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New Technology for Digital Democracy
Votester, A New Tool for Digital Democracy and Digital Demonstrations
by Anonymous
The Problem: Free-speech and right to assemble are threatened
Peaceful public assembly, free-speech and even civil-disobedience are essential to maintaining the balance of democracy in the USA and worldwide. Yet as recent public demonstrations have shown us (for example those against war, the IMF and the World Bank) in our modern-day society it is increasingly difficult, ineffective, and even dangerous for citizens to exercise their democratic rights to assembly and free-speech.
- Many nations do not allow open public dissent at all, and the penalties for participating in demonstrations are severe. In several cases, international governing and policy-making bodies have deliberately selected such nations for their meetings, in order to prevent demonstrations.
- Even in democratic nations such as the USA, peaceful demonstrators are often violently harassed, attacked, detained, arrested and imprisoned by police.
- The police are more organized and equipped than ever before with tear gasses, irritant sprays, stun guns, rubber bullets, water cannons, body armor, etc.
- Demonstrators can now be arrested and prosecuted as "domestic terrorists" if they participate in civil disobedience or their actions are deemed a threat to "national security."
- The mainstream media provides only scant, token coverage of large public protests and civil unrest, often whitewashing out incidents of police brutality, human rights violations, and violations of the right to free-speech and assembly.
- An increasingly large percentage of the world population (especially in developed nations) is over the age of 50 and cannot safely participate in public demonstrations due to the physical fragility and health risks associated with aging. They simply cannot risk getting beaten up by the police. In other words, the majority of citizens cannot safely assemble and demonstrate.
The Solution: Votester, a new tool for Digital Democracy
What is needed is a new technology that enables all citizens to safely and peacefully assemble, exercise their rights to free speech, and perform civil disobedience if necessary. This can be accomplished using an innovative application of open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) technology on the Internet, which we call "Votester." Votester does not exist yet. It is the hope of the authors that one or more groups of technologists reading this document will be inspired to create versions of it and make them freely available to the general public.
Votester enables peers to automatically send recurring email messages and/or HTTP requests to a set of addresses associated with a digital demonstration. The rate at which messages/requests are sent by each peer to each address is determined by either (a) a function of the number of people in the digital demonstration, or (b) the peer-owner's individual preferences.
The Votester function mentioned in (a) increases the number of messages and requests sent per peer, per unit time, proportionally as the number of peers in the digital demonstration increases. In other words, the number of parties endorsing a digital demonstration is used as an implicit measure of its legitimacy and thus allows for the digital demonstration to be "louder." This prevents Votester from being used to harass individuals on a small-scale, while still enabling it to be used for large-scale protests. As the number of peers in a digital demonstration increases, the number of email messages and http requests received per unit of time by the targets of the demonstration can become large enough their organizations and IT infrastructures are overloaded. For small digital demonstrations, Votester results in the equivalent of letter-writing campaigns. For large digital demonstrations - such as demonstrations that attract hundreds of thousands or millions of participants, Votester results in significant inconvenience or even denial-of-service for the targeted addresses.
For example, to protest the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, parties could run copies of Votester on their personal computers around the Internet. They could join a group called "World Bank and IMF demonstration." Members of this group would all receive a set of email formletters, email addresses and HTTP addresses. These might include addresses for the World Bank, IMF, politicians, corporations and even media organizations. Their peers would periodically send out the email formletter(s) to each address, and/or issue HTTP requests to any URLs included in the demonstration as well. The rate at which their peers send out messages and requests is determined as a function of the number of participants in the demonstration group: If more peers participate, each peer is allowed to send more messages per unit/time. For small scale demonstrations each peer might only send the email message once per week, but for large demonstrations each peer might send the email message once per day or even once per hour.
Votester provides a number of additional useful features to users:
- Peers report their activity to other peers in the digital demonstration, thus all peers can see the statistics of demonstrations that are taking place. Relevant statistics are included in email messages sent by peers for particular demonstrations. For example, an email protesting a policy includes information about the protest, stats about the number of peers involved in the protest and the number of messages sent by them.
- Peers also provide a directory of current and proposed protests, and a means for users to join protests, leave protests, post messages to discussion groups, propose new protests to the community, manage protests they start, and send announcements to protest-participants.
- Votester peers may send email messages via their owner's email accounts and/or via built-in sendmail capabilities and/or via public email servers on the network.
- Votester peers have dynamic IP addresses that change each time they are launched.
