Diaspora social network cannot stop IS posts
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's no technical reason that email isn't public, just social convention. Emails are like postcards, and the content is visible to all routers that they pass through on the way to their final destination.
In theory, we could have decided that email was an open discussion platform (more like USENET) with almost no technical changes.
I know they could just setup their own Pod but these values are what makes them any different from the likes of Twitter and I would've expected them to stand by them a bit more.
Whether or not they thought through the ramifications of all edge cases, how they feel about it, and what they do about is another matter entirely.
Yeah that's probably because the ISIS is known for suicide bombings, cutting off heads, video taping it so that the families and friends of the victim can see how gruesome their loved one died, killing unbelievers and tying multiple women to poles at the Mosul Dam to be raped. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to use to promote your values unless you're a psychopath. What the fuck.
What I find more outrageous was that the reporter apparently was held captive for 2 years... without anyone (in the public) knowing. Bergdahl was held captive for 5 years and luckily was returned in a controversial exchange. What is going on that we are not able to protect and/or recover our people?
Seems to send a clear message that if you get captured by an extremists group like ISIS, the government won't come running in to save you, nor will the public even know you are missing -- fore the government doesn't want to stir public opinion into favoring some sort of military action. So, in essence -- you are all alone out there, potentially for years, or worse. -- That is outrageous to me.
Anyway my comments were a response to the idea that Diaspora should promote its decentralized platform on the wake of ISIS publicity, which is a really stupid idea. It had nothing to do with government censorship, although I have no problems with governments discouraging murder videos.
A police officer explained this to me. They do this because they want the ability to arrest the people who are recruiting muslims using these videos. The "recruiting" thing is impossible to prove, so ...
These videos are made with one purpose only : to recruit more muslims to their cause. Assuming they know what they're doing, that's exactly what free dissemination of these videos will do (otherwise, after all, there wouldn't be an al qaeda or IS organization in the first place).
I think you can at least agree that using arrests, and even violence (of the police kind, not the IS kind), to prevent that from happening is unambiguously a good thing.
The arguments against these laws are mostly of the "slippery slope" kind, and I agree that these laws are open to abuse. I hate to say it but I also don't see an alternative.
Police can already arrest the people making the videos (if they were in the UK or US) without having to make it a crime to simply view the video.
I don't buy the argument that these videos are propaganda to recruit -- they are there to stir fear and incite the idea that no one will save you if you are captured. The goal of the videos are to bend the public opinion.
The video will only sicken the majority of US and UK citizens -- which will in turn demand direct military action. This is, what both administrations (US and UK) have been trying to avoid recently as both have campaigned in large to avoid any direct use of the military (aka, boots-on-the-ground). It would be bad, politically, to then renege on that and send troops in.
I take issue with this. They think someone is guilty of a real, serious crime, but they can't prove it so they want to convict them of something else. That is bypassing the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
What does this mean? Of course no guarantee of safety could be absolute, so how large does the threat have to be for us to give up our basic freedoms? Terrorists are already, for western countries a statistically insignificant threat. Nothing compared to drunk drivers, diabetes, cancer etc.
You are appealing to an irrational fear.
I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but here goes : the US cannot protect every one of it's citizens from every external force. Not abroad, and not in America. Terrorist forces who recruit out of a near-global pool of 1 billion muslims, who effectively have presence everywhere, there's no way. If you think about this for 5 minutes, you'd realize that even a genocidal police state wouldn't be able to do that.
> Seems to send a clear message that if you get captured by an extremists group like ISIS, the government won't come running in to save you, nor will the public even know you are missing -- fore the government doesn't want to stir public opinion into favoring some sort of military action. So, in essence -- you are all alone out there, potentially for years, or worse. -- That is outrageous to me.
That's the message islam wants to spread, yes. Of course, the opposite is true [1]. The US military tried to rescue him (and others) and failed due to lacking intelligence.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-us-syria-hosta...
Just want us to be careful here -- you don't have to be a Muslim to be a terrorist -- and not all terrorist's are Muslims.
So yes, for a true believer in basic human rights it can be shocking that we have restricted ourselves (as voters in democracies) in our right of free speech, and can feel that when trying to aid universal free communications ( by hosting pods).
Note that I myself support the restrictions on free speech as they are although I am keenly aware of the danger and evil of it.
