Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties? (2001)
stallman.org
stallman.org
Like him or not, Richard Stallman is already a major historical figure, because his impact on society (via the gnu, FSF, various manifestos, and activism) will be felt for a very long time. Much of what he has said/written in the past has gained stature with the passing of time.
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Edit: added last sentence.
citation needed
The 'm' in "Thousands dead, millions deprived of civil liberties?" should have been a 'b'.
"Bush" in "Congress hurried to pass a resolution giving Bush unlimited power" should have been "the Executive Branch."
Visionary as he was, history surpassed what he anticipated.
Time and time again I see people scoffing at Stallman (and others like him) as "radicals" who do nothing but impede our discourse with their outlandish fantasies, trying to center it around their paranoia instead of finding quick, pragmatic and ultimately self destructive "solutions".
I have a feeling Stallman would have liked to say more, but chose to make a more modest statement. Turns out, he could have cranked it up to 11 and it would still be modest by what we know today.
I think that depends on what you call 'conventional wisdom'. The Patriot Act was widely criticsed from the first second it was introduced. Take a look at this NY Times article from 2001:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/us/nation-challenged-congr...
Civil liberties advocates implored Congress to slow down and consider the legislation's impact, which they said could be a dangerous infringement on Americans' privacy and constitutional rights.
He was very, very far from being alone in his stance. It's just that those with power were not also the skeptical ones.
That said, while he was far from alone, it was nonetheless close enough to say that "conventional wisdom" was on the other side of it. Even in my anti-Bush, left-leaning, civil-liberties-sensitive circles there was a profound overreaction and too much credence given to the "we have to be safe" line.
But no. Free software is not business-oriented. He's a nut because of his privacy advocation; he must have something to hide. Let's just ignore him, and start startups and get everyone to accept our vendor lock-in and remain blissfully unaware how we're harming everyone.
As an example, the angry vegan on the street shouting, "Shame! Shame on you!" doesn't convince you to go vegan. The vegan that engages you in rational debate and shows you how a vegan lifestyle isn't as hard/daunting as it seems, may convince you.
It's foolish to realize that people will ignore bad news from some unkempt academic that seems a bit off, rather than by a clean-cut smooth-talker in an expensive suit.
The bizarre dual nature of patriotism and politics in the US makes it even worse for anyone looking to bring Stallman's message to the public. Telling people that "the system is not flawless and world would be wonderful if only 'those other jerks' stopped trying to subvert the system" is somewhere between "eating a hotdog is like eating your child" and "cows should be able to vote in elections". People have too much emotional stake in that system being the right system. Many of them have literally killed for it, or known people who were killed for it. They've lost sons, daughters, fathers and grandfathers who were fighting for it. They put people currently fighting for it on a pedestal of unconditional support. They have romantic notions of people before them fighting and dying for it.
Maybe there is somebody out there charismatic enough to convince the general population to consider fundamental flaws with the system itself, but I don't think that such a person has really been seen in politics for many many years.
Well, you can take a shortcut if you appeal to stronger allegiances than faith in American democracy... but those shortcuts drive us in the wrong direction.
An example, "Beef is bad for you, but chicken/turkey is better." Sure you might miss steaks, but most recipes that call for ground beef could easily be substituted with ground turkey or chicken with little fuss.
Isn't this exactly what jlgreco said? You've argued yourself in a circle.
| vegans, no matter how polite they are, rarely find a
| receptive audience
You don't have to wait until 2023. The linked posting has a copyright date of 2001, and the wording of the last few paragraphs implies it was written late in 2001 a few months after 9/11.
And in the middle, is this sentence:
"What I am worried about is massive surveillance of all aspects of life: of our phone calls, of our email, and of our physical movements."
Which we have all now learned over the last few days is actually what has been happening, for far longer than anyone realized.
So you only have to look at this article with what we know today, to realize how correct his warnings actually were/are.
Ever since Carnivore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)) was uncovered, it's been obvious that a lot is going on behind the scenes. When the massive wire-tapping operation at AT&T (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) was brought to light, the scale and pervasiveness of this became clear.
This was years ago.
It's been safe to assume that all telephone conversations, text messages, instant messages, VOIP calls, email traffic, and all unencrypted web traffic is or could be subject to inspection, capture, and archiving. If it's not encrypted, it can be captured. If it is encrypted, it might be possible to decrypt it, you'll probably never know.
