Privacy: The Political Divider. Privacy – Henrik Alexandersson Privacy issues are political dividers. Either you take the classical liberal stand – that citizens are individuals, who should be judged by their actions, or you choose a socialist or conservative stand – where citizens are to be seen and treated as a collective. Almost no one denies the need for surveillance when it comes to people who are suspected of serious crimes (or obvious preparation of such crimes). The issue is if you want surveillance of all citizens, all the time. The public Big Brother discourse seems to focus on things like terrorism, drug cartels, human trafficking, sexual abuse of children, public order, and similar alarming issues. But the justification for surveillance has nothing to do with the approach to it as such. We cannot draw the line on a case-by-case basis, as the boundaries of what our elected representatives deems to be acceptable or not keeps changing depending on time, zeitgeist and place.
The Danger To Privacy Isn't Corporate Data-Mining Or Governmental Surveillance - It's Both Combined. The past year, something of a pointless debate has broken out – whether it’s the governments’ ridiculously-broad surveillance laws that pose the greatest threat to our future liberties, or if it’s the corporate gluttonous collectors of data like Google and Facebook that pose the greatest threat. It’s neither, because it’s both combined. There’s a difference in culture on different sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, people tend to look to governments to protect them from abusive corporations; in the United States, people tend to look to corporations to protect them from an abusive government. There’s certainly reason to seek protection from both these days. It is said that a Visa executive – as in Visa, the credit card system – can predict your divorce one year ahead of yourself, based on your buying habits.
Imagine you were diagnosed with a horrible and rare disease – like pancerebral aposcrupulosis, a normally rare disease with above-average occurrence in the political profession. Cryptoparties For Learning Essential Survival Skills. An interesting movement gaining momentum is cryptoparties, which is about learning and sharing fundamental survival skills. I say “survival skills”, because it is about learning the fundamentals of communicating securely and privately. In some places in the world, this is a very tangible survival skill – right here, right now.
People who don’t master this survival skill… disappear. In several places, it is outright social darwinism: people who master these skills survive, others don’t. In other parts of the world, it can very quickly become a survival skill. The European Union and the United States alike are going down a path towards similar societies quickly – and Odin knows what will happen on the United States’ impending collapse 5-10 years from now when it runs out of new creditors. From Cryptoparty.org: CryptoParties are meetups to share and learn basic cryptographic tools such as PGP/GPG, Tor, OTR, TrueCrypt, etc. It is all our duty to support that underbrush. So Just Exactly What Is NSA's Prism, More Than Reprehensibly Evil? The US NSA’s PRISM program appears to be a set of specialized deep-packet inspection filters combined with pre-existing wiretapping points at high-level Internet carriers in the United States. Since the program’s revelation the day before yesterday, speculations have ranged far and wide about who does what to make this surveillance state nightmare possible.
Adding it all together, it would appear that the social tech companies did not, repeat not, supply bulk data about their users at the US Government’s will – but that the situation for you as an end user remains just as if they had. The day before yesterday, news broke – no, detonated – that the NSA named nine social communications companies as “providers” for spy data. Among them were Microsoft, Hotmail, Skype, Apple, and Facebook – no surprises there, activists in repressive countries say “Use once, die once” about Skype – but also companies like Google and Gmail. This raised a lot of eyebrows, not to say fury. So in conclusion, As UK Pirate Party Takes Down Pirate Bay Proxy, Two Other Pirate Parties Bring New Ones Up. The sad defeat of yesterday was that the UK Pirate Party had succumbed to legal threats and taken down its long-used proxy for The Pirate Bay, after the copyright industry shamefully had threatened to ruin the Pirate Party’s executive personally.
As a result, the Luxemburgish and Argentinian Pirate Parties have both decided to put up their own proxies in solidarity and action. The copyright industry in the UK decided to go after the UK Pirate Party members personally over the organization’s proxy to The Pirate Bay, threatening financial ruin for them and their families in a lawsuit. This is unprecedented, unethical, and cancerous to society – in essence, a special interest putting its financial resources behind trying to destroy a political party as such because they disagree with the political direction. As a result, the PPUK decided to close the proxy and come back to fight another day. The Luxemburg Pirate Party has a new proxy up to The Pirate Bay as of today at tpb.piraten.lu. Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police.
