of the population. you're not alone, regardless of how well you simulate that around your monitor. talk to people.
"hey, computer joe, what's that dmca shit they're talking about?"
"dude, i don't worry about it. making a way around it with my l33t skillz."
and dude goes off believing the archtype few honest men will protect him like hollywood says, and no longer worries about it himself either. great.
political activism doesn't work? man, jack. half of what we call history is records of revolutions, and political evolution.
sorry, this kid's feel-good nilhism may be hip, but it's a personal delusionism of someone who had to justify to himself wanting to say "don't put off today what you can put off tomorrow".
Declan seems to have fallen for the fallacy that politicians are dumb, and the hubris that geeks can outpace them.
Politicians are just as good at what they do as geeks are at what they do. If we ignore the politicians, they *will* win. They can shut down the things we love to all but those who are willing to break the law. Don't kid yourselves.
Geeks have to fight the lobbying fight to protect the technology fight.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
...to make our voices heard, then writing all the code in the world isn't going to make any difference; even assuming it will be legal to write (in the US, anyway) code without a license or certificate of some kind, there won't be any hardware that can run code not produced by a multi-billion-dollar company. We have to find some way to stop this BEFORE it happens, because after the fact it will just be too damn late. If lobbying isn't going to help, what will? And why aren't we doing it yet?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
longer form of the short version:
Spend your time coding, not lobbying. Stay in your place. Don't bother having an opinion on anything other than the design of your software- just leave it to the politicians to know what is good for you. Stay in your place- there's no way a coder could know anything about politics, nor should she be able to have an opinion.
Which is utter bullshit. I'm not going to listen to some schmuck tell me to hold back my ideas just because I'm paid to do something other than be a politician. Just because I get paid to code, it doesn't mean that's all I'm capable of. A lame attempt at putting these socially aware "geeks" "in their place." when you classify you divide.
I don't know about you, but I'm not eating the bullshit-burger with a side order of lies. RISE MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS, take back the freedoms which we have a birthright to uphold- the world would be better run by geeks than layers (the profesion from which most politicians come) anyway.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Sorry, this piece didn't phase me a whole lot. The DMCA may have won, but the SSSCA hasn't. I remember one comment along the lines of "we got tons and tons of messages expressing their disgust at the SSSCA, but not a single message in favor of it." Sitting quitely and 'writing code' is not the answer. If anything, what he's suggesting will cause bs like the SSSCA to make greater claims for the need to tightly control how computers work.
It wasn't that long ago that somebody mentioned that the best way to protect our rights was to do something like the NRA does. Gather our resources and blow away a single person. (I mean that metaphorically, I dont mean shoot anybody. Normally I wouldn't need to clarify this, but there's always one dumbshit...) We may not be able to gather enough money to sway political opinion, but it is possible to make one person in particular suffer some sort of consequences, whether it's financially or public opinion.
This doesn't seem like a big deal unless people like Senator Dis^H^H^H^HHollings realize that if they piss off a community like Slashdot, they could end up getting targetted. As I said, that's how the NRA's been able to hang around this long. If anything, we should be looking in their direction. They obviously have a better idea about how to go about maintaining rights than suggesting that people just stay home and clean their guns.
To be honest, when I first read the piece, my reaction was "What have they done with the REAL Declan"?
Declan, did you get bought out or something?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This story was posted here and here already.
Amazing magic tricks
A quick summary of the article: The politicians in Washington don't care what you think, they only care about what their campaign contributors tells them to care about. The sad part is, it's more or less true. Maybe some day the USA will join the free world and become a democracy, one can only hope.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What, exactly, is a cyberpunk? The very name sounds like "adolescent geeks" in my mind. Is there any way they can try to seem at least a little more legitamate?
Reality is shaped by human decisions. Deciding to do something that could change the world instead of reacting to the decisions and actions of others is, at its face, a sensible and obvious choice.
Act or react, it seems simple enough. The latter is easier, of course, which explains why so many wait for the world to change and then complain. Change, or resist change? Let's see more of these efforts.
It can be argued that the DMCA and similar legislation are reactions to efforts which changed the world. This is a valid thought, but it is only a reason to continue. If their resistance quashes future innovation and change we'll never move forward in any significant manner.
--
Poppins, you're fired. You are not a genius.
-- You wanna lobby?
Lobby directly to the hardware makers.
Something along these lines maybe:
Dear Hardware supplier.
It is with great sadness that I must now outsource my entire hardware supply chain to the first country I can find that won't try to control my data at the firmware level.
Thanks for you support and products all these years, and best of luck in the tough times ahead.
Your ex costumer,
J Random.
Let the Hardware companies lobby against this, you grab the problem by the short hairs (namely their wallet) and see what kind of response you get.
I can see geeks having a lot more decision making power on their companies hardware purchasing then influencing a senator or congressman anyway right?
Grell
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
How about another party. Call it Geek Peace.
"Better living for a tomorrow through innovation and technology"
It's important to keep writing the software that forces changes in the culture. But it's equally vital to educate people about those changes, to help ensure that the changes that come are positive. McCullagh's argument reads far too much like "Gee, this politics thing is hard. Let's go back to coding and pizza. I'm sure it will all work out" (or, for the more cynical, "Nothing I do will matter anyway.")
If these issues matter to you, then get out there and educate the less tech-savvy. That includes Congresscritters. It also includes family members, coworkers, etc. Don't surrender just because it looks hard. Or to put it another way: Yes, geeks organizing politically might fail to stop this headlong rush into technological totalitatianism. Even if we speak up, the worst might happen. But if we don't speak up, then the worst is guaranteed to happen.
I applaud people creating the disruptive technologies, but they aren't enough. It's interesting to offer up Shawn Fanning (Napster) as a shining example. How, exactly, is Napster doing right now? Yes, he helped usher in an era of peer-to-peer filesharing (ironically through the failure of the Napster model). But now we face increasingly aggressive legal attempts to legislate away computer security, privacy, and fair use rights to counter the things he's unleashed. Maybe unleashing it needed to be done -- but don't you think that maybe, just maybe, things would be in a better state if someone had clearly and forcefully articulated why these things are good, instead of leaving the field uncontested, to be defined by the PR flacks of the *AA groups?
The DMCA passed unamiously because the geeks were silent, by and large. Congresscritters had no white hats telling them what was at stake; and there wasn't even a nascent organized lobbying effort. And of course Rep. Coble would say the law is "performing the way we hoped." -- he helped write and pass the thing! Why not a quote from, say, Rep. Boucher:
We as geeks have failed to make clear to Joe Sixpack and Jane Q. Public why they care. If we do that, then we're halfway to a victory. Anyone who says that Congress votes for their corporate sponsors over the vocal deamnds of their constituents must have been under a rock in July, when senators and representatives were falling over each other trying to be the first to fix the issues of corporate responsibility that they were shocked -- shocked! -- to discover in American capitalism.
The big lobbiess don't win because Senator Bob votes against his constituents and ignores their please. The big lobbies win because no one else is speaking
So go ahead. Code the next generation of encryption software. Write the next secure anonymous emailer. Protect privacy at the router level. But, while you saving the world in codepsace, take a minute or two to write your senator or explain to your mom what's going wrong, why we're on the wrong track.
Only a multi-pronged approach holds any chance of success.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Sadly, I think he is right about the ineffectiveness, but I don't think the author is right about our ability to out pace new legislation. What happens when controls are embedded in the hardware, legally required to be there, and you can't make your computer run 'unauthorized' software like PGP (unauthorized, or forced into key escarow by the gov.) and DeCSS? This isn't that far fetched, I'd call it a step or two away from the CBDTPA. How do you hack that? It has to be stopped before it gets to that point.One can't do much once computers are legislated into glorified DVD players.
Dumbass!!! It was Clinton that signed the DMCA into existance. Get a fucking clue!!
Until they declare x86 assembler to be illegal and begin loping of fingers per offence.
So what, because the congress and senate will basically make laws that will screw the IT people of this country, with no thought of the consequences that could occur, or in fact wanting the geeks to suffer. That we should just give up? This is completely an incorrect way of doing this, I mean in history, it has been proven that the key to making change is by making your voices heard, so I would say, that we find those that are technologically inclined, and yet make good public speakers to be able to inform the public of what is going on, and as to why this is wrong. As opposed to just giving up, coding and hoping that the code that the community would write will still be legal at the ending of the projects. Although this is what happens in any system that is ruled by a majority, the majority can slam down whatever they want on the minority, without really bad consequences to them. So a better solution would be to make sure that it isn't just a small minority that is looking out for our interests, as well as publicly speaking, I would also suggest for those that can, to vote on the issues, or at least support canidates that oppose these kinds of laws. As well as trying to throw the ones that are responsible for passing them out. Because in this system, those are the best options.
"short version: spend your time coding, not lobbying."
Its easy to say sdo, but when those laws actually take away your right to code and create new technologies.. where do you go.
The current decade is like dark ages. Then you could be put do Jail for preaching that Earth is not center of universe, and now you are put to jail for preaching that Hollywood is not center of universe, isnt it ironic now history repeats itself...
What next... Newton?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
let the battle begin
The only way to get one modded up in this joint is to post AC. (rimshot)
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
I'm not sure that I like what this man has to say, of course, I may well be misinterpreting him. If he means that geeks need to quit squealing and organize more effectively against the crap that's going on in D.C., then I think he's hit on something. Let's face it, the geek movement in general is rather lacking when it comes to P.R. We lack the truly charismatic leadership that is necessary to get through to D.C. On the other hand, there are enough of us deeply entrenched in the schools and universities that there is reasonable hope that through a grassroots effort, enough people can be persuaded to see the light --- future politicians, business leaders, media moguls, etc., the sort of people with enough clout to make an impact.
