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RMS: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
Covalent writes "RMS describes how much surveillance is too much (hint: it's all too much) and how to combat, circumvent, and prevent future surveillance. How much of what is suggested is plausible? How much is just a pipe dream? Discuss!"
The article contains an extensive list of things we do that give too much data to centralized organization, and offers solutions to combat all of them. From the article: "The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us."
Look at GMail, vs hush mail vs tormail vs lavabit and the like. The public just doesn't care and probably can't be made to care.
Long Answer: only the sky is the limit.
After more than a decade of the "war on terror" and its massive abuses, it's safe to say there is no democracy left to be withstanding anything.
What he's saying should have been the predominant engineering mindset of the 90's and last decade. Unfortunately most of us were collecting data, just because we could.
There's hope, but we have to pull together!
It's too bad that the eminently sensible advice in that opinion piece will be ignored by techies because it comes from a guy perceived as icky.
It's too bad that anyone who takes that advice seriously and wants to act on it, then seeks out RMS for help, will likely be repulsed at some point.
In times of upheaval, ideologues are often the only people thinking straight enough to find a way out. Why did ours have to come wrapped in this particular package, a marketing nightmare that makes selling good sense so difficult even within the tech community?
I despair for the future and this is but one reason among legions.
Ad hominem much?
I'm a lot more worried about the US's homegrown religious fundamentalists than I could ever be of the middle-eastern ones that you seem to fear so much.
For starters, there's a whole lot more of them. Most are not individually dangerous, but they are collectively doing a lot more long-term damage.
Last I checked, Democracy is what gave us the Surveillance State.
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
This is a lot tougher than it sounds as previous language that was pretty plain language to the people that wrote them (read the Federalist papers sometime) about limiting the right of the Federal government from infringing the rights of the people. The first and second amendments alone have been trampled with literally tens of thousands of laws that take away or limit said rights (I haven't even touched the other amendments).
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language that "Shall make / not" means exactly what the dictionary says it does. Once you can do that and wipe out tens of thousands of laws that have been written to take away the effective meaning of your rights to begin with you can have an effective right to privacy.
The right to privacy is a wonderful idea, but it's worthless until we restore the concept of the "right" to begin with.
Looks like paid US shills are here already.
Destructive technology already existed in Jefferson's time (and besides, it was Benjamin Franklin who said it, almost twenty years before the United States of America declared its independence), and religious fundamentalists have existed since the dawn of religion.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that no matter how soft and simple lawmakers make it for the government to pursue avenues of investigation with legal checks-and-balances (ie, FISA court) those investigating are unwilling to follow those rules. It doesn't matter that FISA laws have provisions that allow investigators to follow phone or data traces or call routing and still obtain a legal warrant after the fact if they never bother to get that warrant, let alone get them in advance.
Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules that are supposed to guarantee people rights to privacy in their persons, papers, and effects without due-process. I am not a judge, but if I were, I'd interpret that to mean that the government isn't allowed to maintain anything more than basic vital records or basic direct-interaction records with people unless there's a reason. Investigating crime is a reason, but simply having a huge database to analyze after-the-fact is not.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There was an article, or a cartoon, or something that I read once.
1970: You want to give every American a little tracking device so that we know where they are at all times, and can follow them as they move around? You're out of your mind if you think that will happen.
2010: I need another iPhone!
RMSDS
RMS Derangement Syndrome
Amongst other things, those who wait for any RMS story on Slashdot and pepper it with sockpuppet or anonymous posts attacking RMS in any way possible. Note the first two posts are like this.
Whoever you are, I hope this vitriol of yours doesn't bleed onto other people in real life. You do realize you have a personality disorder, I hope. There's nothing wrong with having such a disorder, it's accepting it and then getting help for it that shows the good person you really are inside.
In the meantime, please leave RMS and the rest of Slashdot readers alone. You'll never, ever be able to take away from him and us all the vast success of the FOSS/GNU movement, the fruits of which you undoubtably depend on every day, no matter what you say or do. You obviously know this, so please try and break the cycle and try to be a better person. Talk to someone about it, go and try to get some help, please.
I was watching an old Ellery Queen (shot in the 70s) episode last night, it featured a Russian diplomat, who asked if the detective's office was bugged. "I beg your pardon!" Queen's father roared furiously. "This is America!" I actually LOL'd...then cried inside.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Damn, pre-totalitarian government astroturfers have about 70% of the first posts to this thread.
Loss of freedom in the US, by destroying the economy (see former commnist countries, or North Korea, or failed state kleptocracies, all of which make it almost impossible for free people to pursue their own ends) thus kill far more than several major cities blowing up from nukes. These deaths just don't show up in headlines because you don't see the results from a free, parallel world that is not lagging furher and further behind where it should and would be.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I am not a subscriber to the "too much crap to sift through" theories. Given the power to filter out your personal stuff, my private affairs, or that 'suspicious' bastard down the street, government will eventually do so. Maybe, just maybe, you can escape persecution by being a good little citizen... but not everyone will. As for lil brother, unless you're the government, you may well have to answer to someone as a private enterprise engaging in unauthorized surveillance.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people
I've actually thought that open and accessible cameras in public are a good idea - so long as they are accessible by the public. To me this would be akin to the many-eyes philosophy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law
Why do you despise freedom?
