Slashdot Mirror
Software to Support Human Rights
An anonymous reader writes "Some software rollouts have lives hanging in the balance. Human rights workers in massacre zones from El Salvador to Kosovo face prying eyes peering into their address books and logs, who follow up with bullets and poison gas. One project, Martus, takes these hostile environments into account: a leak can get whole families killed. They use encryption, distributed backup, and other techniques designed to survive the ultimate corrosive environment: vindictive armies in countrysides in the throes of war. The source code is open, to allow meaningful contributions from anyone willing to help. These people bet their lives on open source and private data. The sponsor organization, Benetech in Silicon Valley, funds projects that arm global rights workers, and people under siege, with communications tools that counterbalance the overwhelming force used to exterminate everything "Free"."
"I only saw powder on that website, and they sell it through retailers/dealers."
Okay, I was using that page as an example listing of gun-suppliers. If the example I chose was inaccurate, apologies. However, I remain convinced that it's possible to purchase military-grade firearms in the US, which puts into perspective the poster's concerns over offering encryption capabilities to the public.
Personally, I'd rather see the "terrorists" [communists, witches, frenchies] armed with copies of PGP, Rubberhose and Martus, than with the weaponary available for purchase in neighbourhood stores.
Yes, I agree with you that military-grade weaponry is a bad thing in the hands of the average consumer. In fact, when I was in Oregon, a guy at work told the rest of us about some guy he knew who was buying up tanks and stuff from army surplus sales, fixing them (apparently a lot of that stuff is not nearly as irreversibly decommissioned as they claim) and driving them around/firing them or whatever out on his huge ranch somewhere in the vast ruralness of the state. People like that scare me a lot.
On the other hand, the bad guys have that grade of equipment (generally not tanks, but the rest of it), and so do the police (and if they don't, they're outclassed by the bad guys). Having a population out-armed by the police and bad guys means they're unable to defend themselves against either.
If the bad guys have machine guns, I want the same. Yes, with all the machine guns around, some crazy guy will eventually go off on the populace, but since I don't think I'm the crazy one, that makes the other guys more likely to be crazy, and that's all the more reason. Yee-haw.
Get off my launchpad!