Facebook has long been suspected of being partially owned and/or controlled by the CIA (http://www.globalresearch.ca/facebook-the-cia-conspiracy/126...), and who could blame the CIA for taking an interest in such a valuable dataset. It's not clear if this is true, but if you're truly surprised that it's the case, you're far more of an optimist than I am.
The only thing surprising about this is that it leaked out, not that it was happening in the first place.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh...;
Once the 2 minutes hate is over, nothing will come of this. We'll repeat it again in another 7 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_prisoner
...and Orwell's vision exploited by Steve Jobs for commercial ends :)
Stallman seems to be right about the government's actions after 2001. That doesn't automatically mean he's right about the way I should or shouldn't run my business.
Of course, it's not always right. And that's fine; the issue is yours, not mine.
What he IS right about is that licensed software limits the user's freedom. That's unequivocal, you can't deny it.
This becomes much less clear if you bother to consider things like how that software came to exist in the first place.
Consider that there are things you can do, things you can't (or aren't permitted to) do, and things outside of possibility (eg web browsing before the internet was invented).
Requiring software to be Free/unrestricted reduces "things you can't do", which given a fixed set of possibilities increases "things you can do".
But the set of possibilities is not fixed. Depending on how any particular software being free affects the rate that things are removed from "outside of possibility", it could either increase or decrease the amount of "things you can do".
Edit: Is your freedom defined by how much you can do, by how much you can't do, or by the ratio of how much you can vs can't do? It's silly to be concerned only with the second of those.
Where do you think that came from?
Like most things, there are trade-offs. The question is: does the increased value and freedom afforded by that marginal innovation outbalance the tremendous destruction of value and freedom that these restrictions entail?
"Decreasingly," I would argue (even if we're presently making some people very very rich); I'm working on a project to make it even less the case.
Could you please expand on this?
I use Github, and I love it, but they're closed-source, in spite of so many free software projects being hosted on the site itself. It's ironic. Now, of course, Github doesn't have vendor lock-in because it runs on Git, and you can switch to Gitorious should you need to, but nobody will be there, and there's no features. In essence, you either use Github and it's awesome yet closed-source interface, or you just do local revision control or use a hosting site nobody uses.
It's a vicious cycle. What if Github changes something? We can't change it back. What if they implement a backdoor to leak code out to third-parties? We can't change it back. We can't move anywhere else either, because everyone uses Github.
You can apply this scenario to perhaps more critical applications as well. Office is one more example.
They also create a lot of open-source software that can be used as an alternative to what they do. If Github becomes a poisonous influence, people can and will abandon that platform and move to something better. It happened to Sourceforge and it can happen again.
No one debates that. However, it doesn't mean it's good for you. Even Github has vendor lock-in (Github is more than just git).
The things that make Github really valuable are by definition closed. They own a well-known URL and have a ton of content behind it. I know where to go to find projects, I have a consistent workflow for acquiring or modifying those projects, and I have a reliable method for commenting on and contributing back to those projects. Even if Github were completely open and simple to customize and deploy (which are very different things), a fork would have very little of the value we associate with the original.
Not an open/closed issue, but illustrative of the concept: Google+ is a noticeably better written piece of software than Facebook, but no one uses it because that's not where they can see their sister's baby pictures.
This is very different from desktop applications, such as Office. Assuming file interoparability, I can use an alternative that I like better to improve my workflow without losing much value.
So what we really need is to move away from focusing on project source and toward open data. We should be pushing for better and richer APIs for third-party access to large datasets.
Take the example of the StatusNet server I used to run own my VPS. I would go to Identi.ca or any other site, and to follow a user I'd just have to click on "Subscribe", fill in my handle (easy to automate) and then I'd be redirected to my own server, where I could with one click confirm the subscription.
The messages from that user would get POSTed to my StatusNet server, which would display them in my feed as if it was a local user.
Doing the same with forking, pull requests and bug reports is perfectly feasible; there's nothing inherently "closed" about an easy, consistent interface and workflow.
Multiply that by several thousand hosts and the friction involved in using, let alone contributing to a project goes up considerably. Having a world where every repo uses the same visual and interaction metaphors and supports the same features is a huge UX win, almost regardless of the quality of that interface.