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
When you start tracking me in a grocery store and displaying ads as I move around it ...
You've gone too far.
Capiche?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Give organizations tons of data and the government will have the data as well. We've seen this countless times.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
No, my problem is that he portrays himself as some sort of sage while others do the work
To top it off his sagacity is so convoluted that, if it were code, it would be first into the scrap bin
Funny, I saw him speak at HOPE in New York years ago, and he did none of that and was a rather upstanding guy.
I even directly asked him a question and he was perfectly polite and not crazy at all.
it's how that data is used.
We are going to be watched, because modern society is watching everything.
Democracy can handle the monitoring of everything, if protection and regulations are in place an enforced.
NSA? all that data they have in no way impacts democracy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why? why won't it survive? there is no rule that states you can't have an equally monitored democracy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Destroying the economy? you mean the economy that that by any measure has done nothing but improve for 6 years?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, my problem is that he portrays himself as some sort of sage
Does he?
while others do the work
I would argue that spreading the word is work; it's certainly more than most people do.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
We don't have a democracy in nations like the UK or USA. 'Voting' does NOT equal democracy. In the UK or USA you can ONLY bring one of a number of shell-entities into power that represent the exact same interests. Liberal, Labour or Conservative - Republican or Democrat - whoever the sheeple 'vote' for, the same force controls the nation. The same over-arching agendas are pursued and implemented.
In the UK, a party that had sought to win power for decades (the Liberals) on an unchanging ticket that access to education was the most important issue for British people, increased the cost of university to the highest in Europe the moment they gained power- following the exact agenda Tony Blair had laid down, but couldn't achieve while a 'Labour' flavoured government was in power.
The sheeple have different expectations of the likely obscenities inflicted on them by 'left' and 'right' wing governments, so their masters implement more of their right-wing seeming agendas when Republicans rule, and agendas that seem 'left' flavoured when the Democrats rule. This way, across time, every agenda on the list gets implemented while the sheep shrug their shoulders and say "what do you expect from the Democrats?" and "what do you expect from the Republicans".
Of course, today things are so much worse, so the sheeple accept both left AND right-wing agendas from either party- war-mongering by Obama is positively applauded by all the George Soros controlled mock-liberal outlets, for instance.
NSA full surveillance (and the equivalent in most significant nations) is designed to ensure that the will of the sheeple CANNOT disrupt the status quo, or threaten the true rulers of the nation. NSA full surveillance achieves these three goals
1) provides near realtime feedback of the impact of propaganda campaigns in the mainstream media, allowing the control messages to be fine-tuned, or whole projects aborted if the sheeple are proving completely resistant (see Obama's failure to holocaust Syria as a recent example of this- even with saturated media demonisation of the ordinary people of Syria and their leaders, Obama could not get enough US sheeple to back his plans to bomb Syria back to the Stone Age).
2) to gather potential blackmail material on ALL powerful or influential people in the USA. A simple act, like having illicit sex, can compromise a person to such an extent, 90%+ of those so threatened would support an agenda they might otherwise oppose.
3) to identify arising grass-roots political and social organisations and their leaders, so such activity can (if needed) be co-opted or strangled at birth.
How can ANYONE challenge those currently in TRUE power (the puppet-masters behind people like Obama), when those in power how access to the NSA resources listed above? You simply cannot. All you can hope for are "palace revolutions" where the monsters end up fighting each other for supremacy. People-power revolutions (very rare in Human History) are impossible in nations like the USA, and that includes the 'revolution' of democratically voting someone else into power.
Yes, I plead guilty of hyperbole.
However "The absolute worst you can claim about American religious fundamentalitists, as far as terrorism goes" is where we diverge.
You're looking for terrorists. I'm looking at people who fundamentally threaten the next generations by undercutting education, libraries, women's rights, and critical research that the US could be at the forefront of (instead of letting other countries pass us by).
I haven't even mentioned their indirect influence on people who start wars, and their direct influence on causing major unrest and hate against the western world (Quran-burning, anyone?)
The most damage the foreign terrorists have done to the Western world is to turn us against ourselves, while they pop some corn over the fires set by our drones, and watch our "civilized and democratic" model being consumed by corporatism and paranoia, under the illusion of fighting to preserve our unsustainable way of life.
We are our own worst enemies.
In this instance, for the first time in many years, I agree with RMS. I now believe companies should retain the minimum possible data about customers, and lets solve the usability problems that come from that separately.
Don't like to re-enter your credit card and shipping info every time you buy from Amazon? It's just not that hard to solve that problem without Amazon keeping your data.
