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Cringely On Civil Disobedience
Sauron23 writes "Robert Cringely over at PBS has his usual weekly Pulpit out. This weeks it's a follow up to last weeks discussion of one of the enforcers of the DMCA, BayTSP. He clarifies some of the issues surrounding a planned bust in October for P2P users sharing movies and makes perhaps an unusual request for civil disobediance from P2P users. I don't know what 10 million pirated copies of "Debbie does Dallas" would be worth either Bob. Probably more than the courts would want to handle. Worth the read." Some of the stronger parts of the column, IMHO, is the commentary on the e-mails people sent in.
Had you read the article you would have seen that a real-world protest is exactly what he is suggesting.
You are to violate the DMCA and immediately leave towards the closest police station, and demand a jury trial.
I'm up for some civil disobedience. Who else is with me? I'm seriously gonna do it.
***
For all those /.er's who believe that civil disobedience doesn't work - check out what happened to the Poll Tax in the UK during the 1980's. Hundreds of thousands of people refused to pay, they all insisted on their day in court, it cost millions, there were at least two major riots, all the money hasn't been collected, even now, oh yes and we got rid of a Prime Minister even more disliked than GWB. I was a press officer for my local anti-poll tax campaign and we were harassed, arrested, intimidated but really, really pissed off and eventually successful. So go for it my US comrades...
"...And creating a nuisance."
And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench.
http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Protesting restraints on our rights to free speech, and on our rights to use the public domain, is exactly the same as ``... marching against institutionalized racism.''
It is a petty crime with no moral value whatsoever.
Wrong. If you violate the DMCA by makeing a backup copy of copyrighted, encrypted content which you have legally purchased, your action is entirely moral. If you do it publicly, it is exactly like Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus.
See what I've been reading.
It would be the third possibility I'd be concerned with. Imagine felony copyright violation charges[1] being coupled with those insane three strikes laws. It's not much of a stretch to imagine some (many) poor soul(s) spending the rest of his life in prision for swapping mp3s!
[1] I don't know where felony charges kick in under the DMCA but for sake of argument let's say $5000. At full suggested retail price of $20 you only have to download 250 songs, each off a different album, to break the $5000 barrier.
Cringely's may be right in his suggestion that we may need mass protests in order to get rid of a totally absurd law that tilts the balance of power between producer and consumer completely in favour of the former. But if you think about it, it's also quite alarming that mass protests are needed to remind the government to work in the public interest and to consider one of the most important principles of democracy--freedom of communication--before writing a law.
A democracy should be a government of the people, by the people, for the people, as Lincoln put it. The US have gone quite a long way since then. It has gotten a government of the people, by the industry, for the economy.
Of course, the economy is very important. The primary needs of people are food and shelter. If those can be most efficiently provided by a healthy economy, and if a healthy economy can best be established by private companies that only need to act in the monetary interests of their shareholders, then humanity has found a nice trick to profit from greed instead of suffering from it, and it can be said that it is indeed in the best interest of the people to create a legal system that supports those institutions of canalized greed.
But greed in itself only respects the law of the jungle, and does not value democracy's principle of every citizen's vote being equally important. Instead of 'one man, one vote', private enterprise works according to the principle of 'one dollar, one vote', and where the dollar comes from, it really matters not.
Therefore, a democracy cannot work by allowing the economy's fuel, greed, to flow unchecked, because the even distribution of power among all people would merely become an even distribution of power among all people of equal wealth. And if democracy does not choose to distribute wealth evenly, its only other choice is to minimize the power of the wealthy over the poor.
To stay a democracy, I think that a government must at least respect these two laws: 1. guard the freedom and the vote of all citizens against the concentrations of (economic) power in society, and 2. serve the (economic) interests of the people, but only where that doesn't conflict with the first law.
The ordering principles of the economy do not lead toward democracy, they lead away from it. Democracy and economy can co-exist, but only if the former is in charge. It kills itself if the economy becomes more than means to an end.
The USA is definitely heading away from democracy, and it's not hard to see why. People who haven't heard from you won't vote for you. Reaching people through mass media costs money, even for politicians, so the politicians with the most money can reach the most people. In the US, that money may come from donations by private entities, making politicians susceptible to the obligations that tend to come with gifts. Of course, the bigger the gifts, the bigger the obligations.
Therefore, the system already leans towards 'one dollar, one vote', instead of actively working against it, as a democracy should, in order to maintain itself. Every law that favours existing economic interests at the cost of the freedom of the individual citizen is evidence of that. We know the DMCA and the CBDTPA as particularly painful examples, but they may not be the only ones.
The only way to defend our freedom is to fight for real democracy, the 'one man, one vote' type, and against its perverted brother, the 'one dollar, one vote' type. We can only do that only if we take every step necessary to remove the influence of money from the government.