We used to have something sort of federated for source management. Before Github basically won everyone had their own bugtracker and repo set up. It was not uncommon to spend an hour trying to figure out where they hid the pull URL, then installing whichever version control tool they were using, then fighting with whatever half functional import tool you needed to convert their repo to whatever version control your project had. Then spend another half hour creating yet another account and then fighting with whatever half functional plugin they had installed or trying to figure out the difference between "Critical" and "Severe" just to submit a bug.
In the end what you're advocating for is governance, but I disagree that it must be enforced top-down; shared consensus works in irrigation systems in Nepal, and it works in online systems as well.
† Mostly, but then again, Github isn't perfect either. Some repos don't have READMEs, some don't accept pull requests (e.g., torvalds/linux), many depend on various build tools
(edit: The FSF makes the distinction between propietary software and Software as a Service: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...)
In the colloquial sense. But as that page refers to, at least the JS code is proprietary.
His solution to these problems is to disconnect, to remove himself from the equation to the best of his ability. No cellular phone. No internet connection. No credit cards. Cash only. Don't use web services. Turn off cookies and JavaScript and Java. His answer to any problem seems to be to boycott it, as if that'll change things. Who but Stallman can operate like this? Not even secret agents are as paranoid, they're trained to hide in plain sight.
What someone in his position should be doing is talking about how to avoid this dystopian future by promoting standards, accountability, and more transparency. They should be engaging with law enforcement to understand their need for information and protect a person's right to privacy. There's a legal framework out there that needs updating by people that understand technology, but if they're all stubbornly opposed to co-operating, more stupidly out of touch laws will be passed.
This is why the EFF and organizations like it are extremely important. They're not advocating shutting down the internet just because it's being wiretapped. They're not hiding in a cave while invasive laws are being passed.
While his response to this (almost completely removing himself from society) is unrealistic for the majority of people, his conclusions here are not insane, and are frighteningly accurate and prescient.
I actually disagree with Stallman on a lot of political issues, but highlighting the dangers to liberty in the wake of attacks is completely sane.
The only thing about Stallman that I find insane is his personal grooming habits/food choices.
I think the real question is why people pretend they cannot and end up acting helpless.
My co-workers can't even say no to $startup that acts like it's a requirement that you put your picture and bio on the company website. Some will grunt and complain about it, then act like I did something wrong when refusing this request (which is never presented as a request, of course).
People are the problem here, the government is doing exactly what I would expect when you have a bunch of ineffectual serfs running around.
There was a comment below to the effect of "If only terrorist targeted the real problem instead of innocent civilians...", I don't think the comment was meant as sarcastic, which just depresses me further.
You don't plant a tree underneath a power line then blame the tree for doing what's expected, known, and in their nature.
#edit, I shall elaborate as I know I sound crazy.
Think about software, the employees complain for more time to refactor, the boss continues driving forward with feature creep and reactionary programming/patching/hotfixing. The developers are just as responsible for the quality for the software and will have to support the decisions. Instead of putting their job on the line to stop this behavior before it's too late, they grunt, complain, and meet their silly deadlines. Fast forward a few years, the company cannot keep talented developers, simple new features take years, now the developers are ready to either quit or put their foot down, but now it's way too late, bad choices in data partitioning, scheme design, etc, now you need a complete rewrite. See how the solution scales with the problem?
To me, the problem is out of hand, so naturally people will start trying to start doing what should have been done a long time ago, except it's too late, and the actual solution is still met with "well, no, but I'll do the easier version now".
Until the early 80's there was no widespread use of mobile telephony and internet. It's not crazy to think that the surveillance state has ruined the internet and that there is more value in avoiding it than in using it. Maybe it's over.
I can recall some TI managers looking at Stallman like he had two heads when he told them, over 25 years ago, that developers would make money with free and open software.
The car industry is facing a generation of buyer who find cars a burden. It's crazy to think that we can't screw this up.
False dicotomy, he's done more than just that.
>What someone in his position should be doing is talking about how to avoid this dystopian future by promoting standards, accountability, and more transparency.
Or, hacking the legal system to create an entire class of intellectual product resistant to the kinds of control he criticizes? Plenty talk, Stallman is one of the few who has done.