Recommendation engines? It's just not that hard to solve the problem of finding other products like this one without keeping customer data (remember when Netflix and Amazon had "lists" where customers would volunteer to group like items together - that was great!).
Targeted advertisement? Does anything think that has worked out well, rather than just being creepy and still failing to get the "time" aspect of targeting right?
Sure, I can accept that there is still info that a company needs to accumulate to do business well, especially for subscription-based businesses, but just like we now code with "least privilege" in mind, can we not also code with "least customer data" in mind?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All we need is a constitutional amendment that whatever the government does to the people, the people can do to the government.
If the government can read anyone's email, then I can read the email of anyone who works for the government. If they can listen to my calls, I can listen to theirs. If the can see my bank and medical records, I can see theirs.
FTFY
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Actually, from a basic reading of his statement, it doesn't claim they are related for good or ill. Simply that a new version of one will arrive after the downfall of the other. No more related than saying "I woke up this morning after the sun came up."
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
That was a truly awesome concern troll, but it worries me that people might not appreciate it if they discover that old BenEnglish still programs in COBOL and stores his excrement in baby food jars in his cellar...
He says laws are insufficient, and proposes that these surveillance technologies should have built-in artificial limitations that defy the will of the user. What does that sound like?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Pull the other one. It has a bell attached!
That's because you actually saw him.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules
I think that goes without saying.
But if your holding the gavel, where do you draw the line? When they come to you and ask, hey, no one is keeping track of phone data long enough, can we just preserve that data, so it isn't lost before we catch the bad guy.
Then they ask, remember that phone data, well we need to do the same with internet data, honest we won't look at it until we get a warrant.
Oh, well we missed these people who got flight training were associating with known terrorists, can't we just keep the data anonymous and just let a computer algorithm look into raising flags. Well now we got these flags, and it's a hot lead, can't we chase this suspect when it's flagged, we'll explain it after words, to explain why....
The US's homegrown religious fundamentalists -- who mostly talk and argue about goofy things like the presentation of views inside textbooks.
OMG! Those dangerous people start political debates about the contents of science in textbooks!
And actually --- they are right! Science deserves to be continually challenged --- because science deserves to be continually challenged -- that is why it is science because science is skepticism! I think any true science can hold its own against skeptics fine, that is why it is science!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
It sounds like we might agree on more points than not. However, I am not one to let a good flame war go to waste, so I will argue with you about the minutiea.
I believe the next generation is more threatened by a loss of freedom than a decrease in state run education. There are several ways to look at this. First, we can look at this in pure economic terms of human action. What incentives do governments/states/ruling classes have in educating the next generation and what to private individuals/companies/schools have to educate the next generation? Government's main motive is passive, tax-paying sheep to herd with a sprinkling of zealous patriots to do the herding both internally (police) and externally (military). A private school will want graduates who remember fondly the school that made them successful, so that they will donate liberally. All that boiled down: Government school = shut-up, get a job, Private school = be successful, give us some. Second, we can look at government run services in action versus private services in action. How does a trip to your local DMV sound? How about the Social Security office nearest you? Want to renew your tags? All of these fun fun fun activities brought to you by your local, caring, beneficent government workers doing their absolute best just for you, their boss. Go to a private business and purchase their product. Now compare your level of satisfaction. Also, let's not forget "no child left behind" means "no child gets ahead". Wonder why we suck at math scores? Little Suzy can't be taught exponents yet because Timmy can add fractions. Meanwhile, private school kids are winning national spelling bees. Private school kids represent about 10% of school age children k-12 (source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-jennings/proportion-of-us-students_b_2950948.html - couldn't get to gov data .. the website is shut down). However, private school children represent over 37% of the national spelling bee contestants (source: http://www.spellingbee.com/statistics#school).
This could go on and on, but this post is already large with only two examples of how government services suck. The less involved the government is the better for everyone. They should only worry about they primary three branches, police, military and the scant services needed for those to function. How much water I use in my toilet or shower should be between me and the company providing me with water - which shouldn't be the government. I don't mean to denegrate all government employees. I have three sisters working for the government: two teachers and a postmaster. They are loving people who do their best. The whole system of government providing services is flawed.
Governments primary role is as the legal initiation of force. That role is perverted to bring me or my children education, stamps, roads, water, etc. Government needs to stick to it's role of bringing bad people to justice and not giving me things it thinks I need. A quick point of clarification: bad people. Bad is a moral label and government should not be in the habit of defining morals. It should define legality. However, separating the two is nearly impossible as without harm coming to another person can an act be harmful? If it is not harmful should it be illegal? Final equation for that: immoral = bad, harming someone = bad = should be illegal thusly: Immoral = should be illegal. It is a slippery slope that one.
Reading past some very busy sock puppets lets try for some basic solutions: ... later any person with time and skills.
We know the internet as a whole is watched domestically. The encryption offered by many top US brands is junk, the legal/commercial protections offered by US brands is junk. The coding skills of some US staff is very surveillance friendlily by design or lack of academic interest.
