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Ian Clarke, Ernie Miller On Free Speech, Privacy
mpawlo writes "I am still pursuing my new pastime, interviewing interesting Internet policy individuals for Greplaw. Fresh catches include Freenet creator Ian Clarke on his decision to leave the USA, free speech and Freenet and former Lawmeme editor-in-chief Ernest Miller on DRM and privacy, copyright and the First Amendment... and, of course, why blogs matter. Maybe this will provide some food for thought."
See, I'm an amerikan (a conservative, not a neocon bush-head asshole...there's a BIG difference) and I'm trying to grasp the concept of this whole "rights" thing. What rights we have left are being stripped away for the appearance of security, and the mindless sheep of amerika (bleat) are too stupid to realize it.
Moving to Canada won't fix the problem, as anything amerika gets involved in, canada will likely get screwed up in just via proximity.
The more I see the more I realize the end time is coming. Don't bother planning for the future folks, you don't have one.
Actually it said "blawgs" in my original submission and referred to law blogs, that is online journals dedicated to law and policy, rather than the daily life of your favorite pet. This is also the issue that Ernie Miller addresses in the interview.
Pawlo.com
You are confusing Mr Ian Clarke with Mr John Gilmore. I guess you need to read Greplaw more frequently .-)
The Gilmore flight stunt has been extensively debated. Mr John Gilmore and Professor Lawrence Lessig have issued replies to the debate on Mr John Gilmore's flight-stunt. Mr John Gilmore was rejected from a flight because Mr Gilmore wore a badge saying "Suspected Terrorist". Should the flight captain have ejected Mr Gilmore because of the button or not? The discussion has been heated, not least since Mr Seth Finkelstein suggested that Mr Gilmore's behaviour was 'a millionaire's version of trolling.' Mr Gilmore counter-trolled Mr Finkelstein and got an endorsement from Professor Lessig.
Read Mr John Gilmore's reply.
Read Professor Lessig's comment.
Read Mr Seth Finkelstein's comment on the comments above.
Best regards,
Mikael
Pawlo.com
but I've got to ask:
Does it bother you that the main use of Freenet at the moment seems to be pr0n of a less-than-mature nature?
I can understand the argument that child porn is something we'll just need to accept if we want to allow true freedom of speech, but last time I checked freenet, just about the only content I could find was child porn, so it seems either pedophiles are more tech-savvy than average, or the need for anonymity for other "forbidden" content is not so great yet.
Of course, The RIAA's actions might change that quickly.
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
What do you think of the way your administration is handling things the last 10 years? Don't you just hate the fact that big companies seem to have alot more influence on politics than the average Joe has?
Shouldn't this be changed as soon as possible to protect the rights you as a citizen should have?
Or put in another way: what is the reason the US has taken this 'corporate control' road? How did this happen? Why did you all allow this to happen?
Why the obsession with corporate power? Just how much influence do they have on politics?
Do they set the speed limits?
Are they the reason I can't buy liquor on Sunday?
Jeb Bush is the Governor of Florida. What corporation paid all those voters to vote for him? Jesus, Inc.?
Are they responsible for the Patriot Act?
There's a point where anti-corporatism starts to sound like an ideology or religion. Where's the moderation? There's plenty of blame to go around.
I'd also like to point out that corporations for all their faults seem to be very effective ways of ordering people and resources for maximum effeciency. Most of the stuff you have in your house owes its existance to some corporation. Without corporations, life would be much harder.
http://www.ipjustice.org/081103codepress.shtml
"If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use 'intellectual property' regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms", said Andy Muller-Maguhn.
http://www.ipjustice.org/ipenforcewhitepaper.shtml
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:-) Please also look at the evidence of anti-conspiracy conspiracy theory:
discussion: sept 11 (WTC 2001)
issued by EUC at January 30 2003(Hitler's takeover of power 1933)
As to why, the truth - and I say this is as an American - is because we're fat (statistically speaking we are becoming grossly obese), greedy (statistically the hardest workers the world while in a nation with one of the highest incomes - yes I know about Luxembourg) swine (check out our popular media sometime) so drunk on our own stupid swill (see that popular media again, or how about Britney's absolutely perfect perfect quote below her picture) that we no longer care (elections typically drawing in 30-40% of voters).
It isn't as if any other humans would do any better though, so foreigners shouldn't think themselves superior - we're all born with pleasure centers, and predictable outcomes to them, and this results in addictions, etc. It isn't our fault as Americans because humans are penultimately mere deterministic ongoing molecular processes, or parsed down to English - we're all just ongoing (complicated) chemical reactions. Chemical reactions don't have faults - they just execute like computer programs. Yes Mr. Smarty-pants in the front row, I just denied the existence of free will.