However, my first impression is that he is advocating geeks dropping any active role in the democratic process and subverting the law to get their own way. This isn't a bad thing per se, but it seems that the way the courts and congress have been leaning lately, subversion is completely pointless --- they'll either interpret it as a violation of existing law or put new laws into effect to patch the holes.
It only costs about $25K to buy a congressman. Get 25 friends to contribute $1000 each, and you're there.
there is only one answer to the question of corrupt or immoral politicians: EDUCATION
Politicians can get away with what they do because no one is watching. not enough people to make a difference, anyway. few people care, because few people pay attention. few people pay attention because few people understand what's really happening.
If you want to stop (or at least curb) this crazy behavior, you need to educate yourself and others about what is going on. Find facts, and spread them to everyone you know. Education such as this will help people make up their own minds (don't do their thinking for them, you may be wrong).
EDUCATION is the ONLY way you'll ever get the numbers you need to get people moving in the right direction.
Educate yourself on every aspect of politics, and you'll soon see that it is the only way to get people to move. People go into fits when their favorite ball player is traded because they understand what's going on. Do the world a favor. Be a political reference for your friends. Make things known to people who otherwise would not know about these things. It will help more than you expect.
Geek Activism?
How about Geektivism!
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
The only geek who ever came up with a viable means
of effecting positive change in the current U.S.
political system was promptly sent to prison.
His name is Jim Bell, and he's a loon, but his
Assassination Politics may well save the U.S. from
totalitarianism and genocide, and I can hardly wait
to see it implemented.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The moral of the story is, knee-jerk voting for any political party isn't the solution.
You have to pay attention, do research, get involved, vote intelligently.
Declan McCullagh spent several years on Essential Information's AM-Info (Appraising Microsoft) e-mail list basically just lurking and stirring up trouble he could use in news reports. He finally had to be banned from the list, to the great relief of most of us who live there. Beware the wolf in journalist's clothing.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
I don't know about Deacon, but I sure as hell hope some of those geeks whose "efforts are mostly a waste of time" are there to help all the productive, coding geeks who create such egregious attacks on capitalism like DeCSS (and me, who has probably commited several million dollars in DMCA violations this month, none of which have lead to piracy of any sort). We need to work on both aspects, coding and "activism", otherwise, the the coders activities will become (more) illegal without the efforts of those, like the EFF, who combat a corrupt legal/congressional system and suffocating laws. Geeks have many varied strengths, and we should all fight this battle in the best way we can. With no code, there's nothing to fight for, with no one fighting, there will be no code.
BTW, Mr. Declan, that was a voice vote for the DMCA. It doesn't mean the bill had 100% support, only that the actual tally wasn't enumerated. Maybe you should pay closer attention.
Perhaps someone should code Slashdot an edit feature. Sorry Declan, but I'm gonna blame that one on whatever screwy parent gave you that name ;).
He's a libertarian, of the Cato Institute variety. He expressed a through and through libertarian position.
We're in an election season. This a great time to help out with the campaigns of politicians you like. Often, tney need computer help. You'll meet their staff, and the candidate briefly. So you'll know who to talk to when the time comes.
Blurting out "source code is free speech" to people who have no clue what source code is is totally ineffective. We must try to explain why the ability to understand and control the technology we use in our daily lives is important.
Most people are politically apethetic, and the ones who are not have other concerns. I have found it to be difficult to explain issues such as the DMCA, DRM, etc., to these people. How can someone be concerned with (playing DVDs on computers|some gibberish about "source code"|privacy|whatever) when there are people (getting bombed|getting thrown in prison|starving|whatever). I often end up feeling shallow for what I believe, but I get over it.
The combination of the personal computer and the internet has created the most important communication tool ever (second to the invention of writing). Large corporations which have thriven on the artificial scarcity of more primitive communication technologies are threatened by this, and are trying to get severe restrictions placed on the use of this technology. The various governments of the world are also threatened by the freedom of communication it permits, and are looking for excuses to limit it as well. Most people are getting their all of their information from one or both of these sources, and are unaware of the real issues behind the hyperbole of 'piracy'.
We have to make the non-hackish people of the world understand why preventing technologists from understanding the functions of the technology we use in daily lives is harmful, and why severely restricting the use of communication technology on the grounds that it might be used to infringe copyrights is harmful.
tato (and tato only)
This post is strictly opinion, including the spelling.
The question we should be asking is what are the next set of disruptive pieces of code we should be writing (while we still have the chance)?
1) They have more money than we do. In Washington, money buys access, and money buys influence. Unless Bill Gates suddenly sees the light on the issues that are important to the average /. geek, this will continue to be the case. The new campaign finance law will not change this fundamental truth of Washington.
2) Geeks and hackers are Bad, and there are no White Hats. Technologically savvy people have been demonized in the press and in the political system as "hackers." While we would apply the term "cracker" to the people our politicans are really talking about, the average American isn't capable of understanding the difference between a "hacker" and a "cracker." Until Joe Average is able to tell the difference, we will remain outsiders.
3) People like Shawn Fanning, Kevin Mitnick, and the publishers of 2600 give us a bad name. It doesn't matter that Fanning or Mitnick or 2600 have or haven't broken the law. As an old math teacher once told me on a totally unrelated issue, "It is not only impropriety we must avoid, but also the appearance of impropriety." Fanning and Mitnick look, to Joe Average, like criminals. See Fact #2.
4) They are better organized than we are. This is closely related to Fact #1, because money brings organization. The EFF, as well as we respect it here on /., doesn't have the organization to be an effective grass roots organization (Christian Coalition) or enough money to be a monied interest (RIAA). That won't change until enough people get interested enough to either do the grass roots education or spend the money. I for one do't have the time to do the former, or the money to do the latter. I'm sure I'm not alone.
5) Joe Average doesn't care about civil liberties. Joe Average cares about a fuel-loaded MD-11 flying into [insert large building he works in here]. Joe Average sees in his little mind, and is frightened of, millions of towelheads screaming "Allah akbar!" and shooting their Kalashnikov's and Uzi's into the air. He agrees with Trent Lott that questioning the government is unpatriotic; he believes that by giving up his freedom, the government can catch all the towelheads before they fly those planes. He also believes that "hackers" (see Fact #2) are at least partly responsible for the government's failures, and that restricting their ability to hack things is essential to stopping the towelheads. Since it's not him secretly locked up with the towelheads without access to an attorney or a court, he doesn't care. [Editorial comment: "... And when they came for me, there was no one left to complain."]
6) Joe Average wouldn't know what to do with the ability to copy something if it jumped up and bit him. He sees no need to copy CDs, and wouldn't understand what to do with a ripped DVD if someone told him. He doesn't understand the point of backing up software, and doesn't reinstall his operating system or upgrade his machine (if he even owns one) frequently, so antipiracy codes like the one in WinXP doesn't make any difference to him. He's not blind, so using a screen reader on an Acrobat file is something that would never enter his mind. DRM technology isn't even a buzzword for him; entering that screen of data to get the program to work is just like filling out a form at the local bank -- you do it because they won't do their thing if you don't. "Fair use" is a foreign concept, and since he's so busy trying to hang onto his job, pay for his kids' education and food, keep a roof over his and his family's head, make the car payment, and worrying about the towelheads, he doesn't care to be educated about fair use and why it's good for him. He also doesn't care who looks up his library records because he doesn't even have a library card and hasn't been to a library since he was in grade school.
These are the facts. Whining on /. about it will not change it. We here on /. are not normal people. We are above Joe Average in intelligence and education on these kinds of issues, because we pay attention to them and they are important to us. They are not important to Joe Average, and they will not become important to Joe Average until he can see them directly affecting his pocketbook or his job. And we can not change that, at least not now.
It may in fact be that the only way we can change the law and influence the system is to obsolete it. It sure wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
McCullagh is a troll whose ideas don't really deserve the effort of being /.ed.
It's a false dichotomy to say that we should either code or lobby. We can do both and many other things we may need to do besides.
The funny thing is that this article actually tells us not to be concerned with code. Legal code. Those representatives are programming our government for us. Anyone who tells me not to take part in that process is a fascist.
Duh. We need to do BOTH -- change the facts "on the ground" by writing code whilst SIMULTANEOUSLY waging political battles to reclaim what's been taken from us and defend what rights we still have left.
For basic social movement theory that's founded in the real-life experiences of actual social justice organizers, see Doing Democracy. Geektivists could learn a lot from those who've gone before.
There was a time when the US passed a
law restricting exports of ``supercomputers''
to certain countries. Unfortunately, whether
a computer is super or not was decided by
technically incompetent desk clerks at the
Bureau of Customs. Even the lowly IBM PC
was declared a supercomputer that PC manufacturers
had to go through hoops in order to export
their products.
Eventually, Intel and the other manufacturers
did the sensible thing and
sent their manufacturing facilities
overseas, thus skirting the problem.
A similar situation can occur in the case
of the DMCA. If the DMCA caused
technological leadership to
ship overseas, I think congress would sit
up and rethink the DMCA.
For example, academics can start the wave
by moving all conferences related to
computer security and encryption overseas,
say to Canada or Japan. (Now that would be
delicious!) In fact, to make a point, all
electrical engineering conferences should be
moved to Japan because then there would
be no problem of anyone ever inadvertently
violating the DMCA simply because
one attended a seminar on the electrical properties
of a computer bus, or learned the specific
frequencies that satellite broadcasters used
to broadcast cable channels. (Hey, that knowledge
can be used to build a satellite tuner, thus
violating the IP of the poor content providers!)
Eventually MIT, Stanford, Harvard et al, could partner
with Universities overseas so that US professors
could accomplish their research there; safe from
the good fellas at the State and Justice Departments.
As you engineers out there know, it is possible
to determine the encryption algorithms of
satellite broadcasts through the use of
a an illegal device called the spectrum analyzer.
Hey, Mr. Justice Department, do you know how many
spectrum analyzers there are in MIT?
