John Gilmore interviewed by Greplaw

mpawlo writes "I have just published another one of those Greplaw interviews. This time, John Gilmore had the courtesy of answering a wide range of questions on various subjects such as terrorism and security, spam blocking, censorship, secret laws in airports and of course - sarongs. Gilmore starts: 'I'm a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric.' Enjoy!"

Comments

"I'm a civil libertarian millionaire eccentric"

[Anonymous Coward]

Who isn't these days?!

greplaw?

[jargoone]

Not powerful enough. Give me egreplaw any day of the week.

And I thought I was alone...

[ElForesto]

Here I am thinking I'm the only one that argues what he's arguing. The right to travel *IS* fundamental to a free society, IDs and driver's licenses be damned! I'm glad someone with money gets it (meaning that he has the means to do something about it other than speak up).

Re:And I thought I was alone...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is, because it's *prior* restraint. No one is saying that you have the right to drive dangerously. Neither do you have a right to wield a stick in a way that endangers others. But you don't need a license to have a stick, do you? If you drive dangerously then you are guilty of reckless endangerment, and you can be prosecuted and convicted by a jury. If you are NOT driving dangerously, then you are exercising a right. Permit = permission = not a right.

Re:And I thought I was alone...

[ElForesto]

So it is the right of some drunk driver to mow down a pedestrian and be able to get away with it because in the name of civil liberties, he shouldn't have to have a license plate and drivers license eh?

I have absolutely no idea how to respond to that. Perhaps I need to beat myself over the head with a blunt object to approach that level of thinking and interpretation. You might as well say "So it is the right of some mentally-unbalanced gun nut to mow down a pedestrian and be able to get away with it because in the name of civil liberties, he shouldn't have to have a license to own the gun eh?"

The license had nothing to do with the fact that the guy was ACTING IRRESPONSIBLY. You act like that magic piece of plastic is going to automatically make Daryl the Drunk into Reginald the Responsible. Do you know why people as a whole drive safely? They don't want to damage their property and/or go to jail. The truly good people don't want to hurt other people. You act like the fact that a guy spent a few hours in a line at the DMV should account for his driving skill.

I'm all for much tougher penalties for irresponsible driving practices. Drunken driving should be a felony with at least 30 days in the drunk tank. Repeat offenders should be locked up even longer (presuming we let them out, which we shouldn't). If someone demonstrates a lack of ability to handle liberty, by all means TAKE IT AWAY.

You, sir, are an idiot. There, I said what everyone was thinking. You took my opposition to prior restraint and someone managed to walk away with an advocation of reckless and dangerous behaviour. I don't know what your problem is, but I'd bet it's hard to pronounce.

Yes I agree that big brother should be kept out of your living room, but when you are on the road, you can very easily affect another citizen's right to "life, liberty and the persuit of happiness". This is what pisses me off most about these, "I can do whatever the fuck I feel like" civil libertarians, what you do can adversely affect other people.

Can. That's a really sticky word, isn't it? I *can* choose to shoot a bunch of children with my gun. Should I be automatically subjected to intense psychological evaluation before I can own that gun? Prior restraint goes against everything this country has ever stood for. You cannot in any free society punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.

Do people do bad things? Yeah, it happens. But if you go off the deep end trying to prevent bad things from happening, you might as well lock everyone into their own little padded room in restraints so they can't hurt themselves. (Yes, this is hyperbole. That's the point.)

This is coming from someone who is a stron supporter of the ACLU(I would be a member, but I am a cheap bastard)

That's a good thing that you aren't a member, because with your attitudes I'd doubt they'd have you.

It's obvious to me you lost someone to a drunk driver, and I'm sorry about your loss. However, your emotional problems with that should not end up being the basis of law. By taking away someone's ability to chose, you become a petty tyrant as bad as King George III and an enemy to liberty.

God gave me the right to choose, and I'll never give up that God-given right of agency and free choice. Don't try taking that away.

Re:And I thought I was alone...

[damiam]

You'll notice he's not fighting driver's licenses any more than he's fighting pilot's licenses. It's possible to travel anonymously in a car as long as you're a passenger. Similarly, he thinks it should be possible to travel anonymously in a plane. Aside from hijacking, it's pretty hard to hurt other people while riding in a plane. And having to show ID didn't stop the 9/11 hijackers; they all showed perfectly valid official IDs under their own names. So what's the point?

Re:And I thought I was alone...

[Ichoran]

Fine, there is a right to travel. But this doesn't mean that all rights are unconditional, context-insensitive rights.

For example, a five-year-old has the physical ability to turn the ignition key in a car and press the accelerator pedal down. But this doesn't mean that they should be allowed to drive.

The key principle is that certain actions are inherently dangerous to other people. Allowing other people to engage in these actions is a direct and severe imposition on *my* right to stay alive. Of particular importance, in the case of driving, is the fact that it is not possible for a completely untrained driver to not willfully (if unintentionally) endangering me, because he or she does not have the skill to operate a dangerous device in a way that won't endanger me.