So what can people do:
Use a chip thats well understood: http://guiodic.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/richard-stallman-interview/ ~Lemote machine.
Use an open OS thats well understood. Think about the file system, OS, the connection hardware, encryption and other networking. Most of the intrusion options have been talked about since the 1980's thanks to the press, law reform, political efforts or political boasting been more informative than was expected.
Thanks to Snowden good developers everywhere can now face their design teams, bosses with real options about the kinds of US hardware and software they import. Think of the internet as an intranet and your computer having aroused the skilled admins on 24/7 duty.
Air gap, self designed white box, face to face meetings, physical security, better crypto will make the internet more safe. Where one gov got in, so can ex gov staff, people/groups able to afford ex gov staff and a long list of other "friendly" countries
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
RMS may know all there is to know about technology, but he apparently knows little about history or politics. "[R]estore democracy"? Might be true if it ever existed in the US.
You've already lost, because you've qualified the "basic vital records" with the words "basic" and "vital". That's how we got where we are.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Stop believing that it's okay to ignore "eminently sensible advice" and you'll encourage others to do the same. Nobody is always pleasing to everyone. Your criticism against RMS here ends up reading as an ad hominem attack without evidence or a backhanded compliment which you think is more important to raise than the substance of the arguments presented. There's no reason to despair unless you are looking for a reason to do nothing but throw up your hands.
Eben Moglen is also giving a series of talks about what "Edward Snowden [has] done to change the course of human history", "the evolution of surveillance since World War II threaten democracy", and what it means now "that information can be both so powerful and so easily spread". One hopes you'll take these talks for what's offered in the talks.
Digital Citizen
Like birth certificates and death certificates?
I ask because I don't have a problem with birth certificates and death certificates. As vital records are the basis for proof of identity and are really the only true line that prevents someone from establishing an ironclad new identity and abandoning an old one and whatever obligations they've piled on themselves on that identity, I don't see another option.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How much surveillance can a democracy withstand? That will be very hard to answer in the absence of a democracy to test it upon. Democracy, liberty, rights, etc., all that has been gone for some time now. We live in a nation that has the appearance of democracy without the substance. Over the last 30 years public policy has continuously moved in a direction opposite from what the overwhelming majority of people want. Polls have continuously shown for 30 years that people believe the minimum wage should be high enough to keep a family above the poverty line. The inflation adjusted minimum wage is as low as ever. Polls have continuously shown for 30 years that the overwhelming majority of people believe that deficits should be handled by bigger taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. During that same time taxes on the wealthy and big corporations have gone way down to the lowest levels since before the depression. There is no democracy only democracy theater.
-- QED
I'll never understand the hate for RMS entirely. As far as I've seen in several videos and interviews he actually seems fairly level headed. He seems to understand very well that what he chooses to do is his own personal belief. He thinks that belief adopted by others would be better for those individuals, but he's not trying to cram it down anyone's throat. At least I personally, after watching a few hours worth of his videos feel that way.
He definitely is a bit pretentious ("I wouldn't even accept an iBad as a present"), but the guy graduated magna cum laude at Harvard, and then went to MIT (to not finish his degree.) It would be hard not to be a little pretentious, and have more than a bit of an ego.
At least he's not Torvalds.
Three months is the expiration date for my PII. If I'm interested in something today, I'd probably not be in three months. If I'm interested in something for longer, I probably know everything there currently is to know about it by then, and wouldn't need advertising to tell me.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Yeah I pretty much agree with you...though I don't know a solution to holding financial data.
I believe that a large part of the problem is as follows:
Even a if a company starts out small if it has the opportunity to collect mountains of data, it is practically expected to sell them to 3rd parties now. Any time you have something bad that literally "everyone is doing" you're going to have a bad time.
I did come across something pretty insane that he apparently does (according to wiki.)
"he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from his e-mail mailbox,"
He doesn't use a web browser for a site he doesn't know for certain isn't spying. That combined with the phone thing...that's a lot of dedication.
I think RMS has become something of a techno-survivalist. I never thought I would say those words, but some of the things he has said scream it. Very similar underlying philosophies at least.
"However, every single piece of the kit that I depend on is put at constant threat by patent trolls, where is RMS? Making an enamored speech does not cut the mustard."
I sort of agree with this actually. I think enamored speeches can be extremely beneficial, but not in these contexts. I think he should personally lobby for his cause. Even though a lot of lobbyists are immora/amoral assholes, being able to summon passion about the subject helps persuade. I'm sure some of the politicians are bought, but not all of them.
To be honest he might already be doing this, and if he is, that is more than enough. Hell, just getting the word out is heavy work.
We could call it ARCFUELFAN! It would be positively electric!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
All we need is a constitutional amendment that whatever the government does to the people, the people can do to the government.