The sad part is that this isn't funny since its all too close to the truth. Look at the RIAA/MPAA flacks like Rep. Howard Berman who are willing to sell out any of our rights to get a campaign contribution from Hollyweird. What's the old maxim from the detective/police shows (appropriate quote)? In any crime, follow the money. Most politicians would gladly sell their own soul, their mother's, their grandmother's and yours and mine at the drop of a campaign contribution. They make all sorts of nice noises when there's a demonstration or a petition or something that seems to indicate that we, the public, have an opinion but they'll vote with the people who give them money.
The bottom line is the bottom line. The way to get things to change is to make enough money that the people who make the laws listen to you (and your money).
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The idea that a few setbacks spells everlasting defeat has to be the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Geeks aren't necessarily political animals. What we are, however, is a group of intelligent people with impressive earning potential and a widely-felt purpose.
Fuck this guy. Support the EFF.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Rather than writing off the efficacy of activism against bad legislation, perhaps the author should question how effective e-mailing is. He doesn't sound schooled in any real activist background, so he conflates a e-mail message with the entirety of political lobbying. Activism and lobbying consists of far more than spitting off messages to a representative. If geeks want to form strong opposition to acts like the DMCA, they need to organize themselves collectively and strategize. What would compell reps, for example, to vote against these laws? What has been successful and what has failed?
This is an important issue, and to suggest than coding is the answer is ridiculous. Let's see some better organizing and activism, not less of it.
Dude, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Anyway, I see your point. Our Perl Harbor is being bombed (sorry, couldn't resist). How can we not fight?
This essay from the cypherpunks archive discusses a bit more the theme of technology as political catalyst.
There is a spellbook here; eat it? [ynq]
I see its so clear now.
Instead of having a civil war over how bad slavery was, the negro's/civil righters of America should have just shuttup and kept slaving?
yeap.. that would have got them out of chains much quicker..
oh and whassername Pankhurst shouldn't have chained herself to the gates.. she should have stayed at home, doing dishes and washing clothes only to stop long enough to breed.
Yep I can see how that would have let her vote and have basic human rights much quicker..
You dumb bastard. Your writing to geeks, about how they should ignore that feeling inside that says... "Oh, there is something very wrong going on here.."
you NEED us to feel that way. and to act on it.. otherwise you might as well give admin/coder jobs to any old idiot off the street... oh wait up.. MS already do that, Damn!
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
it's tragic that most americans seem to feel that it's us versus the government and that government is reserved solely for "politicians". in this country, we are the government. control has been gradually slipping away from us over time, but we have both the right and the power to take it back.
if you don't agree with a member of congress, don't vote for them. convince others not to vote for them. if they are not your representative, convince people in their district not to vote for them. if they're too far away or if you don't like talking to people, well, you can mail an awful lot of postcards for just a few hundred dollars. do everything in your power to get people you agree with into office. if you can't find anyone, run for office yourself.
perhaps it's time we view service in government as less of a lifelong career choice and more as a form of civilian conscription, a duty that each of us must undertake at some time in our lives. it seems like a lot of our current problems would disappear if we didn't have representatives who were overwhelmingly concerned with being reelected.
Make yourself useful to someone who can kick butt and take names.
If this happened across the board we would be very orginized and dangerous. There are a few out there, and they are looking for your help. If you really look and find nobody to follow then you should lead. Don't just assume there is sombody better for the job, if you can't think of their name and can't drop them an email, it's you.
Sorry buddy, I didn't mean to make more work for you.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
I think it was quite canny of chrisd to contrast Declan w/ Lessig, it brings out a crucial idealogical theme that runs through the tech community.
Declan is a libertarian, as such, he is in favor of small government and on priniple doesn't like using the government as an agent in shaping society. Lessig on the other hand is a democrat (note the small "d"). As such he holds out hope that masses of people can express a collective set of values that does not cede rights or nonmaterial values to corporate interests.
Generally I dislike libertarianism as it is often used as what I perceive as cover for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense. I read the WSJ, the Economist and Cato stuff pretty regularly and find that that doesn't generally get addressed. I think the reaction so far here points to the lack of that in Declan's piece.
The story that we get taught in school is that democracy is supposed to be this thing that "the people" participate in, Declan says don't bother. Is this story a myth or not? History tells us that its very hard for democracy to work like in that story, ie, the civil rights struggle or the pitched battles for the 8 hour day early in 1900's.
A more modern example that we can look at is the environmental movement. Environmentalism has made politcal headway because of hard work by millions working hard over decades. It hasn't "won" by any means, but it does have impact.
Are geektivists up to this kind of organization and campaigning? Well we have the ability to be far more organized that any political movement ever. This can't be underestimated. Anyway, I think Declan has thrown down the gauntlet.
If you're too young to remember it, you probably won't believe it, but when those clock hands moved, the world noticed and attention was paid. It may be that by creating that symbol and using it to give voice to their concerns, those scientist may have helped to saved us all.
The bad patents and bad laws that have come out now aren't atom bombs, of course, but they should still be opposed for the good of us all. Like the atomic scientists, Geeks have the knowledge, authority, and responsibility to speak out - the trick is to come up with a good clock, if I may coin a phrase. Some mechanism to explain what's a risk - one that people can respect and understand.
And no, I don't know what that mechanism ought to be. :)
The real solution is for geeks to become better at getting their voices heard. How many geeks have sent out a polite clear e-mail explaining to their friends/family/colleagues what DRM, say, could do to them? And how many of those e-mails ended with a line like "If you found this message interesting, please forward it on."? If enough people eventually get the message, the political system will too.
To cut a long story short, the group wrote a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on broadband technologies, and then spoke to that submission. The politicians (from both major parties) asked reasonable questions, and once they got their answers their comments were highly positive, saying that they believed what the group is doing was legal, and they would support continued free access to the requisite spectrum.
Now, I'm not saying that all the group's potential legal pitfalls were solved with one enquiry submission, but the basic point is that politicians will listen, if you talk to them the right way.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I think that sites like anti-dmca.org are a step in the right direction, but (and i'm just gonna pick on anti-dmca.org right now) it's pretty difficult to figure out what is so bad about the DMCA. I think the home page needs a very clear message about HOW the DMCA is squashing innovation, and exactly what is BAD about it. Hell, i searched the site for half an hour and couldn't find a real reason for it! Sure, it's illegal to crack encryption (doesn't the DMCA allow for fair use, though? I'm no lawyer so anyone care to interpret the legalize for me?) and it's illegal to publicly report security holes. I don't see how that relates directly to innovation. Concerning the latter, there are free speech issues, and it just hurts security in general, but innovation? I don't see it.
If someone asks me why they should care about the DMCA, i want to be able to give them some basic facts, or point them in the right direction. But to someone with only a casual interest, activism sites that don't come out and say, in plain english, what's bad about the bill will just get overlooked.
Yeah, it's late, mod me for stupidity or whatever you want. That's what karma's for, right?
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
As Marx wrote and Lenin proved, the only way to make sure something is done properly is to do it yourself.
Viva la Revolution!
1) Code
2) Start your own company
3) Sell out most of your principles
4) Get rich
5) Buy your own congressman to protect your money from the tax man and pass laws mandating your company should never go out of business
Cynical? Me? Noooooo...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Especially since he was telling the truth. Gore was one of the people who helped create the Internet as we know it today, albeit from the legislative side, rather then the technical side. Here's a quote from Vint Cerf, the person who invented the IP protocol:
Vinton Cerf: Good evening, or whatever time zone you are in, hi!! While we're waiting for questions, I'd like to clear up one little item - about the Vice President
Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be and both as Senator and Vice President he has been enormously helpful in supporting legislation and programs to help further develop the Internet - for example the Next Generation Internet program. I get to see a lot of this stuff because I am a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee and we regularly review the R&D programs of the US Government and many have relevance to the evolving Internet.
More information can be found here. Just because "Al Gore deluded himself into thinking he invented the Internet" makes for a good one-liner, doesn't mean it's so.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Vote Green. Here's why.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
McCullagh's
Say What? If we don't speak up how will we get our view across
Getting your views across doesn't matter. The geek community comes across as a bunch of whiney twits, (/.) and hippies, (RMS).
You want to be heard? When was the last time you helped somebody actually get to Elected to Congress? How many Senators know you by first name and rember you favorably?
There is a reason my lobbyiest get paied hundreds of thousands of Dollars a year, and have nice fat expense accounts. They know how the game is played.
If you don't know how to play the game you're just another geek whining that RIAA is trying to take away his pirated music.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
describes my feelings on the subject exactly. I may only be 18 years old but I learned long ago that my opinions do not matter at all to the people who right laws. Therefore I don't care about the opinions (read laws) of those people. I won't try to change the laws I feel violate my freedoms because I am CERTAIN it can't be done, instead I will break them whenever I feel the need and do my best not to get caught. I'm not worried about whether or not the bill allowing companies to "hack" P2P programs because I'm confident that as soon as it becomes clear that the law is going to pass the makers of P2P applications will find a way arround this (ie encryption).
:)
Like the article says, most of us are not well-suited for politics and even if we were we don't have the type of financial backing it would take to get the public on our side. Basically all that needs to be done to get the majority of the people to accept a law is for a politician who supports it to go on TV and say "This law will stop EVIL SUPERHACKERS" or something equally ridiculous and the uninformed (read majority) will say "Duhhhh, OK!!!".
The net is our territory not theirs, so why don't we act like it? Why was the U.S unsuccessful in Vietnam? Because the Vietnamese had the "home-field" advantage. Thats what we have on the net. Politicians can make laws concerning the net as fast as they want, but WHO is going to ENFORCE them. If the RIAA uses a DOS attack on a P2P network I'm fairly confident that within 24 hours someone somewhere will blast their asses off the net in retaliation. Sure it's illegal for that person to do so but that doesn't mean the attack costs the company any less money. Sure the government can spend billions trying to crush all resistance, but regardless of what they do we have a MUCH larger talent pool. Eventually when the majority is whining about incredibly high taxes (something they do pay attention to) some politician somewhere will go "Umm, maybe we should cut back" and that will be it.