Simply by their using the vehicle, they are putting me at risk. There is no effective difference to me (as a victim) between them driving on public roads and them playing Russian roulette with me when I drive on public roads (using a gun with a sufficiently large cylinder).

So we have to balance their rights to be able to act freely with my rights to not be killed by other people's free actions. The current solution is to require training for people who use dangerous devices so that the user of the device can, with high degree of confidence, willfully avoid causing harm to others.

(Note also that it is not good enough for me for them to be punished after they kill me. I'm still dead. The rights we have in a free society should not include the right to kill one or more people, as long as we die ourselves or suffer some other punishment afterwards.)

Now, obviously, if one has a requirement but never enforces it, it doesn't protect my rights at all. So the requirement has to be enforced. I don't really care how it is enforced. The key is that there must be some mechanism to distinguish between drivers who can intend to not hurt me and, to a high degree of reliability, follow through on that intent; and those who through incompetence or inability either cannot intend to not hurt me, or lack the ability to translate intention into action.

A license is one way to accomplish this. A license that doesn't clearly identify itself as belonging to the driver isn't as useful, because this removes the ability for people to distinguish between proper drivers and threats to society. So, typically, you have to use something like a photo ID. I'd be happy with on-the-spot proficiency checks, or an IDless card with a hash value off my fingerprint that could be verified with a fingerprint scanner, or any other way to verify that the operator of the device has the capability to avoid harming others through using it.

The principle of being able to avoid harming others is also why it makes sense to outlaw drunk driving (and increase penalties for hurting people while drunk). When sufficiently drunk, you can no longer guarantee the safety of others. So by driving while sufficiently drunk, you are willfully endangering others.

So, the bottom line is: you can have a right to travel. But it doesn't follow that you have the right to travel and kill people while doing it. The right to travel is the right to travel *provided* that you possess the ability to do so without causing injury and death to others--if you do not possess that ability, their rights to stay alive trump your rights to move from A to B.

(Note that this only applies for the people operating the devices. Having IDs for being a passenger is silly, unless the passenger can, by virtue of incompetence, cause a threat to others. And it's only worth implementing checks for commonly-used devices that can hurt others. Machine shop tools can be deadly if used improperly, but they're not sprinkled all over where they can kill bystanders when untrained people use them on a daily basis. Thus, there's no point requiring an explicit license for public machine shop tool operation.)

Judge Kafka?

[orthogonal]

From the linked interview, on the subject of secret airport laws: (emphasis orthogonal's) "[i]t even worked at the District Court; our judge decided that if she couldn't see the law then it must by definition be constitutional (she ruled that I had no possible way to show it is unconstitutional)."

Is this the United States the Founding Fathers built, or Stalinism by way of Kafka?

Re:Judge Kafka?

[QuantumG]

Dude no. Read the summary judgement. The judge should have said "ok, where is this law? Oh it's secret. Ok, that's unconstitutional." But he didn't.

wrong wrong wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"The drug war is an ugly, corrupt set of policies that were bad when Nixon set it in motion to bash the hippie students who were hounding his ass out of office."

the drug war was first created to get returning GI's , from vietnam off of heroin and originally focused on treatment over criminalization. Of course later Nixon was forced by the right to increase the drug war's focus on criminalization. Oh yeah just as an aside the hippies did not force nixon out of office...he won both terms of his presidency. It was his own criminal activities that forced him out of office....not a bunch of inefectual hippies. They had nothing to do with ending the vietnam war and nothing to do with forcing nixon out of office.

Guys like this, history revisionist, asshole really make it hard for libertarian minded people to support ending the drug war. I mean any time i say the drug war is a waste of money regularly open minded people close thier doors to the idea becouse they have heard all the other consperiacy bullshit guys like this asshole have heaped on to a fairly straight forward argument. What is the saying "With freinds like this who needs enemies"

stendec@gmail.com

Re:wrong wrong wrong

[commodoresloat]

You're right that Nixon's drug war emphasized treatment over criminalization, at least compared to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush drug war. But you're wrong that Nixon didn't see the drug war as a way to bash the hippies. He did, and he said so to his cabinet, as many of his tapes record. They also record that he thought the hippies were in league with the commies and the Jews on this. When you bash the "conspiracy bullshit" coming from the hippies you might at least compare it to the extreme paranoid "conspiracy bullshit" of their main enemy here.

Re:Rights

[Tirinal]

Never mind sarongs, what about the banning of thongs in Florida and Louisiana!! this is going to far by the righteous far right.

Obviously you're not thinking this through. With the current banning of thongs in two major states the resulting surplus will no doubt follow the third fundamental law of fashion: "Anything deemed unwearable by the religious right will surface within two weeks in San Francisco like a tidal wave."

Given the concentration of techies in the Bay Area, I'd say we have something to look forward to.

Re:Server is going down fast... here's the text

[killjoe]

"Terrorism is now defined as force applied for political reasons by people other than the US Government."

THis should read.

"Terrorism is now defined as force applied for political reasons by people other than the US or the Israeli Government."

Thank you.