I think that was the implicit point of the 2nd amendment.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Engaging in historical revisionism to try and change how things were to how they think things should have been. Biasing it to twist the philosophies of historical figures and to retroactively smear the reputations of people they consider their enemies. And then try to push that shit on students all over the country by abusing their position.
They do nonsensical shit like try to put creationism into science classes, where it doesn't belong at all.
Except you give them too much credit. That's not what they're on about - they aren't capable of challenging things like evolutionary theory. They're all about letting teachers push their religion and allowing students to ignore science in favor of whatever they've been indoctrinated with by their parents.
Not to mention that our Fundamentalists also push crap like Quiverfull (breeding a Christian Army), Oathkeepers, and the Christian Dominionists who see the Federal government as their enemy and a barrier to their control. The only difference between our fundamentalists and theirs is they just haven't started shooting yet.
Germany post WW2 is NOT a democracy for very obvious reasons. It is an "rechtstaat" or however that is spelled. Which means the law is the absolute ruler in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
To be a modern liberal democracy, you first got to have the rule of law to curb the excesses of democracy. Democracy got to be curtailed, to survive.
But what is a rechtstaat? What is a law? A law is anything that is enforced. Good or bad. You can have a rechtstaat that sends people to the gas chambers. There is no law that says laws got to be good to be counted as laws.
Democracy is even worse, far to often people seem to assume that democracy == good. NO! In reality elections are won because people think the other candidate is a poopyhead. Or the candidate just doesn't understand that he should promise lower taxes, lower spending and increased services!
Neither democracy nor the rechtstaat are under attack from surveillance because the rechtstaat doesn't care what the laws are as long as they are enforced and democracy is to busy watching American Idol. Freedom and human rights might be under attack but what election has even been about those?
True democracy is HORRIBLE! Do you REALLY want to live in a society where the majority has absolute and total control? So you need a law state to curtail democracy to protect individuals and minorities from the majority. Democracy, to survive, to prosper must be controlled.
It is a paradox but real life outside the classroom is full of them. Surveillance really does not matter. What matters is what is done with the surveillance.
To godwin this post, what matters is not a register of who is or who is not Jewish, what matters is that it matters whether you are or not. Most privacy nuts worry to much about the list and to little about the gas chambers. To translate, if you wish to use drugs you can protest against searches OR you can attempt to legalize drugs. Which do you think creates the better world?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The problem with surveillance now is that we can catch more criminals than we can afford to catch. It seems as if the US has way too many people who live outside the law or at least turn to crime occasionally. But every time we catch a criminal the cost beats us over the head. Catch another heroin dealer and there goes 40K a year just for his prison sentence and lord knows how much for police and courts. Then to top it off when we release these folks their lives are screwed up and one way or another some kind of welfare will have to be given to keep them from rotting on the sidewalks. Then we also have the children and mates of these folks who also are very likely to end up in poverty and crime as well. So the more spying we do and the more catching we do the poorer society becomes.
Then we get to stamp the label of monster upon ourselves as we confront the effect of criminal justice. Certainly we can not use prisons without providing medical care to inmates. But we still have honest, working poor, who are denied medical care. In a way that forces us to provide socialized medical care of some sort. In the end the only way out of this loop is to have a population that is devoutly religious. Faith does work to limit crime.
but he's not trying to cram it down anyone's throat.
Reading /. and not going to outside research on the guy would give the impression that he is - articles from/about him are very regular and frequent.
It seems to me that every time RMS has had an opinion on something it has been validated some time in the future. That's not to say that his solutions have been validated, just the problems he has pointed out. Every single problem that he has stated an opinion on, has come to haunt us. An almost always he is described as a crackpot when he states his opinions. I think RMS is one of the true visionaries in the world, he sees the future and suggests ways to avoid it. Sometimes his views are followed with great success (gnu/linux for example) Other times they are ignored, (copyright and patent problems stated way back when have been a thorn in the side of many software developers).
I read a few of the articles you talked about, and I sort of understand the hate now. His speaking style doesn't translate very well onto paper.
But if your holding the gavel, where do you draw the line?
Don't conduct surveillance on someone unless you have damning evidence that they're not innocent of whatever it is you think they're doing. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
It all boils down to trust. In the [not so long] past, we trusted big names. Today those big names aren't trustworthy anymore as they've shown how they collaborate with surveillance authorities at the expense of freedom and privacy. The problem is we have always blindly trusted unknown entities based on arbitrary criteria. And it yielded the situation we all know today.
If we want to keep out of this surveillance network (at least in the digital communications environment) we need to reconsider what a trusted network is. People I trust are people around me, fellows I can meet and talk to in real life. The only way to keep data safe is to either keep it out of any network or to distribute it across trusted hosts, e.g. machines which I know are managed by and belong to trusted peers. It basically means: flee from giants and manage our data ourselves.
Surveillance should be applied, 24/24, on each elected person FIRST, to make sure no corruption is done at this level.