Let's face it, we need to stop trying, and failing, to influence law-makers who could give a shit less what we think and start doing what we do best.....PISSING THEM OFF
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
Think it through even farther..
If Delta stopped flying, would demand for flights lower? Hardly. Which means one of two things would happen, one of the other companies would expand to take up the slack, or a number of other smaller companies would rise to fill the niche.
Since all the larger companies are having enough trouble on their own, my bet is on the number of smaller companies.
Now, what if part of the money given to Delta was instead placed in a fund to help out small start-ups? Instead of a few CEO's of a poorly run company being able to claim bonus stock options, you'd have multiple people working to compete with each other, lowering the price of airline service for everybody, while simultaneously putting pressure on to better the service.
The only time a failing company should be bailed out is when that company is governmentally owned to begin with - and the only reason a company should be governmentally owned is to provide a basic service to people that private enterprise wouldn't bother with because it's a losing money option (such as telephone/power service into the boonies - or medical service for people too poor to afford insurance)
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Don't give up on politicians, some of them - perhaps even most of them are good well-intentioned people, their flaw is often little-more than ignorance, and you can change that, provided you are good at explaining geeky issues to non-geeks (and, despite the stereotype portrayed in this article, I think many geeks are) in a clear and non-patronising way.
The average person doesn't care about their freedoms because they assume that they would always have them and that no-one could take them away. This is becuase most (western)people think that they live in a fair and just society and that criminals and liars and cheats would never ever get into power. This is mostly because the powers that be have told them so.
This perspective won't change until it is too late. And then, well its too late.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
He's not calling for us to lay down and die, he saying FIGHT, but do it smart. You don't have the cash to make laws (yes, thats really all it takes) but you do have the power to make code that circumvents these laws. Who cares if they pass a bill giving the RIAA power to DOS a P2P network when we can right code that protects that network and possibly, if we have the balls, blasts the RIAA into the dark ages for even trying such a thing.
Basically in this situation it's better to be Malcom X than Dr. King.
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
Right! And when we declared independance from Russia, we had to back up our claims with actions! Geeks everywhere have to get down to business. Just like the Mexicans did when declaring independance from Prussia.
We need to get to it. We've got our intelligence, and more importantly, our knowledge of history behind us. We're more prepared than the Canadians were when they broke off from the Klingon Empire.
Time to go do some good.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"Dude, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. "
It saddens me to see our cultural heritage being lost. Get thee to a video store near you and rent "National Lampoon's Animal House."
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
But if they tried to do that they'd piss off companies that make hardware, which would adversely affect their campaign contributions. Hardware companies have the money to tell the politicians "Hey, heres a few mil now FUCK OFF"
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
This is the wrong outlook on politics, at least in my opinion. One should not refrain from lobbying, that's the only way to get opinions heard in the first place. Just because they might not fully understand the exact impact their policies may have, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to educate them.
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
~ Plato
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
look if those dumb so called representatives of people(dunno who elects them! we never vote for them!) don't do their jobs, obviously the coders have to blabber about their basic rights !!
;)
Coding isn't everything isn't it?
then won't it be better for declan to shut his ass up and sit before a computer and do nothing but coding??
we would atleast be spared of all the political crap he writes
Look, if the NRA or AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) were opposing us instead of Hollywood, we'd STILL be getting our asses kicked.
The NRA / AARP have lots of people ready to give money in $10 and $50 and $100 contributions, put in time, point and click their way to contacting their Congresscritters.
I'll let you figure out what the lesson is for us in terms of what it takes to get taken serious ly in DC.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Boycott politicians, politacal organisations and other organisations and companies which are supporting politicians.
The point is: Do not let them work with information technology, or with technology at all (while "we" can still use it). And if they try to outlaw all technology then ... well either almost everybody will beat them or the problem is uncurrable and we deserve going back to stone age.
Imagine a big (majority) of "techies" not providing politicians with PCs, phones, DVDs, TV sets, cabling, storage media, phone networks, support for such equipment, training, ... Will they (politicians) notice and understand?
hany
Because I realize that what I've said falls squarely in the category of criticising coders for not being more social and for not relating more to the 'liberal arts' crew that apparently knows how to better influence people and politicians better than they do. But that's not the idea, the idea is that in talking to coders, one can come away with a great understanding that they could not have gotten elsewhere. Coding truly lends itself to revelations about copyright, freedom, and expression that other fields do not. I just wish coders would speak up more to the right people instead of trying to pretend like they had degrees in Communications or Political Science, when having a conversation with someone who did would end up having a much greater impact in the long run.
I've been saying this for months in these slashdot forums. The world needs more apps that let people trade files, provide each other with more anonymity, provide more decentralized approaches to things like e-mail and web surfing, and we definitely need to have apps that provide a coat of quills to protect ourselves from the impending attacks from the big-media cartels.
The value of the internet is that it joins people from around the world with different values and therefore we cannot push our values on others and should instead use the internet to bridge the gap between cultures. In order to let other people tell us what to view we need to decentralize our networks so that each viewer has as much say in what they see as in what they serve. We need apps that take over for the aging newsgroups so we can post articles of interest to others in a P2P manner so that they don't need to be cleaned on a constant basis. Instead what you see on these new-newsgroups is what people value. That is what the internet is about.
If you do not act, the internet will just become another idiot box to stare at and the sites you visit will even have region codes so you cannot go to sites around the world because any culture outside of the US will be deemed offensive. It is now or never. There is no second chance.
Thinking of making a killer app (possibly illegal app) to screw the politicians and big-media fags? Follow the below instructions...
Seclude yourself for 1-2 months developing your killer app.
Next develop a virus or malicious program which can send out your killer app to 100 different places including ftp sites, e-mail addresses, and the like, after which is self destructs the computer so that no trace that the killer app was there.
Travel to a country with loose restrictions on internet-cafe usage and load your 2 apps up.
Instruct the virus app to send out your killer-app in say 19 days from now and continue browsing some websites like a regular web user.
The app fires off 100 instances of your killer app, and the computer then erases the killer app, then self-destructs (either reformats the HD or does something to cause the computer to be unusable.)
Police trying to track down who uploaded the killer-app that's got all the politicians pissed point at the last user of the PC named Sven and the rest is history.
Everybody has your killer-app and the RIAA and the MPAA are as irrelevant as Polaroid is in the face of digital photography.
Good luck!
As a former (!!) american citizen, I was suprised at how outraged I got reading this.
Point is: If there is anything that makes up the 'political' side of the US majority, it's the fact that a sense for liberty or even anarchy is burried deep into the still persitant 'pioneer' spirit of US citizens.
If political decisions are to be conducted by the people of the US, getting active is the only way for them (you) to get things moving back in the right direction.
To be percise: Were this guy a konservative citizen of Switzerland, I could cope with his opinion. Lot's of high educated people crammed in a tight, overculturized place ought to find out for themselves when they do things wrong. Overreacting and jumping to blind activisim could be somewhat counterproductive in such an enviroment
Or said otherwise: In larger parts of europe we've got the media for effective, in depth critical comments on politics. The US simply lacks a conform common level of education for political correction to work that way - kinda 'automatically', if you know what I mean. That's where it boils down to the real people and what they feel about their liberty.
Let's face it folks: The last thing we all want is an USA 'going Orwell' - which it actually is doing in leaps and bounds at the time. The foremost thing that makes me think we can avoid that isn't a common political sense in the US, mind you, but the all-american peoples utter lack of humor when it finally gets to them that the fate of their hard earned liberty is at their hands.
Bottom line: Don't listen to this 'wanna be' pseudo-european-cosmopolitan BS, get 'on the street' and tell John Doe what actually happening with this SSSCA, 'Patriot' and DMCA stuff, and kick some serious political butt before it's to late.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Democratic systems for power distribution work by "votes". You've got an active right to vote, which means your single vote can make a difference, which is cool, and you have a passive right be elected, which means you collect several votes from others.
Now guess which option is more harmful to established politicians: you refusing to vote, you not voting for them, or you taking away several of their votes.
Don't bother with writing to your representative. Become your own representative.
Without the practical immunity from prosecution given by their political power, the criminals can be finally put on trial for corruption (which is all lobbying is about, really, legalised corruption). Hey, if I can get life sentence for hacking, then Senator Disney surely deserves death penalty for corruption.
This is a great idea, and there are certainly plenty of geeks who would feel strongly enough about these issues. Someone start it, I'll pay dues :)
Sit down and code.. I dont know about you buy sitting down and coding isn't nearly as much fun as making fun of your representative or GASP pull a Jesse Ventura and become governor! If a stupid wrestling guy can become governor I'm more then sure there's a few coders out there that can be part of congress rather then "sit there and write the next napster" .. and btw... napster/gnutella really wasn't the "next big thing".. It was however one of the most annoying things that me as an network admin had to take care of... Why?... because I don't like the fact that my routers were constantly close to 100% usage and my bandwidth was floating near 90% utilization. Did i mention the various calls I got from annoyed tards for the "slow" service?
His analysis of the current political situation is right, but only as far as it goes. What he's missed is that o1ur jobs are at stake. High tech R&D will have to move out of the USA if Hollywood gets everything it wants and at the moment, MPAA/RIAA have NO meaningful opposition.
He is WRONG about the options being to keep doing futile educational attempts or go home.
Lessig is RIGHT in that we have to stay engaged in the political process. He is WRONG in saying we have to do the same old things, only bigger and better.
BOTH are wrong in thinking there are no other options.
