Geeks are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties | Hacker News Reader

Geeks are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties

technologyreview.com

40 pointsapievangelist12 comments

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Bring back the librarians!

Well duh.

Nobody else seems to care, or do anything about anything.

Instinctive reaction to headline: "What do you mean, new?"

Risible, self-indulgent, self-serving, myopic handjob.

Wow, you really have an impressive history of useless comments.

Nonsense, they're quite functional for all involved. You get to bristle at the presence of an id in a den of egos, I get to be right in the most obnoxious way possible, and everyone has a lovely time.

Excuse me sir, is there an option to subscribe to more of these?

How did I end up at Reddit again...

Is there any part of the article that you have a particular disgreement with? It seems pretty accurate to me.

Basically, the headline is bad.

As a florid recap of the SOPA and ACTA disputes and the extremely high profile public actions taken to defeat them, this article is a success.

As an insightful or perceptive explanation of how or why "geeks" have become "the new guardians of our civil liberties", this article is a vainglorious failure.

The conflation of "civil liberties" with "developments in the legal and technical concerns of modern copyright disputes" is insulting. Understanding and improving the scope and sweep of liberty and law has filled lives and libraries since the Enlightenment. This is Gawker filler for a slow Thursday.

yeah, i thought to my self, "hmm, technology review seems like it's going to be (1) biased towards geeks and (2) not know that much about civil liberties".

BUT then I thought about this quarter's Index on Censorship. which is also about free speech online - http://indexoncensorship.org/Magazine/digital-frontiers/ - so perhaps there is something in it...

I think the article is better than the title. Paraphrased, I think it's arguing something like: There is a subset of geeks who are interested in civil liberties, and have been active on the subject lately. Here is some information about them.

I do think it's probably a minority; for every EFF activist geek, there's another geek working on surveillance technology for a government contractor, and a third who thinks the main issue facing the technology sector is rampant piracy that needs to be cracked down on.

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