Benefits of Votester
It's legal. In the USA democratic system, it is not illegal for a citizen to send an email containing their opinion on an important issue to others in the society. Even if they send their email more than once, this is legal. It is also not illegal for a citizen to visit a Web page repeatedly. Since each Votester peer only sends a few messages (such as once per day, or once per hour, etc.) no individual peer can be considered to be engaging in illegal harassment, hacking, denial of service, etc. Rather it is only the totally decentralized, emergent activity of the entire group that results in large volumes of messages and requests being received by target addresses. Therefore no individual is liable. (Please Note: We are not lawyers and the legality of these claims still needs to be evaluated and established by professional lawyers, and no doubt they will be challenged by governments and others if and when Votester is deployed.)
It's non-violent. However annoying Votester may be it is not comparable to violent demonstrations in which property is damaged and/or humans are injured. Votester demonstrations are peaceful, they are simply email and HTTP campaigns. All that is exchanged is information.
It's safe. Participants in digital demonstrations are not physically at risk. They can make their opinions known without getting beaten up, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, etc. They can also protest without getting arrested.
It's effective. Digital demonstrations get noticed - they may actually cause enough inconvenience to target addresses that they can't help but notice them. They also cannot effectively be blocked by the police, so they last longer and can accomplish their objectives with fewer obstacles.
It's open. Anyone can participate in Votester demonstrations, including people who for reasons such as age, disability, ethnicity, economic status, etc. would not feel safe participating in physical demonstrations, or simply do not have the time or money to travel to a remote location and risk several days of detention etc.
It's unstoppable. Digital demonstrations are hard to block. Since messages come from dynamic IP addresses all over the network, targets have no effective way to shield themselves from them. They cannot anticipate the IP addresses that messages will be received from, and even if they block particular addresses, new parties are always joining and the IP addresses of participants change dynamically.
Conclusions
It is our hope that someone reading this will be inspired enough to create an implementation of Votester, and that they will release it as a free, open-source tool for the public. We believe that creating Votester will be an interesting project in its own right - for it presents a number of technical, social and user-interface design challenges that are worth solving. In particular, in order for Votester to succeed, it must provide strong anonymity protection to users, it must also facilitate a sense of community such that users can easily locate and participate in demonstrations of interest to them, finally it must be immune to attempts at hacking or misusing it so that it cannot be used for harassment by small groups and it cannot be blocked or manipulated by various parties.
another fp for skib
After reading this letter, you will never again be able to trust Michael Sims, and you will see with crystal clarity the way that his testy press releases are to politics what the blitzkrieg was to international diplomacy. To plunge right into it, if there's an untold story here, it's that he says that he is always being misrepresented and/or persecuted. That's a stupid thing to say. It's like saying that divine ichor flows through his veins. The implications of psychotic denominationalism may seem theoretical, but they have concrete meaning for thousands of people. One might think that the notion that Michael runs at the first sign of trouble is pervasive, and this is, not surprisingly, the case. How I pity him if I were to be his judge. I would start by notifying the jury that all the deals Michael makes are strictly one-way. Michael gets all the rights, and the other party gets all the obligations.
Though I don't doubt the depth of his sentiments, it's rather the form of his expressions that I find both sententious and loathsome. I want to thank him for his theories. They give me an excellent opportunity to illustrate just how repressive Michael can be. After I develop an alternative community, a cohesive and comprehensive underground with a charter to fight the warped, distorted, misshapen, unwholesome monstrosity that his editorials have become, I know that everyone will come to the dismayed conclusion that I stated at the beginning of this discussion: In his declamations, larrikinism is witting and unremitting, soulless and imprudent. He revels in it, rolls in it, and uses it to impose unruly new restrictions on society just to satisfy some sort of profligate drive for power. I don't mean to condemn anyone's beliefs, but if Michael can give us all a succinct and infallible argument proving that he has mystical powers of divination and prophecy, I will personally deliver his Nobel Prize for Barbaric Rhetoric. In the meantime, either Michael has no real conception of the sweep of history, or he is merely intent on winning some debating pin by trying to pierce a hole in my logic with "facts" that are taken out of context. You do not need to be reckless to know that his undertakings remain opaque to many observers who dismiss him on the basis of his childish hatchet jobs and general lunacy. But don't take my word for it; ask any noxious slubberdegullions you happen to meet.
We are on a slippery slope towards economic strife, social turmoil, cultural chaos, and squalid cynicism. That shouldn't surprise you when you consider that my general thesis is that one of his dupes once said, "What I call self-aggrandizing fruitcakes have dramatically lower incidences of cancer, heart attacks, heart disease, and many other illnesses than the rest of us." Now that's pretty funny, of course, but I didn't include that quote just to make you laugh. I included it to convince you that there is no defense against ridicule. Why do I tell you this? Because these days, no one else has the guts to. I'll talk a lot more about that later, but first let me finish my general thesis: The next time Michael decides to force us to bow down low before fork-tongued extortionists, he should think to himself, cui bono? -- who benefits? If I may be permitted to make an observation, Michael thinks that a richly evocative description of a problem automatically implies the correct solution to that problem. However, I've never encountered anything as haughty as his agendas. This raises the question: Is he so hate-filled as to think that this can go on forever? In other words, how uncontrollable can he be? To rephrase that question, why doesn't he point a critical finger at himself for a change? This is not a question that we should run away from. Rather, it is something that needs to be addressed quickly and directly, because I find that some of his choices of words in his hijinks would not have been mine. For example, I would have substituted "vitriolic" for "microcinematographic" and "vainglorious" for "incomprehensibleness." While Michael has a right, as do we all, to believe whatever he wants about sadism, I recently heard him tell a bunch of people that it's okay for him to indulge his every whim and lust without regard for anyone else or for society as a whole. I can't adequately describe my first reaction to this notion; I simply don't know how to represent uncontrollable laughter in text.
He will go to almost any extreme to prevent my message of truth from getting out. Why is that relevant to this letter? Because I truly have a hard time trying to reason with people who remain calm when they see Michael create problems that our grandchildren will have to live with.
The credentialism "debate" is not a debate. It is a harangue, a politically motivated, brilliantly publicized, anti-democratic attack on progressive ideas. From what I understand, the objection may still be raised that no one is smart enough to see through Michael's transparent lies. At first glance, this sounds almost believable. Yet the following must be borne in mind: While we do nothing, those who impose tremendous hardships on tens of thousands of decent, hard-working individuals are gloating and smirking. And they will keep on gloating and smirking until we convince the government to clamp down hard on Michael's slurs. It's not just the lunatic fringe that's in Michael's corner; a number of previously respectable people have begun backing him.
I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people. I can therefore assure you that we mustn't let Michael promote the lie of extremism. That would be like letting the Mafia serve as a new national police force in Italy. He is locked into his present course of destruction. He does not have the interest or the will to change his fundamentally lascivious inveracities. If it were up to Michael, schoolchildren would be taught reading, 'riting, and racism. By the end of the decade, he will indulge in a vast orgy of murder to sate his innate blood-lust and his hatred of his betters. People have commented that there may be a gap in my logic there. I don't think there is, and I've gone to great pains to explain why. A great many thoughtful people share my concerns about him. For proof of this fact, I must point out that the reason he wants to turn me, a typically mild-mannered person, into a crude vat of fascism is that he's entirely malign. If you believe you have another explanation for his jejune behavior, then please write and tell me about it.
To put it another way, if Michael can one day abuse science by using it as a mechanism of ideology, then the long descent into night is sure to follow. I want to draw two important conclusions from this. The first is that I resent being exposed to irritable sideshow barkers, and the second is that if we let him palm off our present situation as the compelling ground for worldwide onanism, civilization itself will fall. I'll say that again, because I want it to sink in: Only unbridled clunks are capable of imagining that it is his moral imperative to manipulate everything and everybody.
If we can understand what has caused the current plague of uncompromising wastrels (especially the licentious type), I believe that we can then shatter the illusion that Michael's mottos are our final line of defense against tyrrany. Might I suggest that Michael search for a hobby? It seems he has entirely too much time on his hands, given how often he tries to inculcate foul-mouthed sentiments. Fortunately, most people understand that I've heard of contemptuous things like neocolonialism and tribalism. But I've also heard of things like nonviolence, higher moralities, and treating all beings as ends in and of themselves -- ideas which his ignorant, unthinking, obdurate brain is too small to understand.
Here's an eye-opener for you: I oppose his words because they are unregenerate. I oppose them because they are slaphappy. And I oppose them because they will push our efforts two steps backward by next weekend. I guess what I really mean to say is that to believe that Michael's vices are the only true virtues is to deceive ourselves.
In light of my stance on this issue, I am tired of hearing or reading that doing the fashionable thing is more important than life or liberty. You know that that is simply not true. I do not find warnings that are self-absorbed, feckless, and prurient to be "funny". Maybe I lack a sense of humor, but maybe Michael wants to force us to do things or take stands against our will. Such intolerance is felt by all people, from every background. "What's that?", I hear you ask. "Is it true that to deny this is to deny science, let alone the evidence of one's own powers of observation?" Why, yes, it is. That's all I'm going to say in this letter, because if I were to write everything I want to write, I'd be here all night.
You've been trolled.
HAA HAA!
This site has grown so lardassed that it cannot even distinguish insightful commentary from flamebait anymore.
How about a progressive poll tax? A millionaire thus needs to part with as significant portion
of his assets as a poorer person.
Considered harmful.