The third choice is ORGANIZE in a clueful way.
Is the average member of the National Rifle Association a major record label suit making $1M a year?
Is the average retiree member of the American Association of Retired Persons a VP of Universal making $2M a year?
I think you know that the answer to both questions are NO.
Does Congress listen to the NRA or the AARP? Not always, not all the time, but in general, the answer is "YES!". The "not always" simply means that nobody gets everything they want all the time.
Is the income of the average member of either group that much greater than ours? Of course not, our average incomes are far higher than theirs. Is the average intelligence or wisdom of the average member of each group so much greater than that of the average "geek" that they deserve political influence and we don't?
What does the NRA/AARP do?
The high-tech part of the US economy is $500B, the entertainment sector about $50B. They are the tail, WE are the dog. Who's getting wagged?
There seems to be an assumption that just because we work with computers, there's a collective cluelessness that will make it impossible for us to combine as a whole to save our own asses, that we are too stupid to understand what our own self-interest is and too selfish to give our own money and time to do anything about it.
Declan has offended us because he's the first geek public figure to make the assumptions that our opposition makes about is explicit.
Our options are:
- Do what the NRA/AARP does. Band together, open our wallets, donate our own time to make sure our friends get elected and our enemies get retired. One $100 contribution to a Congresscritter can be ignored. 100,000 such contributions aggregated by a "geek" organization means that when the Department of Commerce sets up a DRM conference, our people will be invited VIP guests and maybe Hollywood doesn't get invited.
- watch corporate high-tech R&D move to places where Hollywood doesn't 0wn the government to escape the drastically increased costs of compliance and slower development cycles with the legislation passed or in progress will mandate.
- bet on every government in the world adopting the same shackles on its own high-tech that the US entertainment industry wants. I think this a sucker bet.
Get ready to open your checkbooks to buy insurance against having to move out of the USA to practice any high-tech profession via the political process. Or start saving up for relocation and startup money in a new country. Or see what kind of fast-food uniforms you look best in.The individual geek option in this case is to move out of the US when this happens to wherever the most interesting companies are going or learn how to love flipping burgers. Do you want to say "Would you like fries with that?" on the job?
People, it's "Join or Die" time.
We can find something to join or invent something, but we WILL stand up and be counted or we WILL be rolled over.
You have run out of time to decide. What's it going to be?
Tech Public Policy stuff
There will never be a peaceful resolution, no matter how much you yak about changing the system. The politicians, while most certainly a lower form of life, aren't exactly stupid; they'll simply outlaw any attempt to horn in on their power base. It's that simple.
Lobby all you like, for all the good it'll do you. And code all you like, in the naive belief that Congress won't just declare your code illegal if they perceive it as a threat. Either way you're fucked.
Innocence is for Catholic schoolgirls. Whether you think 'the code uber all' or 'lobbying works', it won't matter for shit in the real world. What it boils down to, and has always boiled down to, is: who has the power.
They do, and you don't. The only way to change anything is to change *that* equation. Until then you're just engaging in a simplistic act of mental masturbation to make yourself feel better about the shithole this country is becoming.
If you want that power, you'll have to *seize* it. Because they sure as hell aren't going to give it to you of their own free will.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
As much as I believe persons exists that fit into your broad description, I don't think the majority of people are like this. That you are intelligent does not mean everyone else is dumb.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
It's our jobs, or what's left of them.
Or if you aren't working, whether there will ever again be a wave of high-tech company expansion that'll get you a job.
CDTBPA, BPWG recommendations, and we don't know what next mean that the cost of US high-tech R&D go through the roof, and the brain-damaged technology Hollywood is likely to approve will reduce the functionality of hardware, software, the Internet itself in a way even or especially noticeable by Joe Sixpack *and* his PHM. What does this economy look like for a high-tech worker?
The example for us to follow is the NRA, not the Federation of Atomic Scientists. We have to learn how to play hardball politics in the big leagues. NOW.
This isn't about taking a noble stand. It's about kicking asses and taking names. It's about raising enough money to tell politicians "Our way or the highway. Your choice." Our chunk of the economy is 10x that of the entertainment industry. If we can't figure out a way enough money given this to make guys like Hollings go away, we deserve what we are getting.
This is also about the future of whether there is going to be any human freedom or not in this part of the 20th century.
However, I think the motivation that's going to get us to open our wallets and checkbooks and get up early some morning to walk a precinct for a candidate our organization's political analysts say is our friend is or point-and-click faxes to our elected officials every other week is... a few rich, greedy assholes want to protect a dying business model that is publically denounced by their own employees in a manner which will probably end the IT or other high tech careers of a whole lot of us.
So they can inflict a few more boy bands or Britney Spears soundalike on us before they retire.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I agree with the article that hacking, like art, promotes ideas that challenge that status quo, and is therefore an effective form of activism. However, it's not enough to promote new ideas if those who are benefiting from the status quo you are challenging have the power to suppress them. Should artists who create controversial work which other people then want to ban just stick to creating the best art they can and let the "experts" decide whether anyone should be allowed to see it? Obviously not, artists sometimes need to be advocates for their work, and so do geeks.
The problem is, politics is selfish and irrational, while geeks as a whole tend to be an altruistic, reasonable bunch. The same qualities that make a good geek make a bad politician, which is a compliment to geeks. Look at our main advocacy organization, the EFF, they are too nice! They concentrate on grassroots education, not on lobbying. Meanwhile, the RIAA and MPAA are holding a financial gun to the head of Congress. It's not because there's any public support for the RIAA / MPAA position, there isn't even any public awareness of it, which is the problem. The RIAA / MPAA would never be able to generate public support for their position, but they can generate large checks that can buy elections.
I would not want the EFF to stoop to those tactics, but someone needs to stoop to them if we want to counter the RIAA / MPAA. Unfortunately, the closest thing I've heard of can't be taken seriously, if only because it's called GeekPAC. It sounds like some kind of a joke, and if you present yourself as a joke, you shouldn't be surprised if you're not taken seriously. So, I would like to say to the GeekPAC people, change your name, and get serious. Either that, or someone needs to start a serious, technology friendly, thouroughly disgusting lobbying organization.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
/. and drooling over last night's Usenet porn cache.
Oh.. I thought that said "Geek activity."
I was laughing my ass off for a second there, imagining a geek actually performing some sort of physical or sexual activity other than hitting the reload button on
Advocacy. Introduce companies to free, open source software. A lot of them ignore it, because they are unaware.
I don't think the guy could be more wrong. True, geeks are not the most politically astute. The people they are up against have a lot of practice, a *lot*. The main problem is that geekdom in general does not have many spokespeople. When a geek is asked to prove something, he/she/it will produce emperical data to show why they are better with graphs or demonstrations. Unfortunetly, what is needed in the political arena is rhetoric from someone who looks like they know what they are talking about and that requires an articulate, socialable and well dressed individual.
It sounds shallow but it's true. Lets face it, if you walked into a bank for a loan and were faced with a scruffy man, you are not going to listen to his advice and it's the same with politics. They are not going to look let alone listen to many geeks because they present themselves badly.
Ultimatly, spokespeople will help better than code. Why? Because it's very easy to simply make what you do with code illegal with stiff penalties. Lets look at a few examples
Geek: Lets build strong encryption yoo hoo
Law: Using strong encryption and not providing the private key is illegal. Penalty, 5 years
Geek: ummm... this sucks
Geek: Lets build a peer to peer network for efficient distribution of files
Law: Sharing copyrighted material is illegal. ISPs, you are oblidged to block the following ports
Geek: haha, we're rotate the ports
Law: We'll make it legal to DOS the Geeks computer
Geek: umm.... this sucks
Geek: Lets demonstrate how copyright managment technology is flawed
Law: DMCA, you are now shafted
Geek: umm.... this sucks
And so on.... Geeks do need to continue posting their senators, but they also need to nominate people to speak in public in behalf of a group. A large number of people talking to a senator, or equivilant thereof (I'm not american, we don't have senators, we have TD's) at the same time is a rabble, not a political group
Predicated on the premise that
The House of Representatives voted 385-3 last month to approve life prison sentences for malicious computer hackers.
Declan presumes that the Congress ignores geek wisdom, concluding that resistance is futile:
Trust me, a few--even a few thousand--peeved e-mail messages won't change vote totals that lopsided.
His defeatism is misplaced.
First, he overstates the argument -- Congress required far more than malice to earn a life sentence, you have to take or seriously risk lives in the process of your hackery. Indeed, in the Slashdot debate, only a few obvious ideas were floated HOW one could actually do such a thing.
Second, I have found to the contrary that the legislative process can be worked to the benefit of hackers, and precisely because of techno-lobbying. Many horrific and just plain stupid bills were floated this year and just as quickly dumped precisely because of sound, intelligent and organized lobbying by geek activist organizations. Other bills were neutralized or rendered harmless.
Lobbying does not equate to whining through email -- which appears to be Declan's only, quite blunt and ineffective, tool. But it is a straw man for his rather simple-minded argument. Others, using traditional processes and traditional means, seem to be doing much better.
Declan's article reminded me of an earlier study in another realm. Gerald Rosenberg, a law professor at the University of Chicago, did an exhaustive study of the ability of courts ("Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?", 1991) to produce social reform and concluded that U.S. courts "can almost never be effective producers of significant social reform". (Good synopsis and book review here.)
He went further to argue that because the cost of participating in the court system was so expensive, "Public interest law groups that have long relied on litigation to achieve policy goals ought start looking elsewhere."
I agree with Declan but it would be interesting to see more statistics/studies to confirm this trend before we give up on this avenue for social change.
Hey, I'd love to code, but I'm not a programmer. I'm a geek just the same.
If I was a programmer, I'd probably be saying that I'd love to code, but I'm deeply afraid of being sent to prison for coding!