Honestly, what more could be expected of one person.
Where before The Free Software Foundation and the GPL were important at pushing things forward, they are now holding things back. People want even more freedom than the GPL offers, they'd rather use the MIT or BSD license. In some circles, GPL is the kiss of death, that no matter how good the software is you can't use it.
My point is Stallman has done important things, but if he thinks he's still as singularly important as he once was, he's delusional. The movement is much, much bigger than one person taking a stand against proprietary printer software. It's millions of people working together to make software as a whole better. Nobody will ever be at the center of this movement again.
If Stallman moved to a tiny island in the Pacific and was never heard from again we'd get by, and many of us wouldn't even notice. He's done his part and left his mark.
By way of contrast, when we lose someone like Aaron Schwarz we're diminished. He was someone who was not just opinionated, but motivated to change things. He didn't just write papers or give speeches, he wrote software to further his cause, he went out of his way to challenge the status-quo and force people to to pay attention.
We desperately need more people like him.
So what if Stallman doesn't contribute to software projects much anymore? The whole point of this link was to direct attention, not to his coding skill, but his unusual foresight, which he retains.
I'd appreciate a source on this - not in a "I doubt it" sense, but "I would find it useful"!
Oh please, stop with 'people' generalisations. First off GPL is the most used open source licence there is, and that doesn't mean it's what the 'people want'. Just as certain as MIT or BSD is also not what 'people want'.
The 'people' is a diverse mass of individuals which have different needs and ideologies, some want the source code of modifictions/derivatives as an exchange for their code, others want their name retained in the source code commentary, etc.
Also many times developers chose one licence for one type of project and a different one for another type of project. What we typically see is that for full application style projects, copyleft is dominant, while for component/framework style code, permissive licencing is dominant.
Copyleft and permissive licences caters for different needs, they fullfill those needs and hence they are used.
And, just like Aaron, Stallman has done a lot. He's also written software to further his cause, and he also went out of his way to challenge the status quo and get people to pay attention.
Half the software you use now wouldn't be here otherwise.
Also, I think developer freedom trumps code freedom in this day and age. GPL served its purpose when code was being threatened by corporate concerns, but now, because of people like Stallman, it's recognized that open-source can be good for business.
> Please let your elected representatives, and your unelected president, know that you don't want your civil liberties to become the terrorists' next victim. Don't wait -- the bills are already being written.
Refusing to be surveilled in the meantime is a temporary measure that Stallman adopts because of his extreme deontological ethics. He does that in the background, to the extent that it doesn't interfere with his work for a large non-profit dedicated to political activism. Remember, he used a computer with non-free software on it until the Lemote Yeeloong was released.
But the "better subversives" need someone to point to, to say "you think what I'm suggesting is unreasonable and difficult? What about this guy's suggestions?"
It's called shifting the Overton window; the people who do it generally aren't widely liked (or likable), but if we all stayed closer to the center, we wouldn't get nearly as much movement as we'd like.
Honestly, he sounds like he's never given up on UUCP.
What his conclusions actually are have been stated many times before. Free software in every device, under the GPL. Free software in servers, under the AGPL. Being able to install open source firmware on those devices. Using free standards. Banning intrusive DRM, restrictions to second hand sale, et c. All very reasonable and implementable today, if there were the political will.
Well, maybe not all very reasonable, but reasonable to varying degrees. Still, I don't get why you are so worried about Stallman, when he actually wants what you want.
If you're an engineer with a penchant for scratching your itches, boycotting problems does change things.
stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
What I admire more than Stallman-the-visionary is Stallman-the-idealist. The guy speaks his mind even when it's really difficult. Further, he appears to live in accordance with his thinking as best he can even though it's pretty inconvenient. These are both really very difficult to do consistently over the long haul.
At the time Stallman wrote this, it was a very unpopular thing to say. He was not just considered a crackpot but drink-in-the-face-at-parties unpatriotic.
For better or worse, I'm more of a pragmatist. I often experience the idealist as a pain in the ass and standing in the way of 'getting things done'. It's good for me to be reminded that the idealists must be listened to carefully. It might just be that I'm trying to get the wrong things done and I should slow down and listen.
Stallman in many respects is being pragmatic in the pursuit of his ideology.
Conversely, the NSA and like organizations are working toward their idealist beliefs.