The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se has been raided by the police and copyright industry. This marks an escalation of the war against sharing culture and knowledge, as the site contained nothing but user-submitted translations of movie dialog. We are quickly coming to a two-tier justice system, where the copyright industry is right against single parents by definition, and that’s not taken very well. The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se, literally meaning subtitles.se, is a site where people contribute their own translations of movies. This lets people who aren’t good at the original language of a movie or cartoon put those fanmade subtitles – fansubs – on top of the movie or cartoon. Fansubbing is a thriving culture which usually provides better-than-professional subtitles for new episodes with less than 24 hours of turnaround (whereas the providers of the original cartoon or movie can easily take six months or more). The Swedish Pirate Party has published a press statement:
Five Basic Misconceptions About The Copyright Monopoly And Sharing Of Culture. Five erroneous assertions have kept appearing in the public debate since 1990 about file-sharing vs. the copyright monopoly. These assertions have persisted for 25 years, despite being obviously false. This is a reference article to link to and point at whenever one of them pops up the next time.
It can seem disheartening that factually false – as in 180-degrees wrong, just-read-the-text wrong – arguments persist for a quarter of a century, but there is a lot of money in perpetuating these untruths. If you have fallen for one of these, you are not alone; the first step to understanding the criticism against the copyright monopoly is understanding what it is. Therefore, as we uncover these misconceptions, we also learn what kind of legal mechanism the copyright monopoly is. 1. The first fact is that the copyright monopoly is not property, but a monopoly. We can observe how the copyright monopoly is enabled in the U.S. The United States Constitution will have to serve as an example here. Why Google Is Not A Search Engine But An Investigative News Agency, And Why That Matters. Infopolicy – Rick Falkvinge Google has long been the number one “search engine”. Perhaps that’s the entirely wrong way to think about the service, leading to a number of unintended and bad legal consequences.
The term “search engine” was a word made up on the spot in the dotcom era, after all. The job Google does has been considered to have a different job title altogether since way back. When Google was launched, that was in the middle of the dotcom boom – and everybody was calling themselves something that wasn’t a traditional analog job title, just to underscore how “new”, “digital” and “dotcom” everybody was.
What Google does is to find tons of material related to a specific subject, judge its relevance, and present a report on the subject. You don’t call a car something radically different than “car” just because it goes much, much faster and cheaper than the previous generation of cars. This needs to be seen in the light of Google doing investigative journalism. It's Not "Getting" Or "Downloading" A Copy. It's "Making" Or "Manufacturing" One.
In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties. When people are saying “I downloaded a copy of Avengers“, that use of language erodes their liberties just a little bit further. It is wrong, as in technically and factually wrong.
Looking at the use of “downloading a copy” or “getting a copy” and how this is incorrect, we need to examine why it is important to use other words. For that’s not what happens. “Getting” or “downloading” doesn’t describe the process. What really happens is that you have instructed your system to listen to a complex series of protocol packets, and using them as instructions, you manufacture a copy at your end. The first reason is language.
“He downloaded a copy of Avengers for free.” The Copyright Monopoly Is A Market Distortion, Not A Birthright. When you start questioning the copyright monopoly, many middlemen and other has-beens start acting offended – as if you have somehow questioned a natural right that they have by birthright. Nothing is farther from the truth. The copyright monopoly is not a natural right. It is a government-sanctioned private monopoly, granted under the assumption that no culture would get created if there’s not a profit motive behind it, and that this profit motive can only be realized in a monopolized setting. Yet, when you question this assumption and this monopoly, some people react with unmitigated anger and fury – as though you have questioned their very right to life. This is puzzling, and indicates a lack of understanding of what the monopoly is and why it exists.
(People who like liberal capitalism should balk at “goverment-sanctioned monopoly”. Thus, any entrepreneur aspiring to sell culture by the copy has historically had two layers of customers, and keeps having two layers. There Is Never A Need To Justify Sharing Culture And Knowledge. Just as some misguided people react with hostility to the fact that the copyright monopoly is not a birthright, they can react with hostility and demand a response to how sharing is “justified”. This, too, is misguided. One example could be seen in the Reddit thread about The Pirate Bay being the world’s most efficient public library. For a while, the top comment was “whatever helps you justify it” (as in, “invent whatever excuse you like to try justifying the sharing of culture”).
This is a misguided expression based on the false premise that sharing knowledge and culture needs to be justified. It is completely the other way around. Humankind and civilization have advanced due to and because of people sharing knowledge and culture, and humankind has never advanced when culture and knowledge have been locked up and contained. And yet, some people believe that sharing – whether over The Pirate Bay, direct handover, or whatever other mechanism – needs to be justified.