You can't code if the politicians make it illegal to code so many of the basic tools we take for granted. You need to secure and safeguard your right to do that now.
Actually, yesterday would have been better. There was a time of innocense when that wasn't necessary, but that time is sadly past us now.
Coding and being politically active aren't mutually exclusive, so choosing one OR the other is a false dichotomy. Both are important, and both need to be done right. Declan's point might make sense if we understand it as "ineffective lobbying is a waste" but the lesson to take from that is "don't bother lobbying", it's "Grok lobbying and do it right."
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Re: Geek Activism
I was moved to reply to your recent article on Geek Activism on CNET due to what I consider to be the dangerous political naivety of the piece. Advocating that people should step back from challenging the political and legal system in favour of computer programming is the most ignorant and ineffectual suggestion I can possibly imagine. Allowing the decisions of others to be made without debate or contestation in a political arena results in poor decisions being made, unrepresentative political systems and at worst the danger of a minority imposing their views on the rest of us. Do you really believe that people programming at computer keyboards can change the world? That is the simplistic utopian belief that technology can somehow free us without recourse to the political system. I would suggest you look carefully at the recent case of the prosecution of the Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen for his role in creating DeCSS software (and under the pressure of the US government no less), see digitalagora.com for more info.
Black Civil Rights activists, the Women's movement, Anti-war protesters, and even geeks have to actually get up (and well away from the computer keyboard) to force change and fight for a more equitable political system. I agree that email on its own may be ineffectual, but creating lobbying websites, educating people and writing to political leaders, lobbying companies, newspapers and magazines all contribute to a debate that can have profound effect on the decisions of politicians.
The ability of individuals to obtain and read facts free from licenses, coercive copyright restrictions, corporate censorship (maintained by the use of copyright law) and other attempts to control information, reduces people's ability to obtain information and make up their own mind. The space where people can read and communicate with others, which includes the Internet but is not limited to it, is a public sphere, a space of public deliberation, it is vital to the maintenance of a modern democratic state and this is being slowly eroded.
We should be encouraging people to take part in this political debate to set policy with regard to technology and fight to widen access to information and indeed to technology itself.
Regards
David Berry david@locarecords.com
Home Page
It's bad politics to put everyone into the same handbasket. All exhortations of the form "All geeks must do XXX" are wrongheaded. Large scale political changes require multiple approaches. There was no single organization that set policy for the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement of the '60s or of the labor movement. Yet all of those movements, comprising vast arrays of temperaments, tendencies, philosophies, etc., have been profoundly influential.
The kind of "activism by way of coding" that McCullagh advocates is certainly an excellent way of addressing some of today's serious issues, but we should not limit ourselves to one mode of engagement. Even "small" things like writing letters to editors or congress types contribute something to the general momentum. They also help build our senses of personal involvement. If a thousand or so candidates this fall are asked about the DMCA when they appear in public, a few of them might actually take notice.
The general points to keep in mind are, first, become involved, somehow. Write letters, checks, code, whatever you like. Speak up at meetings, talk to friends and co-workers. Post your opinions on message boards, especially "non-geek" boards (when you can do so without going off topic). Study the issues. Make movies. Write folk songs. Start a school. Many possibilities!
The second general point is: organize. Join an existing outfit or start your own. Five or six people working together can accomplish orders of magnitude more than five or six people, each working alone. True, one rally with two speakers and a dozen listeners won't affect national policy. But a few hundred rallies could be the beginning of a swing in public awareness.
Finally, since many of the odious steps taken by decision makers, the power structure, etc., are highly technical in nature, effective opposition to those measures will require many forms of active participation by people who are technically astute. That means that many of us will need to get out of our cubicles or basements and (figuratively speaking, for now) take to the streets.
----------
Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
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Better lobbying isn't.
We're great at making a big fuss about this sort of thing, but we SUCK at doing so effectively.
Consider this a call to all of the politically minded geeks out there. As for the rest, sit down, start coding and stop raving before you hurt the cause you're trying to help.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
If it's good enough for Cato, why isn't it good for geeks too? Are we supposed to 'stay and the kitchen and let the men take care of tough stuff like politics"?
BTW, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not calling McCullagh himself an idiot here. I don't know his larger body of work well enough to make that judgement. This is a boneheaded article, though.
What he did was he published a piece in wired on Gore's CNN interview, then he got a comment on that piece from his girlfriend at the Cato institute. Then he reported on the comment from the Cato institute and the article was circulated by Newt Gingrich's office. Of course the smear would have died instantly if the media ever bothered to check sources.
Declan also has a pretty sordid history.
After the election Declan was real pissed that the Bushies didn't even invite him to the inauguration and published nasty stories about their Web site. So now he is persona-non-grata in both the Republican and Democrat camps.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
What's this talk about coders not being suitable for lobbying? Did I miss character generation where you had to pick either coding skills or social graces? Sorry, words like "cultural tendency" are just meaningless generalizations to me.
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
Declan didn't bother to contact the Gore capaign to find out that Gore had actually promioted the funding bills and the rest of the media never bothered to check Declan's report against the actual interview.
The thing is in Declan's crackpot universe government is only evil and stupid. Nothing the government does can possibly have good effects so therefore Gore could not have had the slightest positive impact on the Internet.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If your job is working with computers, then the stuff coming out of Washington should terrify you. They could severely limit the amount of growth in the computer field with some of these proposals. Eventually, that means it will be likely that you will have to find a new career doing something other than coding. I mean, we all have to eat. Even if you don't love working with computers for their own sake, you should at least consider the monetary aspect. (I know, we are all supposed to live on our love of coding and manufacture things like food and clothes out of our good intentions.)
Technology and politics always go together. New technology always shakes things up and creates chaos. In authoritarian societies, this chaos can lead to revolution and counter revolution, to bloodshed and mayhem. In democratic societies, the change is still unpleasant. Politics is never easy, it's never quick. What this article is saying is, "let's just stay in our ivory towers and wait for the storm to blow over?" Maybe he believs that technological revolutions can't be stifled by a concerted effort of politicians. How many time do I have to cite this article, UNNATURAL MONOPOLY: CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BELL SYSTEM MONOPOLY, on the telephone monopoly before people like Declan McCullough get it?
Recently I have been reading a great book about politics. It's called Means of Ascent and it is about a ruthless, brilliant politician named Lyndon Baines Johnson (and to a lesser extent, to his opponent in the first Senate race LBJ ever won, Coke Stevenson).
Johnson was brilliant at using money and technology to get his message out to the voters (his message mostly being about destroying Coke Stevenson's reputation in the State of Texas). How did Johnson use technology? Well, he used the radio much more effectively than previous Texas politicians. He also used the helicopter to go from speech to speech. The book makes a point that this kind of campaigning was extremely effective. (Of course, Johnson still had to turn to what I will euphemistically call "machine politics" in the end, but even that wouldn't have been effective without using the gains he had gotten with his effective use of technology. Even with the machine politics, wiretaps were very helpful to the Johnson campaign.)
However, the main thing that the story of Johnson and Stevenson impressed on me was that Stevenson's problem was that he refused to "sink to Johnson's level." He refused to defend himself against Johnson's charges (some of which, like suggesting Stevenson was a Commie stooge, were clearly absurd if people thought about them), and point out problems with Johnson's own record himself. He felt he was above all that.
Well, in the end Johnson went to the Senate and Stevenson didn't. That's what happens when you give up a political fight before you've really lost it.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
"But individual tech people are probably better off spending their energy writing code than being part of the political process."
Excuse me? Last I heard this was a democracy, even if a republic. While politicians DO make the final decisions, WE (the people that is) are supposed to be represented. Obviously this isn't happening. In this case, who is going to fight for our rights? The legislators? The companies?(who you suggest in your article) Heck no! What's more, how is a congressman supposed to know what his constituency wansts unless they tell him? There MUST be communication between the government and the people. If this stops happening, then the politicians will be right to vote however their paid customers (Disney) want them to vote.
Not to be too U.S. centric but I am interested in knowing if anyone has found their elected officials responsive to email. Most of the time I have found that messages just get a generic reply. Has anyone else found this to be the case?
What is it like in other countries?
- Sometimes I think the Officals forget that they work for us.
I think it would be a big step forward if the Congressional Record really was a record. As it stands, any senator or representative can "amend" the record post facto and insert or delete things at will. Make Congress publish an exact transcript of all its proceedings, and much could be done to wrest power back. Or at least to educate the sheep as to how their reps really work.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Trying out the very latest CVS versions and entering meaningful bug reports and writing "howto" and other types of documentation are really valuable efforts. These are the places where hard-core coders deeply involved in their projects won't see bugs because they "know" how to use their programs, and of course don't write newbie oriented documentation.
Failing that, I rather see interested geeks lobbying that doing nothing constructive at all. Even writing one email or fax is better than going to watch TV or play the latest massively multiplayer game.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
But as soon as YOUR big evil Linux corporation starts lobbying, your fists are all in the air giving the "All hail!" Why? What happened to keeping politics out of it? What happened to the righteous morality of it all? You guys finally figure out your NOT open minded anarcho-libertarians and just big government, myopic, environmentalist "share the wealth" bureaucrats after all?
VA Software (parent evil corporation of Slashdot.org), Red Hat Linux and others are gonna write plenty of laws to stifle choice. Yet that's okay because you want the ONLY choice to be Linux.
This whole essay can be sumed up as
"Democracy has failed, Government by the people has failed, Quit trying cause you are not getting imediate results, No instant gratification so why bother."
Well I am not as Cynical as this windbag.
The awnser is NOT to stop Activism. The awnser is to be more effective at it. Make a VISIBLE impact. Marches, Demonstration, Paper-Ink letters NOT electronic.
Make your presence and your belief known. Be Rational and level headed and open to questions/debate. Be Logical and not emotional. Next election, Organize a Table outside the polls to express your concerns.