The risk of being pedantic over language should at least be tempered against the realization that privileged language is at the core of much of this discourse[1].
[1] "Terrorist"
"Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
(The Ohio State University commencement address)
“Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.
We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn't want to. But we don't think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.”
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/05/obama_to_o...)
I'll never forget growing up on reddit and digg during the Bush Era. People were talking about this stuff all the time, calling Bush Hitler and the Patriot Act evil, Gitmo unconstitutional, and raising awareness of the uncivilized wild-west Republican and Conservative Parties. I mean Redditor's honestly thought the USA was coming to an end. Then after Bush left and Democrat Obama got in things continued to get worse. Attacks on privacy and constitutional rights, drones, surveillance increased yet the backlash isn't there. Think of all the terrible things you read about Bush, now come to the realization that Obama is continuing this behavior yet people (Democrats in particular) aren't complaining. Because their party is in power.
That was the moment I realized the worst thing about America was the 2 party system. Each party is oblivious to it's own flaws, blames the other party for everything. It's called "Ingroup Bias" http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Ingroup... This same "Ingroup Bias" is what's preventing Americans from standing up against their party when they introduce invasive legislature AND preventing members of both the Republican and Democratic parties from standing up against their party's own extreme views on national security.
=== My Point ===
If either party puts a stop to the extreme surveillance and a terrorist attack happens, that party will forever be blamed by the other and will lose elections for quite some time.
So everyone was under constant surveillance, not just by the government, because they didn't have those kinds of resources, but by everyone around them, too.
Upwards of 200 million people are spinning in their mass graves at your abject ignorance of the 20th century history of totalitarianism.
Hint: the world "total" is a clue.
... I write this assuming the earlier comment wasn't amended to tack on the phrase; if it was, my apologies...
"Current status
"The limit has been strongly enforced in urban areas, but the actual implementation varies from location to location. In most rural areas, families are allowed to apply to have a second child if their first-born is a daughter or suffers from physical disability, mental illness or mental retardation. Second children are subject to birth spacing (usually 3 or 4 years). Additional children will result in large fines. Families violating the policy are required to pay monetary penalties.... [ Lots more detail. ]"
So, yes, they do care about "remote villages". Enough to place them under the control of the government; don't know how true this was for the rural areas, but back before a free market in food was allowed, getting on the wrong side of the local functionaries resulted in your not getting ration tickets and dying of starvation, or so I was told by a couple from the PRC in the late '80s. Those same functionaries enforce this policy and they're not polite about it.
Seriously, do some very basic research before you continue to downplay the utter horror of totalitarian societies.
Your tone is inappropriate, however - a link is shallow; when we get into discussion, we learn things.
It's more than "some civil libertarians." Totalitarian regimes commonly victimize academics as a threat to the homogeneity they seek to impose.
This seems fallacious. Computer-based face recognition would be significantly better than human-based, because computers can remember thousands of faces while humans can only recognize a few hundred at most.
...has never been shown to work on the scale needed to secure access to commercial air travel.
Ah, here!
He didn't have to spend much effort in predicting the future in 2001, he just had to be consistent.
However, that's not even the biggest problem with the knee-jerk response: it's not a trade being offered. If you could guarantee me 3000 lives saved in exchange for more invasion of my privacy and that of my billion closest friends (assuming they agreed), I'd have to think about it.
But no! 3000 lives were lost, and that is tragic, and it's more tragic that the fear it caused was then exploited to consolidate power. It was consolidated in the hands of people who are probably mostly reasonable people, and who are probably mostly trying to keep us safe, but there is no guarantee as to the number of lives saved (although "lives lost to terrorism in the 10 years prior when you didn't have these powers" helps us provide some upper bounds...), and moreover some of those people we're being asked to trust will prove not to be good people, power will be abused, and it might well cost more lives than it saves: governments have killed overwhelmingly more people than insurgents and terrorists over the past 100 years.
By the way, you could even argue that some measures, such as increased airport "security", indirectly killed people, who took their more risky cars instead of just flying.
This title reminds me a quote from Ultimate Spiderman: "Your uncle snuffs. And you stop basket ball!?". Seems rather… blunt.
But not in any way relevant to the September 11 hijackings as the hijackers were travelling under their real identities including real photo ID cards.