Power alone already corrupts enough. Let's not add money to it!
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
It's been all over the news lately.
Lonely Mission Stephen Donaldson Wants to Stop the Sexual Abuse of Inmates by Inmates
Chicago Tribune (CT) - FRIDAY, June 23, 1995
In a comfortable downtown Chicago restaurant, Stephen Donaldson is suddenly silent, his face turning a deep red, his eyes staring at nothing. Donaldson is trying to describe something so horrible, so sickening, so painful that it almost destroyed him.
It is very difficult for me to talk about it, Donaldson says, taking a deep breath and pushing away his plate. This is a good way to lose an appetite.
It began Aug. 9, 1973, when Donaldson--by then a college graduate, Navy veteran, journalist and Quaker pacifist--participated in a pray-in at the White House on the 28th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan.
Donaldson was arrested for trespassing and sent to the Washington, D.C., jail, where he refused on moral grounds to post a $10 bond. Donaldson believed the bail system discriminated against poor people and minorities.
At first, Donaldson was housed in a section of the jail reserved for older and non-violent detainess. He spent an uneventful week playing chess and talking with other inmates.
But Donaldson said jail officials began pressuring him to pay his bail and get out. I refused, Donaldson recalled. I said I was going to stay until trial.
Soon after, Donaldson was transferred into the jail's general population--something officials evidently hoped would force Donaldson to pay the bail. Almost immediately, a young inmate who introduced himself only as Baseball approached Donaldson and said a group of inmates wanted to talk to him about his politics.
Not suspecting any threat, Donaldson followed Baseball into the inmate's cell. Eight men were waiting for him.
They blocked the exit and told me to take my pants off, Donaldson recounted. I said, 'Like hell.' They picked me up and began ramming my head against the iron railing of the top bunk. They sat me down on the toliet seat and Baseball stood in front of me.
Baseball ordered Donaldson to perform oral sex. Donaldson refused. He started punching me, Donaldson said. There just wasn't any way out. I was totally surrounded. I was terrified. They said if I said anything about it, they would kill me. At that point I gave in.
Donaldson was forced to have oral sex with Baseball. A second inmate demanded anal intercourse. When Donaldson refused, the inmate tore off Donaldson's pants, shoved a pillow over his head so that he couldn't scream and raped him. It was excruciatingly painful, said Donaldson.
For the next four hours, several dozen inmates dragged Donaldson from cell to cell raping him.
Baseball collected two packs of cigarettes from each inmate who raped Donaldson. That was the price of sex in the D.C. jail. This is just the way we welcome new kids on the first night, one of the rapists told Donaldson.
You won't have to go through all this again. The inmate lied. The next night Donaldson was gang-raped again. It was devastating psychologically, says Donaldson, his voice almost inaudible. It seemed like I was going to spend the rest of my life . It was like the end of all hope.
Donaldson managed to escape his attackers and run to the nearest guard post, where he collapsed. The next day, after posting bail and being released, Donaldson held a press conference to tell the world about what had happened to him.
Since then, Donaldson hasn't stopped talking about the problem of prison rape, which he estimates affects more than 300,000 inmates each year at juvenile centers, adult jails and prisons nationwide.
As president of the New York City-based Stop Prisoner Rape--the nation's only advocacy group dedicated to the problem--Donaldson speaks to state legislators, law school students, psychologists, private attorneys, correctional officials, talk show hosts and just about anyone else who will listen.
Working out of his New York apartment on a shoestring budget, Donaldson corresponds with about 300 inmate victims of sexual assault and wrote a friend of the court brief in a landmark 1994 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that holds correctional officials liable if they fail to protect inmates against sexual assault. Donaldson also helped put together two groundbreaking audio tapes and manuals used in prisons to educate inmates and correctional officers about prison rape.
Hitting rock bottom
For Donaldson, it's been a lonely, difficult and bitter personal struggle. Donaldson, 48, has been imprisoned four times since his first jailing and raped repeatedly during each incarceration.
He dropped out of two graduate schools, bagged a promising journalism career and drifted from one job to another. He was briefly homeless, arrested twice for drug possession, started carrying a gun, and suffered through alternative bouts of rage, paranoia, helplessness and depression.
For years, Donaldson said his whole body would shake uncontrollably for no apparent reason. He suffered panic attacks when there were a lot of men around. He has suffered chronic insomnia and he attempted suicide in 1977.
Donaldson hit rock bottom in 1980 when he fired a handgun in the emergency room of a New York City hospital after he was denied treatment for a cut on his hand. Nobody was hurt, but Donaldson was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
He was released after serving four years, started therapy for rape trauma syndrome and eventually became a rape counselor. Donaldson also intensified his efforts to publicize the problem of prison rape--something he describes as his mission in life.
But that, too, has been a difficult and frustrating experience.