"GeekActivism" CAN Be effective if we ACTUALY try!
Get your hands dirty and get to it
It just isn't clear what he's trying to encourage here.
Most sensible geeks, I think, are all in favour of copyright as long as it's in moderation. In other words, people should indeed get paid for their work. But we shouldn't get the loss of fair use, the loss of the right to create on an equal footing, and the sledgehammer DMCA.
So how are we supposed to code enabling technologies? Coding things that break existing copy protection is illegal, isn't achieving what we want, and is in fact making it worse - by driving in the perception that tools allowing fair use will inevitably be used illegally. File sharing apps like Napster are known about by now, and all those have done are - yet again - earned a bad reputation and brought consumer broadband into question.
The point is simple. We are NOT going to be able to do this by civil disobedience or any illegitimate means. We don't have enough sympathy in it; the one illegitimate act that IS popular amongst average folks (plain ol' piracy) is the one we DON'T want to encourage, and the one that is WORST for our cause; and we depend on too much. We depend on content producers, ISPs, phone companies, power companies, software makers, hardware makers, etc., none of whom need to care enough about our issues that they'd risk being associated with illegitimate activity for our sake.
Coders could, I suppose, try and work out a new kind of copy protection that would allow fair use but disallow illegal copying. But that would require the cooperation of the content owners; and as long as they're able to use protection methods that block fair use, they have no motivation to offer that cooperation. As long as the courts won't make those methods unusable - either by ruling that they cannot be used at base or ruling that it is legal to break them for fair use purposes in a way that's viable for Joe Average - nothing will move them from that stance. Distributing 'fair use' breakers that are deemed illegal will harm the cause.
The only people we could get on our side are small content creators - little bands, etc. - who are feeling the negative pinch on their side (horrible contracts that force them to abandon copyright, inability to get the technology allowing them to copy protect their works because they lack reputation, etc). But even that doesn't matter much, because the public won't be swayed by anyone who hasn't gone through the big publishers' publicity machines.
Other than that, about the only thing to do is to try and set up a truly enormous distributed machine to count up to 2^650000000, store every number and GPL it (this is equivalent to GPLing every possible CD image). If you're prepared to wait more than a hundred years and store terabytes squared of data, things could get very interesting. Otherwise, zip.
...when some people also said it's no use to rally against the vietnam war.
On the other hand, other than eventually stopping the war, these rallies did not do much good then. But were they useless? Of course not. The world now is now much more left-minded overall than in the 1950s (local fluctuations like bushism and putinism notwithstanding). The "geeks of 60s" just gew up and permeated the society, including the government, skewing it to the left. Sure they've lost a lot or the original nonconformism in the process, but then again, they had something to begin with.
So my bet is that the current geek movement will similarly have little short-term influence but rather serious consequences 20 to 30 years down the road.
You can find some of the more effective ones over at Infoshop.org. They've been kicking it for over 7 years and have something of an international following.
A better choice is to read about the constitution. Few people truly understand the document which allows it to be trampled. If you read enough, you will see that the US government rarely upholds the constitution in opposition to its own interests. Constitutional courtesy is only extended to common criminals.
...is geek politicians
Think about it:
Geek gets elected mayor of podunk, Tx
more geeks move to podunk
influx of geeks get another geek elected to house district of podunk
more geeks move to this district
influx of geeks get geek elected as a Texas senator in US senate, causing more geeks to move to Texas
geek gets elected governor of Tx.
geeks take over Tx, including the Tx representatives and senators to the US.
repeat until geeks rule the world.
This is, of course, an ideal situation that will never come to fruition
Admittedly, there are only a finite number of geeks, but all we need are a few good geeks in high places, and we will be able to better fight these laws.
"Who am I" and "Why are we here" are not the problems.
The problem is when someone asks "Why are they here."
You really need to get over yourself. Just because the average American doesn't want to buy smuggled components just to aid them in breaking the law (most likely uses for such equipment is pirating IP) does not make them sheep. It just makes them uninterested in your cause. Those who don't give a crap about your cause, whatever it may be, are not sheep.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Why waste your time and money lobbying washington, it is truely a waste of time and money.
The lawyers think they are so damn smart and that they can continue to screw over americans without a revolution; an informed citizenry will crush the blood sucking magots!
1) Code in such a way to make Hollywood proposals irrelevant 2) Go To Jail. Sure, I'd love to just code and ignore the political arena. But the politicans have an answer for that, and it's one which can't be answered by coding. Trying to fight the expansion of copyright law with code is like trying to fight censorship with more speech.
It's quite possible to get rich at somebody else's expense: by stealing from them. Or you can get rich by redistributing their income in a "more fair" fashion. For example, let's help the poor farmer with farm subsidies. Problem is that most of the subsidies go to people who don't need them.
You neglected to say: "In a free market, if I get rich, it's not at your expense." People who think libertarianism is a cover for the rich and powerful often forget that those people don't like the free market either.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Dude, I have two words: Animal House.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
People who think libertarianism is a cover for the rich and powerful often forget that those people don't like the free market either.
Its true, I have great difficulty telling the difference between a market fundamentalist (in the sense that George Soros means it) and a libertarian, the rhetoric that gets used is so similar. I'm still not sure which the poster to whom you replied is.
I really have trouble taking the guy seriously. He is a true polititian.
My sophomore or junior year in college, (at Carnegie Mellon) he was the Student Body President. Until it came out that he hadn't actually been ENROLLED in classes since the beginning of his term... in fact nobody could quite figure out what he was doing, and there were a number of expenses that he incurred which had no obvious connection to his 'job'.
The whole thing finally blew up when Declan was brought up on charges of assault for knocking his girlfriend down the stairs.
Whether or not I agree with him, I just can't read articles written by such slime.
All of this stuff appeared in CMU's student newspaper, The Tartan (http://www.thetartan.org/) its unfortunate that the archives don't go back to 1998.
I can only guess that you wrote the article "Geeks in government: A good idea?" to stir up anger and controversy. It worked. For about a minute.
I agree that politics is primarily driven by lobbyists paying politicians money. However, your article essentially states that public opinion makes no difference to politicians. This is patently false. Do you really believe that no law was ever changed due to public opinion? I doubt it.
The original USA Patriot Act had language that would have made computer hacking an act of terrorism, punishable by life in federal prison. This WAS NOT limited to hacking that lead to someone's death. The law was changed before it went through Congress.
The Justice Department's Operation TIPS program was killed in large part because of public outcry. Dmitry Skylarov was released and the company who asked him to be prosecuted, Adobe, changed their stance because of public opinion.
And you're here telling people to give up? You might as well be telling people, after the closest
Presidential election in history, that their vote
doesn't count, so they shouldn't bother.
If you think political activism is "mostly waste of time," you might also want to pull out a history book and read about the American Civil Rights movement and a guy named Mahatma Gandhi.
I often believe that my Congressman doesn't listen to me and doesn't care. Regardless, I have an obligation to stand up and fight for what I believe in. It's called integrity. Try writing an article about that, because this one was mostly a waste of time.
Don't kid yourself for a second that Phil Zimmerman would be irrelevant if the legislature and law enforcement decreed that encryption was banned. It would go away, as would those who use it.
Remember, too, that
>The big lobbiess don't win because Senator Bob votes against his constituents and ignores their please. The big lobbies win because no one else is speaking
Yes, yes, YES.
Elections are decided by votes. Money only counts because it can buy TV ads to influence voters who haven't heard any other information.
When voters get mad, things change. MADD got drunk driving laws changed. Perot's minority of the vote suddenly made everyone else care about the deficit.
As long as we still have the right to vote, playing politics matters. Imagine you're a Congressman. One side sends you letters from thousands of voters in your district. The other side offers you enough money for one TV ad. Who wins? I don't know but at least it's a fight.
The problem with relying on technology is that law has tools at its disposal that coders don't have. You can write the next anonymous remailer. An oppressive government can send a team of big tough men to drag you to a windowless room. Then they can do the same to everyone who runs your code. Who wins?
>Only a multi-pronged approach holds any chance of success.
The truth of that extends far beyond this topic.
It isn't and won't be illegal to program. A few restrictions on what you can and cannot code does not outlaw programming in its entirety. Just because you won't be able to create software to help you pirate movies or songs does not mean the government has put an end to civilian programming completely.
Got anything ELSE you want to fear monger over?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
And Congressmen you should support.
/.
Read about 'em here. Previously covered on
Anyway, there is progress being made. We learn fast. And the Net makes it that much faster.
+&x
Except then I wouldn't be allowed to drive to work as I live 45 miles away and don't have an electric, pollution moving, car to drive. Greens just want different government regulation, in many cases they want MORE regulation. I want LESS, MUCH LESS regulation of what I do in my life. Libertarians are the only group that also wants to LOWER the size of government in ALL areas of our lives. Not just move the bloat to another module, in slashspeak.
So he is saying Your rights are vanishing, you can't even build new technology and also Go ahead and make new technology so they will have to change. Sure, if you really wanted to push it to the extreme we could try to get every programmer in trouble with the law, but that's not what I want.
Note that Phil Zimmerman was almost jailed for PGP for writing a potential criminal tool. Look at what happened to Napster, and all the negative fallout and political garbage from it, and note what the IETF has become.
While the columnist is right that our congresscritters don't seem to care about us, IGNORING THE PROBLEM WON'T MAKE IT GO AWAY.
So run for congress and local government, make frends with your congresscritter, and continue to make the apethtic public aware of the erosion that is going on.
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
The simple fact is that we keep trying to attack the branches and not the vine at the root. Civil disobedience of copyrights is the only way to go. It is easy to do, impossible to enforce, at attacks them at the core. They're core is a lot more vulnerable than ours is, and even if we just counter some of their cheezy guilt trips about stealing food from the mouths of artists, that alone could have a huge difference.