The video being "suppressed" is of the gruesome, intimidating murder of James Foley, a journalist who risked his life for a profession dedicated to 1st amendment principles. Being intolerant of intolerance is perfectly ok for me. Maybe not you, because you're kind of extreme and not really thinking through things in my opinion, but ok whatever floats your boat.
Do you have a source for that? I would be very interested in seeing the details.
Just google "Secret Service twitter" or follow the @SecretService at https://twitter.com/SecretService They're not shy about this. It's probably illegal to threaten anyone's life or really any kind of violence on Twitter, not just politicians. I doubt threats of violence are protected speech.
The freedom is about lack of prior restraint. It does not absolve you from the consequences if your words cause another to be harmed.
You can shout "Fire!" in a crowded club, if there is a fire in it. You can even shout "Fire!" in a crowded club if there is a bomb in it, hoping for a more orderly and less panicked evacuation. You can also shout "Fire!" in a crowded club if you like the Ohio Players or P-Funk. But if you make a false alarm and someone gets an injury in the resulting panic--even if it's just fewer sales at the bar because everyone left--you'd better be prepared to accept the consequences. And it isn't enough that your words could have caused harm, there has to be some actual harm and some actual intent to cause mischief.
So if you stand before a crowd and encourage people to run riot and sack the city, the consequences you face are going to be a lot different if that crowd is a rotary club meeting or if it is an unruly mob with pre-sharpened pitchforks. It is absolutely your right to do it, but if you do it with criminal intent, expect to be punished for the damage that you caused.
* Freedom of speech is freedom of restriction from government.
* Calls to violence and videos of murder are not covered by the 1st amendment.
Calls to violence are generally not protected; though Brandenburg v. Ohio ruled that the call to violence must be likely to actually incite violence.
You could mean either :
1) US freedom of speech, which is only freedom from government interference with political speech, and obviously US-only.
2) UN "international" freedom of speech. Has 2 major problems
* cannot actually be used to sue anyone for denying it, unlike the US law
* has been repeatedly judged to not even cover "muhammad is an asshole", despite that obviously being political speech in a third of the countries that signed it. Same goes of Chinese and EU politicians, EU royalty, Thai royalty, and a myriad of other cases.
However, my conflict comes from the fact that censorship doesn't really solve the root problem. In child molesters, the problem is better treated in psychiatric care and in extremism the problem is better treated through education, peace, and tolerance.
All they need to do to is say, "Censoring this is not possible", as they seem to be doing, and that promotes their software. They don't need to talk about, approve of, or even be aware of the horrific things that ISIS does. It's enough to know that people really, really don't like what they're posting.
On the other hand, by actively attempting to censor the content, as Diaspora also seems to be doing, they're also sending the message that they don't actually truly believe in openness as a value, deep down, even though they designed their software to provide it. That actually hurts them a bit in the long run, I think.
I for one would like Twister to take off as alternative to Twitter:
EDIT: It also seems to be compatible with Tor now:
If a group that posts videos of journalist executions can use it without getting shut down, it is certainly usable for any other group that may be unpopular with their local majority: Tibetan nationalists, Falun Gong, breastfeeding moms, cop watchers, Iranian women's rights groups, Ukranian rebels, homosexuals, German Nazis, Quebec secessionists, eco-terrorists, unschoolers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, red-state liberals, blue-state conservatives, and people who text while driving.
To get the good, you have to take the bad with it. The same Bitcoin that can buy a pizza can also buy a murder. The same typewriter can write both a beautiful poem or an extortion note. A hammer can build a house or crack a skull. A fire can chase away the cold and the dark, or it can burn your home to ash.
The early adopters are going to be the most blatantly offensive, and the most suspiciously paranoid, and the most idealist. The mainstream people already have their mainstream network, and won't see any reason to switch until they find themselves penalized in some way for being different from the owners of the system.
This is good. If someone as nasty as a journalist beheader can't get silenced, I know with reasonable certainty that if I go to Diaspora, there's likely nothing I would ever do myself that would result in me being erased from the network. And I can share information with just my friends, rather than my friends plus all paying Facebook customers.
And in addition to all that, how can you expect to get more jaw-jaw and less war-war if you slap a gag on the other guy every time you see his lips move?