Despite the publicity his case initially generated--hearings were held in the District of Columbia City Council in the early 1970s--Donaldson says his words have fallen mostly on deaf ears. The D.C. jail guards, who he alleges allowed him to be raped, were never punished. And Donaldson can't remember how many letters he's written about prison rape to politicians and prison officials that were never answered.
The public also hasn't been too interested in inmates being sexually abused behind bars. And correctional officials nationwide tend to downplay sexual assault in prison, saying that sex behind bars is rare and more often than not consensual.
I don't want to minimize the problem, but I think that the number is relatively low, says Tom Metzger, speaking for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs 81 institutions with about 97,000 inmates. There are a number of individuals who suggest that this is a much greater problem than we think it is.
But research tends to support Donaldson's contention that prison sexual assaults are not infrequent. A 1982 study found a 14 percent sexual assault rate in one California prison, while a 1984 study reported that 28 percent of the inmates in six New York state prisons had been the target of sexual aggression at least once.
A 1994 study found that 22 percent of male inmates at three Nebraska prisons reported they had been pressured or forced into sexual contact ranging from grabbing the genitals to oral or anal sex. Only 29 percent of the Nebraska inmates who had been sexually assaulted said they reported the incident to prison staff, the study found.
This problem needs to be addressed, said Donaldson, who held a series of meetings in Chicago in May. Even those members of the public who don't care about the humane treatment of prisoners need to understand that prison rape is a serious public safety issue.
The rape system is an assembly line which takes young, non-violent newcomers and efficiently fills them with rage and a desire for revenge and then deposits them on our doorsteps, Donaldson added. If they've also been infected with HIV, we've given them a death sentence which they in turn will spread. That will come back to haunt us all.
---
Criminiologists say prison rape has been around as long as there have been prisons. It has nothing to do with sex. It's an act of aggression, power and control.
The whole idea is to force someone--to take away someone's manhood, said Wayne Wooden, who co-authored the California study and is coordinator of the Criminal Justice and Corrections program at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, Calif.
Wooden said that new inmates usually are targeted by sexual predators within three days of the newcomers' arrival in prison. The predators, called jockers or studs, primarily go after young, attractive, heterosexual men.
Most of the victims are non-violent offenders who are unfamiliar with the Darwinian rules that govern life behind bars, criminologists say. And most of the targeted inmates are not affiliated with powerful street gangs that dominate life inside many prisons.
Wooden says that unless the targeted inmate fights back and wards off the attack, he will get a reputation that he can be taken and he will be victimized. Predators also use a variety of tricks to lure weaker inmates into sexual relationships.
As soon as a fish walks into prison, all the normal issues of survival come to the forefront, said Michael Mahoney, president of the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prison watchdog group. Weaker inmates have to hook up with stronger inmates or with a gang and part of that may be for sex. In other situations, they just decide they are going to rip you off for sex.
The perfect target
In many ways, Donaldson was the perfect target. A middle class kid born into a military family in Norfolk, Va., Donaldson was valedictorian of his high school class in Long Branch, N.J., and a graduate of Columbia University.
Before he was jailed in D.C., Donaldson had had only one brush with the law: He had been jailed for one night in 1968 after being arrested for trespassing during an anti-war protest at Columbia. Donaldson was also very spiritual, placing his trust in God to protect him.
I was very naive. I wasn't prepared for anything monstrous like that, said Donaldson, referring to his jailhouse rape. I knew that there were fights in jail, but I had never heard about gang rape.
Inmate Michael Blucker also says he wasn't prepared for what happened to him at Illinois' maximum-security Menard Correctional Center. Blucker, who filed a lawsuit last month in federal court against the Illinois Department of Corrections, alleges he was repeatedly raped by gang members between May, 1993, and April, 1994.
Blucker says he contracted the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, after being sexually assaulted--and that corrections officers failed to protect him even after he reported the attacks. A former resident of Crystal Lake, Blucker is incarcerated at the Dixon Correctional Center and is serving a 10-year sentence for residential burglary and automobile theft.
I became a gang slut, said Blucker, 25, in a telephone interview. I became my cellie's sex slave. He sold me for cigarettes, coffee, sometimes for nothing. You can't get over something like this. Everyday I think about it. Everyday I dream about it.
Blucker, a non-gang member, said the first rape occurred several days after his arrival at Menard when three gang members cornered Blucker in his cell, brandished homemade knives and wrapped an electrical cord around his neck. In another incident, several inmates beat Blucker over the head with bricks before gang-raping him in the shower room.
I didn't do nothing unless my gang member told me to, Blucker said. I feared for my life. I'd seen what they had done to other gang members. I wanted to come home alive, not in a box.
Howell of the Illinois Department of Corrections refused to comment on Blucker's lawsuit. But Richard Ahmad, executive director of the Prison Action Committee, a Chicago-based group that aides ex-cons, said it is highly likely that Blucker could have been sexually assaulted.