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My senator Sent me a physical letter. Don't know if it was made especially for me though.
Geeks are some of the few people around that actually think now and then. If not Geeks, then who? For some ideas on how, check out the essay entitled "The Stench of Impropriety at the Bribe Bazaar" at: http://brutusworks.com/politics/bribe_bazaar.htm Dr. Cushman suggests a contract that politicians would be forced to sign . . . which can only happen if large numbers of people like us, Geeks, hold their feet to the fire and insist. The edge we have is being able to bypass the traditional media and get information out to the public on the web. So, spread the word! Mirror the essay and link to it!
I find it troublesome that Declan puts Phil Zimmerman as an example of the technologist enforcing a greater change through software than the politicians through law.
He's right, but he makes the assumption that every geek, or at least a significant number of geeks, are going to be Phil Zimmermans.
He seems to forget that Phil Zimmerman put himself at legal risk, had to face legal consequences, and was technically considered a criminal by the government.
Not every geek has the courage to become a criminal for the sake of ideology, nor should they.
He also seems to forget that the change in the use and legal status of encryption was not brought by PGP alone. It took time, a lot of effort, and pressure from more social factors than Phil Zimmerman alone.
Very big and very important factors helping Zimmerman on that task were lobbying groups by business sectors who considered international strong encryption necessary to protect American Business (TM).
A big and important factor was that the opposition was mostly government bureaucracy. As far as I remember there was no Big Money group lobbying group OPPOSING relaxation of encryption legislation.
Without the lobbying, PGP and actually any unrestricted use of strong encryption would have stayed underground. Your legal international online transactions would have remained relatively unprotected.
No citizen, geek or not, should have to go "underground" and engage in "illegal activities" just to use technology for a legal purpose.
This has serious implications, not the least being that it makes every user a criminal and a target for extortion and government harassment.
That's why "just coding" is not the solution. Coding is necessary, it's the proof of concept that demonstrates which side is in touch with reality, but it is not sufficient. It never was, and I'm surprised Mr. McCullagh forgets that.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
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Anyway, he said that when he was getting started, he thought that Libertarianism would most appeal to business people and the wealthy. He found out that they simply weren't interested--because often their wealth stemmed from government regulations, or at least government regulations today protected their wealth/livelyhoods from competition.
I think this is spot on, and an ugly truth behind much of government's paternal regulation. BUT, having said that, there is a very, very large blindspot in the Libertarian philosophy in my opinion, and that is:
the ability of companies, of corporations, of organizations, to wield power, influence, and authority as great or even greater than that of any government, and such organizations are not constrained by constitutional law.
This is a problem, and right now the only solution is the imperfect, and often abused, use of government regulation of industry. At least the government is democratically elected, Florida election shinnannigans notwithstanding. Corporations are not democratic in the least, and if a citizen is to be under the heel of one or the other, far better to be under the heel of a government you can remove from office in a few years.
That having been said, the best solution is to have constitutional guarantees that protect individual rights from centers of authority apply equally, irrespective of whether those centers of authority stem from civil government, corporate governance, religious or political affiliation.
In other words, it shouldn't just be Congress that is prohibited from making a law restricting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., it should be any organization whatsoever. Ditto with every other protected right and liberty.
Individual rights, freedoms, and liberties must take precidence over everything else, including the society's choice of economic systems and even system of governance itself.
Until that fundamental problem is addressed, Libertarianism, by taking what controls there are off of corporate America, is proposing a cure many times worse than the problem.
Address that issue effectively, and Libertariansim may well be on to something. But as long as libertarianism elevates the capitalist economic system to the same level of importance as the consitutional republic ("democratic" in today's parlacce) political systems and the human rights and liberties it is designed to protect, the entire philosophy will effectively have a poison pill included with it.
Individual freedom, liberty, and constitutional democracy is orthogonal to economic systems, and mixing the two together undermines the far more important stance the Libertarian's could be taking: that of defending and protecting individual liberty and constitutional law from both the politicians and the large, multinational corporations, both of whome seek to subvert it.
Until and unless that ever changes, I will respectfully continue to decline becoming a Libertarian.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
In summary: the expertise of geeks is coding, then you have three options: learn another expertise and lobby, teach politicians to code/use technology so they understand, or both.
maybe you haven't seen my other posts, but that is exactly what i'm talking about doing.
Moo.
It is and will be illegal to program apps that do things like copy files unless we do something about it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Politicians are rich. They are lawyers and business men. Getting elected costs a lot of money and they don't use their own. They are therefore indebted to the other rich people and corporations that paid for their campaigns, even if they are not already biased by their own personal and business interests. On issues that do not directly affect them and their sponsors it is obviously possible to influence them. However the biggest influence on them, other than their sponsors, is the mass media which is also controlled by corporations.
Politicians need have little regard for letter writing campaigns and the like, since they cannot harm them. What matters is the position of the mass media on the issue and how much money is available to finance their next campaign. These are the only things that are going to significantly influence them.
This presents us with severe problems on this particular issue. We have no money (by these standards) and our opponents are very rich and have sponsored many politicians. Even worse the mass media not only support our opponents, they are in most cases directly owned by them. They are part of the "content" industry.
Comparing this with situations like that faced by the NRA is erroneous. The politicians and their sponsors, and the mass media for that matter, do not have any strong vested interest in that issue. The main customers of the manufacturers of handguns and assault rifles are the police and military after all, who are not affected by such legislation, but any residual corporate interest is on the NRA's side. It is easy to push politicians in a particular direction, with a relatively small amounts of money, if the people pushing in to other direction are equally weak.
On this issue however the politicians, the corporations and the media are united in pushing this forward. It should also be noted that corporations working together have at least as much power as the government to effect change. It is likely that the SSSCA/CBDTPA is just chest beating by the "content" industry to make sure that the tech industry gets on with implementing TPCA/Palladium in a timely manner. And it seems to be working.
It seems likely that it will be easier for the "content" industry to take the path of least resistance and introduce this through the back door using the wintel monopoly. Any legislation will come later as a follow up to force smaller players (e.g. free software) into the fold or out business. But even if they took the legislative approach, rather than implementing it through a "gentleman's agreement" between corporations, our influence is still close to nil.
This scenario has benefits for everyone, not just the "content" industry. The large players in the tech industry, like Microsoft, benefit through the massive amount of market control it gives them and barriers to entry it erects for competitors. There are considerable benefits to the government as well in terms of enhanced ability to monitor and censor the net. Of course the ordinary man in the street loses a lot but that is what politics is all about. Given that everyone with any power is agreed that pervasive DRM is a good thing it would incredibly naive to thing any amount letter writing by the few people who understand and care about the issue will have any effect.
If this was a different issue which did not involve strong vested interests on the parts of the politicians, corporations and media then some of the suggested strategies might work. Buying votes (if you can raise the money) or influencing the mass media are the most effective methods. Writing letters to newspaper editors is probably a better use of your time than writing to the politicians directly. Get the mass media behind you and most of the politicians will follow. But even writing directly to politicians could work if there is no significant opposition to your cause.
In the final analysis targeting a particular politician and getting them voted out of office will not work in our case where you have strong (rich) opponents. Any politician who gives his career in defense of Disney will be garunteed a kushy directorship and their opponent will be easily bought to replace them. Politicians are rich people and would rather suffer an election defeat than bite the hand that feeds them.
On this issue (and many other important ones) we cannot hope to win. Attempting to evade or subvert the law using code is at least theoretically possible although it will be difficult. Changing the political system is a task even more difficult than winning this one battle. The outlook is bleak and while circumstances may significantly change the path, we can be assured that the outcome will be to the benefit of our opponents, not our own.
Just like the Mexicans did when declaring independance from Prussia.
Almost true, suprisingly.
John Q. doesn't even see or seem to notice the police beating the hell out of the Somalian teenager down the street, or the Fortune 50 company dumping massive amounts of toxic waste into their local river. THESE are issues that should affect John Q., but don't. The average fellow is powerless against corporations, agencies, and the gov't. And for all you partriots out there who bought your American flag sticker for your gas-guzzling SUV to drive timmy to soccer practice, don't bitch about how powerful voting is. Voting's been turned into a purely symbolic act. Besides, people don't even vote for the right candidates. Choosing between George W. or some other fuck isn't going to affect them as much as voting for their city counsel members, or their schoolboard members.
I digress...point is, I have no faith in John Q. Maybe I'm a pessimest, maybe I'm offbase, maybe I'm an unpartiotic terrorist who should be burned at the cross, right along with those damn towelheaded camel-jockey fucks! .
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
JOIN THE EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation!
Ya Sure! You Betcha!, The_THOMAS
*Which* type of files? Word processing documents? No one is going to make copying word processing documents illegal, unless they contain IP. Music documents? Video documents? Well those I have no problem with being outlawed from copying. I kinda like content creators being able to make a living.
So clarify what you mean when you say "files"
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I used to think code stays ahead of law about four years ago. Then I realised that it was utterly pointless and ineffective position to maintain. The only way to make a difference is to make you point known to the politicians.
I have found that there are existing organisations out there that can help with Hactivism for example - Civil Liberties groups. Most of these groups need assistance in terms of understanding how and why technological based law will eventually affect the everyday person as laws passed that affect geek groups affect everbody - in time.
The type of work we do everyday, places the geek on the cutting edge, not only of technology - but civilisation and law. The world is driven by technology and that is what makes the everyday geek the perfect type of person to educate those with the skills to navigate a political world. Now it is the geeks responsibility to educate themselves about the working political machine, and geeks have always been good at pulling apart systems.
When was the last time you got involved in the electoral process?
Untill you actually get involved with the real politicians, not the Libratarians or Green's who have the head's do far up their collective asses, Indiana Jones couldn't find it, I'm talking about the people who actually make the laws, the Democrats and Republicans. You're just a nerd pissing in the wind.