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Comment by silentOpen | Hacker News Reader

It's very simple: a free country is run by free software by definition. A free country has published laws that are implemented and debugged (adjudicated) in public.

If the FBI wants carriers to install software on their network devices, the FBI is implementing regulatory law as code in the network substrate. The source and its build and development process must be public. They have no magic tricks and there is no unknown capability that this could compromise. It's simply a requirement for a country governed by the law. It's how we watch the watchers.

Seeing as how we can't even get voting machine source code released, I have little faith that the spy state will cede its code in the near future. Given this, it's now time for all able-minded hackers to build tools for personal liberty and spread them far and wide. Godspeed.

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The author of the code for section 215 of the Patriot act, Sensenbrenner, says it is being used totally beyond what he intended.

In this sense, it can be said to be executing arbitrary code, perhaps it can be said that the typical method of those in power is to look through the 10,000+ page laws, search for the weakest and most arbitrary provision, and exploit it to the fullest extent possible.

Of course, part of the reason for this is that no debugging was done - after receiving the law, the military went so far as to lie about how it was being used.

No offense but Sensenbrenner deserves his share of blame for this too.

People pointed out even back then that that Patriot Act was way overbroad and could lead to things exactly like this.

Militaries plan against the capabilities of a possible opponent, not just what they think the opponent intends to do.

Congress should never have let it get passed in the shape it was in, but Sensenbrenner should have written the legislation keeping in mind the capability it would give the Executive branch, not just presumed intent.

Its because some of the issues we are facing right now, that we should value even more the work of guys like RMS.

open software its not just about hackerism, education and freedom in the hacker sense of being able to understand things and how they work because they are open.. but also in the sense of transparency.. we effectivelly know what is running in our own machines..

open source its a pretty good weapon to achieve transparency.. and its something we need badly now.. (its not just about cryptography)

> it's now time for all able-minded hackers to build tools for personal liberty and spread them far and wide

A friendly reminder: As a start, pick your favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29

Besides that, I'd say the biggest challenge will be to get our society running exclusively on open hardware.

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