The officers often leave the cellhouses totally unattended, said Ahmad, who served 17 years in six state prisons--including Menard--for murder. The guards really don't have control over the cellhouses now.
A. Nicholas Groth, a Florida psychologist who has worked in the Massachusetts and Connecticut prison systems counseling victims of sexual assault, said the most traumatized rape victims are inmates like Donaldson.
In Donaldson's case, he was not a hardened criminal who had adopted that value system and lifestyle, Groth explained. To him, it would have been much more devastating psychologically than someone whose life has been marked by abuse, neglect, mistreatment, and institutionalization.
---
Donaldson is walking down Michigan Avenue and people are staring at him. With his Lincolnesque beard, thick glasses and white baseball hat that reads, Stop Prisoner Rape, Donaldson does not fit into the crowd. He looks and acts like an outsider. Rape does that to a person, Donaldson explains.
You feel alienated from everybody around you, said Donaldson. I became extremely alienated from all power structures. Rape is ultimately a power issue. I started feeling like an outlaw--being outside the shelter and protection of the law.
In recent years, Donaldson has sought spiritual solace in the Buddist and Hindu religions. And he has found an outlet for his anger and rage in the punk scene, where Donaldson spends most weekends listening to jarring music and slam-dancing. He writes for several alternative music magazines under the byline Donny The Punk.
But like many survivors, it is Donaldson's cause--stopping prison rape--that has given him a reason to continue living in a world that has brought him so much pain and suffering. With an IQ of 180 and boundless energy, Donaldson has become a walking encyclopedia on the issue on sexual assault.
I don't know anybody who is more knowledgeable about this issue both intellectually and through experience, said Fay Honey Knopp, former director of the Safer Society, a Vermont-based group that hired Donaldson to produce the audio tapes and manual about sexual assault in prisons.
During his two-day Chicago visit, Donaldson was in perpetual motion. He spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times' and Chicago Tribune's editorial boards, held a press conference with Michael Blucker's mother and the mother of another alleged Illinois prison rape victim and talked to psychologists at the Midwestern Psychological Association meeting.
He also met with a dozen private attorneys, American Civil Liberties Union officials, Mahoney of the John Howard Association, and State Rep. Cal Skinner (R-Crystal Lake), who is sponsoring legislation requiring state prison officials to inform new inmates how to avoid and prevent sexual assault, provide literature and tapes to inmates on rape and rape trauma and allow access by rape crisis counselors to inmate victims.
The bill, which Skinner says has little chance of being approved by legislature this year, also would require all prison officials to receive training on how to identify and prevent prison rape, and require guards notify the warden when they recieve a report about an actual or threatened sexual assault.
Donaldson supports the legislation, though he doesn't believe it goes far enough.
He is encouraging lawyers in Illinois and nationwide to file class action suits against correctional officials to force them to house weaker inmates away from sexual predators. Donaldson also wants prisons and jails to distribute condoms to inmates to slow the spread of AIDS behind bars.
It's an ambitious agenda. Donaldson is doing most of the heavy lifting himself. But Donaldson feels optimistic.
I feel like I am finally able to get something done, said Donaldson. To feel that somebody is listening to me, that gives me self-confidence. I don't feel as vulnerable as I used to.
CAPTION: PHOTO: Stephen Donaldson, president of Stop Prisoner Rape, estimates that more than 300,000 inmates are abused each year. Tribune photo by Walter Kale.
Seastead this.
A 0.0134 second google search revealed this:
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-slmatr.html
1 .htmm
The impact of speed limits on highway speed:
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
The impact of speed limits on safety:
http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_200
http://www.nj.npri.org/nj99/03/fedagency.ht
Summary of findings by the US Dep't of Transportation study:
* Based on the free-flow speed data collected for a 24-h period at the experimental and comparison sites in 22 States, posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic
* Speed limits were posted, on average, between 5 and 16 mi/h (8 and 26 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed.
* Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.
* Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.
* The average change in any of the percentile speeds at the experimental sites was less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 m/h), regardless of whether the speed limit was raised or lowered.
* Where speed limits were lowered, an examination of speed distribution indicated the slowest drivers (1st percentile) increased their speed approximately 1 mi/h (1/6 km/h). There were no changes on the high-speed drivers (99th percentile)
* At sites where speed limits were raised, there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
* Raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
* Lowering speed limits in the 33rd percentile speed (the average percentile that speed were posted in this study) provides a noncompliance rate of approximately 67 percent.
* After speed limits were altered at the experimental sites, less than one-half of the drivers complied with the new posed limits.
* Only minor changes in vehicles following as headways less than 2s were found at the experimental sites.
* Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
* Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
* Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.
* The indirect effects of speed limit changes on a sample of contiguous and adjacent roadways was found to be very small and insignificant.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK