Slashdot Mirror
Cognitive Dissident: Interview with John Perry Barlow
Bob Hellbringer writes "Mother Jones Magazine has an online interview with John Perry Barlow of the EFF, on the things that all slashdotters love: 'the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture.'"
on the things that all slashdotters love: 'the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture.'
Speak for yourself. I for one am utterly bored with the political direction Slashdot has taken in the past couple of years. And it's not even good politics! When the issues of the day are domestic and international terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, the prospect of war in Iraq and elsewhere, the economy, or even the space shuttle, the prevailing topics of discussion on Slashdot still center around that same list of drivel: the RIAA, Microsoft, and stories about "chilling effects" that are just barely more than "we hate the government but we don't know why" flamefests.
If Slashdot wants to get political, at least get political in ways that people give a damn about. Otherwise, let's stick to the stuff that made Slashdot a fun place to hang out in the beginning: news for nerds.
I write in my journal
I can think of no organization that is more active in protecting the base rights that most people in the tech community relish than the EFF, of which Barlow is a founder. Every member of Slashdot should also be a member of this organization. Among other things, the EFF is defending Fair Use Doctrine especially as it applies to digital content (an area where there seems to be lots of double standards), Internet Censorship, Government/Corporate surveillance and a lot more.
Sure, intelligence about the enemy in any situation gives you power over them. In this case, you (any random citizen) are in the position of enemy.
Sure, we all know that nobody like J. Edgar Hoover ever really existed, right? And people in power deserve all the power we can give them, because, after all, they're only in power to help us. Right? [/sarcasm]
The problem with your perspective is that, even if people are doing nothing wrong, they are not "fine." Not if someone with access to the information has a reason -- political, financial, or personal -- to use that information against the surveilled.
Really. Quite entertaining. Wish /.'s interviews were like this.
Anyhow. His view on the current laws on cyberterrorism is exactly my view (i'm contributing to BoF (Bits of Freedom) a dutch "EFF" if you want).
It frightens me that the US government is taking these steps and stands. The country which used to be known for his freedom is slowly turning into a country like Irak itself. Controlling it's own people. It would not surprise me if even the American press is being controlled. I used to dream of leavin my own country and live in the USA. That dream has been destroyed over the last couple of years when it became clear that what constitutes freedom in my mind did not have the same meaning in the USA.
I'm so disappointed in my countrymen.
This is a pretty harsh remark but i guess it's right on the mark for most of the people i know who live in the US. They all share the feeling that their countrymen look deliberately the other way because they are afraid that if they speak up they would be branded anti-patriotic. The worst part of it is that they too look the other way. They refuse too admit it but whenever i want to discuss the TIA they just response with the phrase "It's for the protection of us all" and that's it.
I hope that the EFF can create enough momentum to turn the tide. Otherwise we are facing a grim future.
For now, the threat on peoples lives comes from both terrorists and the reckless United States Governement with their wars against defensless countries like Iraq, like you said. But these days the theme of slashdot is quite detached from real world suffering and distruction. Slashdot is news for nerds, a suppliment to the regular news to bring us things of particualar importance for net-dwellers. And for this special esoteric news the villins are not terrorists, not uncle sam, not faulty heat sheilds but those who want to change our environment (the net and our own computers) forever. People like Microsoft, the RIAA and legislators that want to turn information into something that is tightly monitored and unacessable even on ones own computers are what the slashdot community (the bulk of them) are most threatened by.
People come to slashdot. They insult it on the forums they created. They insult the bulk of the community by calling them repetitive. They use words like karma-burn to discribe their posts to make moderators feel guilty to give them the -1s they deserve and they dare to try and change it to fit them!
Slashdot is getting political in a way people give a damn about. It gets political in a way as its readers and community gives a damn about with the exception of those who consider it some matter of their vain pride that they attend it to mock their opinions in a medium created for them. If you want to see war, turn on the TV, there is death, poverty, flaming astronaughts, germ bombs, guncrazy preasidents threatening to use nukes. Then you can discuss them, with friends and family over dinner. You could join a political party, join some demonstration, write a letter to the newspaper or member of parlement, write an alegorical novel, take up sculpture and express yourself that way, become a vidgilante and linch someone, join a terrorist organisation, or you could even go as far as posting your conserns at a different website... there are plenty out there that would love to hear you opinions about "real" political issues. Even post to slashdot when they post their numorous stories about your beloved reality (the space shuttle was mentioned twice). Get political about something that people give a damn about, but don't stop us from getting political about things that people don't.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The only thing that gives me much hope for our private futures is that all of this can change iin a few years with a new administration. It might not, but it could. The only law in the United States that lets me sleep at night is the 22nd Ammendment (no more than two four year presidential terms). When someone tries to change that I'll get my gun.
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You have to be a trusted individual. Trusted by whom?
I agree, they are more about analysis and synthesis. These initiatives strive to identify patterns that may indicate dangerous activity. The only problem is: before a crime has been committed, no crime has been committed. It's a problem that is firmly rooted in the nature of the universe.
These initiatives attempt to bypass the problem. They will try to do so by creating a large, steady stream of suspects, many of whom will spend long periods of time in detention for no real reason. If you doubt that this will happen, I suggest you look around. It is already happening, primarily to people of Middle Eastern descent.
You say, "We had the data." Who exactly had the data? Some people in government may have had suspicions or scattered facts, but there is a large leap between these and the knowledge of a plot. A system like TIA would not have connected those facts.
TIA was not proposed to assemble pre-determined government agency suspicions into a final, central bundle of crime knowledge. If it were, and if such a thing were possible (which I doubt without the aid of artificial intelligence), then it might have helped. But this is not the case. TIA was proposed to gather together all available commercial data on all people in order to perform blanket filtering and pattern-matching queries.
Really? The Communists did for over a hundred years. Are you a kid?
And besides which, there have been plenty of fervent capitalists who were opposed to personal freedoms -- the ones that they couldn't make money off of, and other people's that interfered with their own profits. See for example the attacks on unions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Capitalism is not any good at protecting liberty, and that's not what it's for. It's a decently good economic system, but that doesn't make it the best possible or anything. Swearing allegience to capitalism is like swearing allegience to your car. It's just a tool, not an end all by itself.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If the government would just legalize weed, I'd put up with a lot more TIA type stuff.
I think it goes a little deeper than that but you raise a good point.
The big problem with the government tracking people is that we don't have a benevolent government.
Right now they prosecute peaceful people with insane drug laws, and in some areas persecute people based on private sexual behavior.
I'd be a lot less worried about government invasions of privacy if I didn't have to fear they'd do something insane to hurt good people with the info.
If you have the Total Information Awareness project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeighs -- but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America. But having spotted them, it couldn't toss them out until it'd exposed them to the next layer of search. .... which includes what I consider to be cultural crimes, like say marijuana smoking.
And there, in a nutshell, you have failure to predict and prevent. Who said Tim McVeigh smoked dope? Each "layer" of search is based on someone's idea of what a terroist is, not what one actually will be. What you end up with is a shit list, which may or may not contain a suspect. Before the event you don't know what to look for. Before September 11th, the purchase of a dozen box cutters had no predictive value.
God, things are screwed up. I'm reading Mother Jones and it makes sense while traditional media is clueless or conspiratory.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
from the article:"It strikes me that existing political institutions -- whether it's the administration or Congress or large corporations -- only respond to other institutions. I don't care how many individuals you have marching in the streets, they're not going to pay attention until there's a leader for those individuals who can come forward and say I represent the organization of those individuals and we're going to amass the necessary money and votes to kick you the hell out of office."
Well, I can't find the article, but I read an opposing viewpoint that promoted a leaderless movement. The biggest advantage was that "they can't stop your movement with one bullet." When I look at history and see how the deaths of MLK, the Kennedys, and more recently Rabin, destroyed a movement, it gives me pause. I don't know how a leaderless movement works, but it is an idea worthy of discussion.
Then again, maybe a leaderless movement can still have institutions.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
EFF used to have an office in Washington. Given the relatively small pot of honey (around $1 million) they have to work with on an annual basis, however, eventually they found it more productive to legislate through litigation rather than lobbying.
e companies are located within 50 miles of EFF's offices down in the Mission.
It makes perfect sense when you think about who they go up against. Big media, big industry, big government, big money. Swift, underpaid non-profit lawyers have a far better chance in the courtroom than swift, underpaid lobbyists would have in Gucci Gulch.
In addition, being in San Francisco allows EFF to connect to that freaky activist hippy vibe community. Also helps that some of the world's largest/wealthiest/most-sympathetic-to-their-caus
Makes pretty goddamned good sense to be in San Francisco rather than Washington, if you ask me. They used to have a one-person-show liasing in DC for them after they moved to SF, but as far as I know, that "office" of the EFF is now gone. And as far as volunteers go, the EFF usually has more in-house than it knows what to do with. It'd be far better to give/raise money for the organization than volunteer your webmastering or Linux skizznils to the cause.