So 'how could we allow this to happen'? I'll describe the process, if you wish. The corporations, macro-human entities that exist only to acquire resource regardless of all other matters, catered to us in exchange for resource. They catered so well we stopped caring. Now that we've stopped caring the corporations have learned that they can modify the rules of the environment they exist in - that is, change the government in their favor - and they have so that the environment now allows them to gather yet MORE resource free of traditional limitations.
As for rights being stripped away (the Patriot Act - and yes, they actively are being stripped away, ask a certain former employee of Intel or webmaster of raisethefist.org) the framers of the Constitution, being good legal engineers, built a defense in depth to prevent the system from completely running out of control. Over a long enough timeline, the probability of just about anything approaches one, including multiple simultaneous failures. 9/11 was but one breach. Another was an attorney general (who lost his senatorial race to a corpse, technically) with little understanding (or at least concern if he did understand) of the Constitution. Another element was a conservative administration headed by the members of the thinktank Project for a New American Century, who back in the Clinton administration openly advocated the US taking down Iraq to use as a base from which to topple many various Middle Eastern nations in succession like so many dominos. That there would be collusion between their oil-centric corporate interests here, as well, is simply gravy on top for them. You might have heard of some of the members of PNAC - they include Dick Cheney our Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld our Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz his righthand man, formerly Richard Perle, his much nastier lefthand man, Steve Forbes, Jeb Bush - the list goes on. I encourage you to at least read that last link so as to ascertain that I am certainly not a conspiracy theorist of any kind.
There's your why and how. Shouldn't this be changed? Yes if you choose to believe in the sanctity of individuals, which as a strict Cartesian I do. Will it? I doubt it. I encourage you to vote for Howard Dean, as he's a step in the not-wrong direction regardless of your view of things like gun-control/abortion/gay marriage/healthcare.
Any other questions? It's 3AM here in the west coast of the US and I'd like to go to bed.
No, not for a second. I have a deep conviction that the freedom to communicate is absolutely essential to human progress. This conviction was forged during my youth growing up during quite turbulent times in Ireland, during which I learned that terrorism is not a product of freedom, it is a symptom of the absence of freedom and understanding. Censorship is the enemy of freedom and understanding, and therefore the friend of terrorism.
Exactly right, man. And it is that absence of freedom that will cause *further* terrorism in the U.S.
Anyone think this is the *real* reason Ian Clarke is leaving? He's worried about possible terrorist actions taken against the U.S. government by its own citizens?
My journal has hot
This is wrong. The Bush administration is not comprised of conservatives.
They are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights in many ways. That's one of their long term objectives, and they have to do it quickly because in the US there is a strong tradition of protection of civil rights. But the kind of surveillance you are talking about of libraries and so on is a step towards it. They have also claimed the right to place a person - even an American citizen - in detention without charge, without access to lawyers and family, and to hold them there indefinitely, and that in fact has been upheld by the Courts, which is pretty shocking. But they have a new proposal, sometimes called Patriot II, a 80-page document inside the Justice department. Someone leaked it and it reached the press. There have been some outraged articles by law professors about it. This is only planned so far, but they would like to implement as secretly as they can. These plans would permit the Attorney General to remove citizenship from any individual whom the attorney general believes is acting in a way harmful to the US interests. I mean, this is going beyond anything contemplated in any democratic society. One law professor at New York University has written that this administration evidently will attempt to take away any civil rights that it can from citizens and I think its basically correct. That fits in with their reactionary statist policies which have a domestic aspect in the economy and social life but also in political life.
You said: Without corporations, life would be much harder.
I think most anthropologists would disagree. There was a heck of a lot less stress and a lot more free time for hobbies in the hunter and gather societies.
As long as you are healthy in an H&G society, things are lot easier.
You can't be serious.
If you were right, then we would just revert back to H&G societies right now, reduce our stress, and get to those hobbies.
But we don't. We don't because most of us would starve.
The precious rights that I have lost are the fact that the federal government can legally view what books I borrow and movies I rent, without my knowledge. They can do "sneak and peak" searches without my knowledge. Wiretaps and search warrants with much much less legal approval.
Don't forget that I can now be labeled "enemy combatant" and locked up without a lawyer or a trial.
According to the new Patriot II act proposed, the US government can declare me a non-US citizen based on any actions I do. That means if the government wanted to, they could revoke my US-born citizenship and take away my habeus corpus rights and ship me off to Guantanamo Bay.
"Hitler was TIme Magazines Man of the Year too. What is your point? "
His main point is that Prescott Bush was financing the Nazi war effort, in full knowledge of that fact, a full 10 months after the war had been entered by the USA. At that point in 1942 the "Trading With The Enemy Act" was invoked, and the Union Banking Corporation had its assets seized. Ol' boy Prescott was a senior director; executives included two Nazi officials. I would say "study your history" but this historical fact has been obscured and suppressed.
I guess his more important point is that there is evidence of a dynastic ideological continuity from grandfather to the current president, and so people should be prepared to experience a more subtle and complex rerun of Germany ca. 1932.
Damn those pesky terrorists