Some police officers are now under such surveillance, and it help their works, and I just hope it'll go much more farther (Google Glass someone?)
We, citizens, should ALWAYS have the last words.
I can't call that English
You want to understand the hate, you could start @ his personal website - http://stallman.org/ and you'd understand why. He, in his own words, is unhinged - and would come off as that to anyone who doesn't happen to be a part of the OCCUPIER crowd
I have met him, and while I wouldn't say I got that close, I got no such impression. In fact, at the time he was spending a lot of time self-grooming, specifically picking at knots in his hair to the point that it was almost distracting from the conversation, except that he was, in fact, completely keeping up and engaged with the conversation while grooming himself.
He may often have a lot of hair and beard (since then when I have passed him at the con, he has had shorter hair, but its easily been long enough since I saw him even in passing that It could have grown and been cut a few times) but, never really seemed ungroomed any of the half dozen times I have seen him in passing.
In fact, I hear from a couple of female friends that he is a bit of a flirt too.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
As vital records are the basis for proof of identity and are really the only true line that prevents someone from establishing an ironclad new identity and abandoning an old one and whatever obligations they've piled on themselves on that identity, I don't see another option.
We are rapidly reaching the point where our technology will mean that nobody who doesn't want to will have to work in order to live. By many measurements we could be there now if not for systems designed to permit luxury yachts instead of permitting sharing of improvements in productivity. If you're at that point, it's reasonable to place responsibility for credit on the creditor. If you don't want to lend credit, you can start a business with your money yourself, or otherwise invest it. Is that not an option? Or are we wed to our currently-failing system of mercantilism?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You didn't answer, what about retaining evidence so it isn't lost? With the current snoden leaks, it is obvious that our government can't be trusted. But if you were a judge a year ago, I doubt you could find legal justification to deny logging data that is searched only with judical oversight.
The US is a democratic republic which means we elect people to make decisions for us. And its not going that great right now because people keep voting for people because reasons other than their knowledge and experience. For example Obama had no prior economic, military nor executive experience. Democracy is mob rule. It gave us Prop 8 in California and hindered all civil rights issues. The average person has little to no specialized knowledge on the issues they vote on. THe majority is always going to support an issue on rumor, gossip and flat-out wrong information their friend or the internet told them. What we need are small groups of representatives who are well versed on an issue -- like scientists and global warming.
Well, banks etc are used to being regulated, and so a legal solution would actually work there. I'm OK with my bank knowing a lot about me, they do a good job of not getting hacked and so on, but there should simply be no legal way for them to use that for marketing purposes. Opt out doesn't cut it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage.
Casteism
You also probably live in the US where you are closer to the local religious fundamentalists. If you lived in the Philippines you would probably be more worried about their local religious fundamentalists. The same thing could be said in any number of nations where local fundamentalists use terrorism to enforce religious fundamentalism.
In the US we get idiots like Pat Robertson going on TV and they might hold a protest. In places like Pakistan or Israel their idiots will blow up the local supermarket or coffee shop. While I hold our fundamentalists in contempt, it's pretty rare that even the most extreme cases will engage in terror, and when they do, society quickly condemns them. Even our idea of local bad guys like the KKK can't hold a candle to organizations like Hezbollah.
You didn't answer, what about retaining evidence so it isn't lost?
That's not a valid reason for surveillance. Freedom > safety. There is no excuse for violating the constitution.
But if you were a judge a year ago, I doubt you could find legal justification to deny logging data that is searched only with judical oversight.
That "legal justification" is called the constitution, and yes I could. Not to mention that there is no real judicial oversight; they just rubber stamp general warrants, which are unconstitutional.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Part of the reason why the DMV and Social Security customer service experiences are so poor is that there is an overriding effort to provide those services at the least cost. This means that instead of staffing for customer needs, the queuing setup is arranged for maximum worker productivity and these goals are diametrically opposite (which you would understand if you had ever learned any queuing theory). The latter in private business would not be a good thing because it would provide an opportunity for a competitor to gain market share by providing a superior customer experience, however it's done with government because the latter has a monopoly over those services.
Now, if DMV or Social Security inquiry visits naturally tended to be of a predetermined length, it might be possible to allow the online booking of DMV or Social Security appointments in advance, with the caveat that you would miss your appointment if you were even 1 minute late. That would provide improved customer service while still maximizing employee productivity. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of communications capabilities of DMV and Social Security customers, it's doubtful that visit length is that predictable. The variance from the average will result in loss of employee productivity (because you need to use interview slots on the high side of the variance to have guaranteed scheduling) and increased costs would be deemed unacceptable by conservative legislators, so that the only results from attempting such a change would be more delays in getting your issue addressed due to staff shortages from constrained budgets. So about the best you could do is have an online estimate of the servicing time for the current queue (similar to what they do for international border lineups), as well as estimates for the next week based on past trends for that time of day/week/month (taking into account floating holidays).
