What would be the agent of coercive force in the new space of the Internet. As countries join the Internet and the future of our civilization becomes the future of the Internet, we must redefine the relationship of forces.
EDITOR’S NOTE
NOTE ON THE VARIOUS ATTEMPTS TO PERSECUTE WIKILEAKS AND PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH IT
A bank blockade is an assertion of power to control financial transactions between third parties. Appelbaum has been detained, routinely searched, denied access to legal counsel, and questioned at border crossings whenever he travels in and out of the United States.
INCREASED COMMUNICATION VERSUS INCREASED SURVEILLANCE
The ability to access the blueprints of the systems that underpin our lives is part of why free software is important, but it's also why free hardware is important. That's why we see so much hype about cyberwar - it's because some people who seem to have the authority on war are starting to talk about technology as if they understand it.
THE MILITARIZATION OF CYBERSPACE
JACOB: There's something called the NSA AT&T case in the United States - the second case: Hepting v. It's like selling a country a truck, a mechanic and a team that gets in the truck and selectively targets people and then shoots them.
PRIVATE SECTOR SPYING
But this revealed that the key identifier of the database structure is the word "target". These people are not called "subscribers" or "users". It is therefore only about the circumstances in which the data is used. But the problem is that you can hardly blame a company for following the laws of the land.
It is called normal and it is called criminal when companies do not adhere to the laws of the land. I am not sure that at this stage we can answer the question of whether either approach is better. We need free software that everyone can understand, everyone can modify, and everyone can scrutinize to make sure what it does.
However, this is the thing that is totally not obvious to non-technical people, and it should be driven home. The only question is in which one of the two ways they will think about it.
THE INTERNET AND POLITICS
But it is wrong to say that this happened only in the last few years. In the case of the Ben Ali regime – this is evident in so many regimes today – you can decide what people can learn about, or with whom they can communicate. This is a competitive technique because it is cheaper to stack servers in one place than to spread them out.
The internet could exist without this centralization, it's not that the technology is impossible, it's just that it's simply more efficient to have it centralized. There were thousands of them that were parallelized - in the same direction - and that again is decentralized political action. It is the idea that we are all peers and we can share with each other; we may provide different services or we may provide different functions.
In the case of Encyclopedia Britannica, it doesn't matter because we have Wikipedia and we have a lot of other material. It is only one source of many, and what matters is the verification of the data.
THE INTERNET AND ECONOMICS
But in fact it is the architecture of the state that allows them to do this, it is the architecture of the laws and the architecture of technology, just as it is the architecture of financial systems. ANDY: Julian, it's not wrong what you're saying, but I'm not sure if you can really distinguish between the freedom of communication and the freedom of economic interaction, because the Internet as we have it now is the infrastructure for our social, our economic, our cultural, our political, all our interactions. However, there are some problems: it is not really an anonymous coin, and this is a very bad thing in my opinion.
It is wrong to suggest that the economic situation with the Internet is different than without it. It is actually harder to get foreign currency in the US because we are so far away from all other countries. But there is a historical trend of control over currencies, and this control is not just seen on the Internet.
JÉRÉMIE: In the US it is special because the connection between the political system and money is so close. And what I think is really crazy is that it's basically the amalgamation of these three things that you're talking about.
CENSORSHIP
I had the opportunity to speak with some people from China—and I don't know whether they were in some position in the state, or whether they were selected to be able to go out to speak with me—but when talking to me them about Internet censorship I very often had this answer: “Well, it's for the good of the people. JÉRÉMIE: If you look at the way Chinese censorship is done, you see from the technical perspective that it is one of the most advanced systems that exists in the world. For example, over the American internet, it's very decentralized - it's very difficult to do the Chinese-style censorship in the same sense.
ANDY: It's in the details of the mechanics - the so-called pre-censorship system in Germany obliges you to appoint a legally responsible person for everything you post. When you read a file on the Internet in one location, it is the same as if you read it in another location or in the future - this is its universality. We're building the same kinds of authoritarian control structures that will attract people to abuse them, and that's something we try to pretend is different in the West.
It is no different in the West because there is a continuum of governance that runs from authoritarianism to libertarianism. ANDY: In an end-user device, it's the thing you have between your ears.
PRIVACY FOR THE WEAK, TRANSPARENCY FOR THE POWERFUL
What actually happened, the bad side of this deal that Germany did, is that they used former officers of the East German State Security so that the Stasi can not only administer the Stasi records, but also part of the so-called "New Germany" ," the united former Eastern part. The internet has led to an explosion of the amount of information available to the public - it's just extraordinary. In fact, that we have produced over a million words of information and given it to the public is a function of the enormous explosion in the amount of classified material out there.
When you look at that balance between powerful insiders who know every credit card transaction in the world on the one hand, and people on the other who can Google and find blogs around the world and people's comments, how do you see that balance . ANDY: I know that after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to unify Germany and the Americans set a condition in the so-called 2+4 talks. There are such politically compelling demands for it -- like, "these guys have killed before, they're planning to kill again" -- that it's going to happen whether you think interception should be available or not.
So you have some oversight, at least some of the time, of what's going on. JÉRÉMIE: This debate about full disclosure reminds me of the group known as LulzSec, which released 70 million records from Sony—all the users' data from Sony—and you could see all the addresses, email addresses and passwords.
RATS IN THE OPERA HOUSE
JULIAN: Jake, if you look at people, as Evgeny Morozov described the problems of the Internet, these issues were predicted long ago by coders.123 It wasn't a position that we should simply complain about the growing surveillance state and so on, but that in fact we can, we must to build the tools of a new democracy. Tor is free software, it's as widespread as it is today because we build this notion of freedom into the way we build alternatives, build technology, and build models. As Gandhi said, "You have to be the change you want to see in the world," but you also have to be the problem you want to see in the world.126 This is a sentence from the book A Softer World, it's not the same as the Gandhi quote, but I think people need to know that they can't just sit idly by, they need to actually take action and hopefully they will.127.
ANDY: The CCC has become like a forum of the hacker scene with a few thousand members based a little in Germany - but we don't understand ourselves as living in Germany, we understand ourselves as us on the Internet, which perhaps a large part of our self-understanding that also attracts. It's a global thing going on now, which does have very different, very decentralized cultural attitudes from Swiss, German, Italian hackers - and that's good. We still have a world built on weapons, on the power of secrecy, on a whole economic framework and so on, but that's changing and I do think we're very important in policy making right now.
We can debate issues in a controversial way - and that's something the CCC has actually managed for a long time. And perhaps this was expressed in the Arab Spring and pan-Arab activism that was enhanced by the Internet.
ENDNOTES
The invention of the printing press is the closest historical analogy to the invention of the Internet. WikiLeaks published one of the earliest reports of the effects allegedly caused by Stuxnet - the nuclear accident at the Natanz nuclear plant in Iran. Senior officials in the Republican Party have called for the New York Times to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
For more on the Rubberhose file system, see, “The Idiot Savants' Guide to Rubberhose,” Suelette Dreyfus: http://marutukku.org/current/src/doc/maruguide/t1.html (all links accessed on October 24, 2012). For more on the extrajudicial killing of US citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, see Glenn Greenwald, "U.S. Extrajudicial Murder The extent of the redaction can be seen visually on the Cablegatesearch website which shows revision history, with edits colored pink: http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php.
However, the content of the law was never revealed during the course of the proceedings. For free software, see "Definition of Free Software", from the GNU Operating System website: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
Chase Madar
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