Eben Moglen: The alternate net we need, and how we can build it ourselves
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"Ok, that's the next 15 years of your life and mine. You're going to try to end anonymity on earth and I'm going to try to keep it. Because without anonymity the human race will not be human anymore."
"They [governments, business] are not going to be left to their devices... They are going to be left to our devices. And our devices are going to be about Freedom!"
Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.
Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms. Governments shall not infringe on the right of the people to encrypt any data that they use between two parties. This is not a trivial matter, this is the future of the human collective taking form here. Will everything we do be tracked, or will some of it be private?
Here is Eben talking about what he's doing on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358702n
Err, I don't think so, based on the following utilitarian argument:
First, more freedom in the network means more freedom in general. Evidence for this is easy to find. Encryption in particular does one thing and one thing only: preventing eavesdropping. That helps freedom of though, and even of speech (for small groups on a chat room, for instance).
Second, more arms means more dead people (not much, compared to car crashes and ageing, but still). Evidence is even easier to find. And as far as I know, it doesn't increase freedom in any interesting way.
Even beyond my judgement call, it should now be obvious that encryption and ammunitions have very different effects. Using one as an analogy for the other would be wildly inaccurate.
>Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.
Yea, I know. Some of the problems can and should be fixed. For example, we need to move away from "legacy" PR based on controlling the message.
"This is why we can’t have nice things."
We have the technology, the skill and the knowledge to do so much we couldn't even dream about a decade ago, but everything we do seems to raise so many new issues of possible abuse. Always the same dual-use dilemma [1].
With every step forward, we need to make an additional step in every other direction just to make sure we aren't walking the plank.
Boggles my mind why it's not enabled as a fallback for browsers without flash.
Or perfectdark
I am not sure when or how he made the LLVM claim, but I would understand Zuckerberg claim. Eben considers the right of anonymity a very important right and facebook has made the biggest assault on anonymity on the net ever. It is actually erie how they have managed to remove anonymity from a huge swats of the net without the users complaining at all.
Hidden, uncertain, common costs just aren't accounted for.
The loss of freedom is easily invisible, and the actual cost very hard to measure. Plus, it's a common. More individual freedom for others often mean more for yourself. (Case in point: anonymity: more other nodes means you're harder to find.) With those three effects, it's no wonder "no one cares" about freedom.
Facebook feels gratis, and even free, because (1) you don't pay money, and (2) you have an easy way to talk with other people. The advertisement you can live with, and the spying you don't even see. Few people could actually link Facebook's spying to changes in their present lives. (I'm not sure those that can are at liberty to speak their mind right now.)