The people who complain about government providing poor service tend to be the ones who complain the most vociferously about government services being too expensive and demanding drastic cost containment/reductions in those services (which requires maximizing worker productivity at the expense of customer satisfaction). In other words, the ones who complain the most vociferously about the services provided by government are the ones least qualified to manage those services since they can't even see the contradiction in their own positions.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Oh please, there's plenty of evidence that RMS has no understanding of social decorum. There's that infamous toejam-eating video on YouTube. And yet you're the one moderated higher than the AC?
He might have an important message but it's lost when he fails to understand the importance of the barest of personal appearance and hygiene.
The biggest problem I have with RMS is that he says a lot, but doesn't provide any solutions, or more specifically, solutions that are palatable for people to be able to accept that also allows them to accomplish what they want. RMS's solution to a lot of things is to use free software and only free software, yet most people have at least one proprietary tool that they need because the free/open-source stuff doesn't cut it (for me it's the Xilinx tools, MS Office at MATLAB, for others it might be Photoshop or AutoCAD). But RMS doesn't care if the free tools don't provide the functionality or quality of output you require, just as long as their free. Hence, the ideology doesn't work in practice and so people ignore him because his solutions cannot be implemented in anything but an ideal world.
Many of his solutions to problems also involve going without - don't use a mobile phone, don't go to most web sites, don't use most web services, etc. Most people don't want to go without because devices like smartphones are so fucking useful once you've used them for a long enough period of time, that giving up that capability and functionality WITHOUT A REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE (which RMS doesn't provide) means his message gets ignored.
I don't think RMS realizes this. People don't pay attention to someone who tells you to stop doing what works and move to something that doesn't, or just not use said thing at all.
If it wasn't against the law I would have cleared out the occupy crowd with bear mace. I'm extremely glad you linked me that. Again, in his interviews, and a few of his youtube videos from conventions at least I liked him a lot.
Literally the first thing I read on the site was this:
US citizens: tell Congress you will work to replace anyone that votes to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.
Then I saw this:
In the US: tell major newspapers to follow the LA Times and stop publishing letters that deny known facts such as global heating.
Neither of those things are issues that are 100% either way. I want to cut SS/medicaire/medicaid. It's relatively forgiveable to do so since he is implying that it's simply a message to his viewership. The second one however is literally censorship. A man who raises his entire fucking ideology around things being "free" and "censorship is bad" shouldn't say something like that.
Sure most known evidence points to it being true, and most likely it is. But even if we had the entire timescale of humanity to go by we couldn't pretend to *absolutely* understand each and every weather and climate cycle. He's a scientist, he has a degree in physics for fuck sake. He has to know and understand that science isn't ever concrete. What kind of fucking scientist uses the phrase "known facts"?
I don't care if you're talking about gravity nothing is just plain "fact." Be it gravity, evolution, Electro-Dynamics, Chromo-Dynamics, or really anything that is "accepted, mostly accepted" in science shouldn't be called "fact." And it's not.
His disdain for opposing viewpoints definitely rubs me the wrong way. Hell I absolutely hate the NSA, and I hope a 10.0 earthquake hits half an inch under the surface and is somehow localized to their headquarters. However, I also am willing to bet that at least one form of their surveillance has saved at least one life.
He wants to slam anybody who wants to cut social security, medicare or Medicaid. A typical Leftist - it's these programs that have the US in a budget crisis, not just the wars in other countries, so if you want to cut these things, then he would oppose you if you were a Congressman. Similarly, global warming is a contention of debate, so if he wants papers to stop publishing people who write against it, he's all for censorship, while ranting against it. And so on.
He's not your classic Liberal - one who believes in these things and would merely vote for them - he's about as extreme as the OCCUPIERS in about all his views. His views on pedophilia is somewhat buried in his writings, since even he knows how inflammatory it is. But his views on day to day things are very much 'my way or the highway' - which is one more reason why his misuse of the word 'free' to describe his ideology is no different from the Communist halves of Germany, Korea or Yemen during the Cold War describing them as 'Democratic'.
Welcome to the world! And --- yuck --- the world is made out of --- ewww --- it's people! It's people!
And people suck!
And people argue and posture --- and often irrationally!
But there is a clear difference between a constant unlikable argument vs. violence and advocating violence.
And what makes the civilized world "civilized" is that we argue instead of resort to violence.
There will always be arguing. And there will always be stupid arguing. Which is quite a step up from Medieval Times.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Why is it that Americans keep coming up with this? "Democracy" and "Republic" aren't in opposition. The United States is both a democracy and a republic; North Korea is a republic but not a democracy; Canada is a republic but not a democracy and Saudi Arabia is neither democracy nor republic.
Look out!
After reading his piece on Wired I found it in the main to be reasonable and balanced; it lays out sensible policies that can be for the most part readily done, and restore to coverage of law that which has been done out-law. It specifies what can be collected, how it's done, and how it can be used. It provides for proper police procedure and as close as possible precludes a police state - which I think most of us can agree with.