And you can plan a murder. The conversation itself is not a crime. But it is very damning evidence if the prospective victim that was discussed actually turns up dead, showing that the crime was, in fact, premeditated murder and not a less severely punished type of homicide, and that accomplices were involved. The speech is not the crime. It is evidence of malicious intent if a crime subsequently occurs. It may also be useful intelligence that could allow someone to interfere with a crime in progress.
If you overhear the murder conversation, you might be able to prevent a murder. But those guys could have been talking about their clan strategy for a MMORPG raid, and you simply misunderstood the intent. You don't know for certain until someone acts.
Censorship cannot stop crimes. It can only conceal evidence.
They have good uses but I can think of plenty of bad uses and I suspect that the bad uses will outnumber the good uses at any moment in time.
How many pedo-pervs would you allow to trade images such that one political dissident may speak without fear of persecution?
If a political dissident would approach me I'd more than happily attempt to smuggle his words out of whatever dictatorship he or she is currently living in, that would be my call to make. But whoever gets unfettered access to my network interfaces is going to have to be known to me in person.
You have to pick your Blackstone Number. If the actual ratio of criminal to innocent exceeds it, you should not participate in Tor. Otherwise, you should.
As for myself, I don't think I'd go as high as 10, but I might be willing to enable as many as 3 people to anonymously commit the worst information-based crime I can conceive without my knowledge to enable one person to achieve the greatest assistance possible from safe and unfettered access to information.
Unfortunately, if I run a Tor exit node, I am likely to experience government persecution as the identifiable scapegoat for all that criminal activity that I was willing to tolerate for the sake of helping one person in need. By prosecuting exit node operators for traffic passing through, government policy effectively sets the Blackstone Number for everyone to zero, and damns the innocent.
(2) if someone is a dissident I'm willing to take significant risk on their behalf, but only after I've verified for myself that they are what they say they are.
I'm not entirely green in this respect, I've run a number of services that were borderline legal and have had numerous run-ins with the law because of this. I've decided for myself that the amount of abuse does not make it worth my while on the off chance that one day a dissident might make use of the service. Feel free to adjust your strategy according to what you believe is the right ratio, I've done this for myself already after building up a fair amount of experience with services that lent themselves a lot less to abuse than tor.
"diaspora* is completely Free Software. This means there are no limits on how it can be used."
Sounds like the IS people are using it as intended.
(Life will get complicated for any pod admins in western countries though.)
Xerox cannot stop IS using photocopiers.
Sanford cannot stop IS using pencils.
BBC cannot stop IS listening to World Service.
etc.
"admitted"? What's with the tone of this article? What crime are they "admitting" to?
In my experience, BBC should be better than this.
In this case the Diaspora team is using their free speech to suggest that various pod administrators choose not to publish some particularly nasty speech.
My own perspective is largely reflected in the early post of logfromblammo, which puts me in the extremist free (i.e., decentralized/uncensorable) speech camp, i guess. logfromblammo's observation that early adopters rarely come from (anywhere near) the mainstream seems an especially salient aspect of the good-with-the-bad argument in this case.
The only thing i'd add, as an old school free speecher, is that the traditional anti-censorship answer to bad speech is more good speech. ...still thinking about how that model plays out on a distributed social network (social networking being an activity i personally mostly avoid).
Anyway...GRATITUDE for the cogent, respectful conversation i've had the pleasure of eavesdropping on.
As it was said before, saying that certain assholes should shut up does not equal betraying the principle of freedom of speech. Now, that is philosophical subtleties aside. Of course this invokes hard questions, like, who gets to decide which assholes should shut up. But let's not split hairs -- IS case is not a borderline case. That is, if we all agree that what they do is universally harmful.
If someone doesn't then I think there's not much to discuss.
That would have been a great quote to have on the crowdfunding page.
https://libertypod.org/posts/7a778c00f3a201319eb700163efe12c...
Sounds like a quality criteria to me.
(and for the record, "IS" is not a synonym for "ISIS")
Sounds pretty extreme to me.
Not so much. You are using the definition from an article geared towards ousting extremists -- and therefore their definition is "extreme". An IS can very much-so be a legitimate non-extreme government. (albeit, different from what most of us would prefer as a government)
My question would be -- why are people allowing them to call themselves "Islamic State" then? Why not just go on calling them ISIS or something that does not de-legitimize already existing and legitimate governments? I mean, people in this thread are already starting to jump on the band-wagon and label all "Islamic States" as extremists... when that is not the case.
(Edited for clarity)