Whatever his views on other things, whatever his opinions on others things, as found on his personal site, and what one might thing of all that, I have no trouble differentiating public RMS from private RMS. When he makes sense (which IMO is more often than many give him credit for) I think it's worth paying attention to.
In short, his proposals on Wired make sense. They can be done, can work, and restore privacy and rule of law.
Yeah, I follow most of that, and the foregoing.
All I know is the past three times I've been to Social Security things have gone well, although once the wait time was a shade over a half hour; in all cases the people working there were courteous, pleasant, and very helpful.
I went to DMV to get an ID card for voting several months ago. (My last visit, in '91, was over two hours standing in line, although the people themselves were decent enough.) I went in, was in a short line for five minutes. Got 'processed' and had pic taken in less than three minutes and all pleasantly done, then sat in a padded chair [!] for 18 of the forecast 21 minutes. Got to window, had beaucoup papers ready, all she asked for was last ID, looked at it, tinked in some stuff, said "that's all I need" and 90 seconds later I had a certified piece of paper temporary ID and was good to go. Blew me away, man. Best DMV experience by far I've had in past fifty years, and better than most any I've heard of.
The numbers have improved. The economy has not, nor has the reality for most people. Follow the money. Most of it has gone upward into the hands of fewer and fewer people. It hasn't come back out.
The facts are freely and honestly available, mostly sourced from government stats - and I haven't seen many accusing, for instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of cooking the books. Unlike the big banks, who, if you will recall, played a big hand in causing a planetary depression and where, again, a few people made a lot of money and skated.
Last I looked (and going by memory only) real income for lower 2/3 of populace has not equaled what it was in '74. Boomers' grandchildren are the first generation in the history of the nation where their collective aspirations to become better off than their parents comes a cropper. All discernible trends of which I'm aware show no prospect of that changing, nor for their offspring. The proceeds of productivity and increases in same increasingly are concentrated in fewer hands - and contrary to all fervent assertions, little of it is used to invest back into the economy. Again, follow the money. See where it goes, and see what comes out, and where and how.
But yeah, Wall Street is doing OK. Bully for them, and, I'm guessing, bully for you, too. Cheers.
And in a well-managed service where demand is properly monitored and staffing is appropriate, that's as it should be - so long as you avoid obvious peak periods of user activity like lunch break. You'll also get served faster at a restaurant if you show up at 11:45 AM.
However if you don't believe that government can deliver services as effectively as private businesses, even though they have the same tools available and don't need to carry the overhead of returning a profit, then you probably shouldn't be put in charge of running those services. Talk about Nabobs of Negativism!
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Agreed, re service structure matching to service need. Further, that properly designed and administered service provided by government, where applicable, can cost less in overhead, other factors being equal. I have no ideological bias about this stuff; again, it's matching need to good solution.
Problems in any organization are mission creep and empire building. There's a third one: give a person in a cubicle more power than they actually need to do their job and they will use it to create more regulations than are needed to get the job done; it's a form of tyranny.
My view viz. government is two-fold: there are the functions set out by the constitution, and there are the functions where government can better provide that which people cannot do as well by themselves. Examples abound and are open for discussion. Usually government is in a better position to do much in the way of infrastructure - roads, waterway management, apportioning electromagnetic spectrum, some utilities (at least insofar as oversight), and in ensuring some kind of level playing field for producers and consumers in several areas as problems arise - standards for foods, public health, and the like. Sometimes government can do better and more affordably what private providers cannot, or where they otherwise would use their position to screw people over.
There are always going to be areas of contention, and one of the things lacking has been public involvement; often the people most affected will be those who don't or won't participate in discussion, or involve themselves in self-governing. Historically we collectively turn matters over to those we happen to elect, trusting in them to use their intellects and integrity to do for us. We now see in many areas how well this hasn't turned out. I have no magic wand or good ideas on how to change this.
I would also add that government is better at funding and managing long-term/basic research - something that most of private enterprise has no interest in doing. There are significant benefits from doing so (for an example look at all that has come out from the human genome project). Otherwise I completely agree with you.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Oh, heck yes! Sheesh, I've been arguing that for a few decades now, since PARC and Bell Labs were closed; that would have been to me a valid opportunity for government to help do what companies no longer would; sorry if it seemed differently. (A problem now, in a different venue, is where companies pay their employees so little that they have to rely on government for survival, e.g. food stamps.) Anyway, I should have been more specific.
To me that's a demonstrated need where gov't can, and I think ought to, do where citizens themselves (or via corps.) don't or won't.
(Btw, I've been participating in WorldCommunityGrid since '04; several of the projects have been portions of the Genome project and then on to proteome folding. It seemed to me to be worthwhile doing, and it doesn't cost all that much extra to keep the machine running full-time.)
Also btw, I like your quote. My French is rusty and was never good; so I render it as "Sing and dance, 'cuz that's about all the bastards haven't taken away yet."