ralpress.org

After a very interesting discussion with Glyn Wintle at the London launch party of Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex, I decided to become a supporter* of the Open Rights Group (*the Group invites you to become a “supporter” rather than a “member”). I think it’s fair to say that the ORG is more or less the British equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and I believe that it has quite close, if informal, links with the US-based organization. (For the record, I’m also a member of the EFF).

If you have any interest in an Internet free of overbearing government control and censorship, and if you have any interest in the freedom of individuals to collaborate in order to write their own software and to share that software, then I urge you to support the group.

It is not indulging in conspiracy theorizing to claim that our government is manoeuvring to reduce the freedom of The Network. “Conspiracy”, of course, suggests that ominous plans are being made behind closed doors, whereas many of the plans for increasing state control of the Internet are being made and implemented quite openly. Not convinced? I invite you to peruse my informal collection of delicious.com bookmarks, tagged Internet, surveillance and privacy, just to get you in the mood.

C’mon folks, unless you want to see the Internet (in the UK at least) turned into an extension of the BBC, and all digital content (probably including that on your hard-drive) vetted by the the likes of the Hollywood studios, music copyright holders, and proprietary software vendors, then throw some support in the direction of the Open Rights Group. They’re a highly motivated and astute group of people, and all computer users in the UK are benefitting from the work they are doing. I believe that without the lobbying work of groups like the ORG, we won’t have computers as we understand them for much longer. They’ll be outlawed and replaced by government-supplied devices, or more likely perhaps, by locked-down, DRM-laced equivalents from “authorized” computer providers.

Of course, I’m stating my “cynical and corrosive” opinions on these matters while I’m still permitted, for we know that certain members of the government take a dim view of people expressing their opinions and thoughts on the Web (espeically when they run counter to the opinions of the current government).

EDIT: The full O’Reilly podcast interview with Glyn Wintle can be accessed here.

The latest news regarding the Australian government’s decision to censor Internet content:

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/labors-web-gag-worse-than-iran/2008/10/23/1224351491889.html?page=fullpage

Almost all of the most alarmist predictions made over the last few years are coming true. Little seems to have been too extreme or exaggerated.

Next stop: “We don’t like that free software vendor, one of our “consultants” has advised us it that its offerings might potentially violate patents held by a respected member of our business community, so we’re afraid that their website will have to be blocked….”

Don’t even bother trying to persuade me that this won’t happen. Yes it will. Business and government are going to combine to restrict our choice, compromise our privacy and civil liberties (they’re already doing that big-style, of course), and will attempt to force us to pay for as much of our online activity as they are able. The perpetrators are the new digital authoritarians, turning technology that they didn’t create, champion or (in the case of the majority of politicians) understand, against the general public.

Government and politicians fear the Internet because it enables the general population to have conversations and to access knowledge that those supposedly serving us don’t control.  Remember Tony Blair’s moaning about the Internet and how it had made the population much harder to govern? It was prophetic.

I just want to write a string of expletives, but what’s the point?

UPDATE: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au

Reading about the latest developments with regard to the ACTA conspiracy* finally persuaded me to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, making a small donation in the process. It’s something I should have done years ago.

At the top of the membership confirmation page was the line:

“Hi Friend of Freedom”.

It’s a rhetorical, trite phrase, but it made me feel good. I shall endeavour to donate whenever funds permit.

---

*conspiracy noun (conspiracies) 1 the act of plotting in secret. 2 a plot. 3 a group of conspirators.

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The latest move by the technology-drunk New Authoritarians. The latest strap to be tightened on the surveillance, tracking and control straightjacket.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

“Declined to release key documents”, and “meetings are closed to the public”? Doesn’t that make it about one step away from a conspiracy?

The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates.

I feel alarmed too, that a meeting being conducted behind closed doors has such serious potential ramifications for personal liberty.

Bellovin said in a blog post this week that “institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention” of the U.N.’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The UN’s commitment to the “principles of reason” depends upon the views of a variety of people, many of whom actually have little such commitment. If the clauses within the Declaration were in safe hands, we wouldn’t see developments such as these or these.

I think it was Yamamoto Tsunetomo writing in the Hagakure who likened allowing sufficient public license to the presence of flora and rocks in a pond. A pond that has nowhere for fish and other animals to hide contains little life. Stamp down too hard, stamp down everywhere you see the potential for wrongdoing, and the citizens will end up creeping around, fearful of the state, wary of stepping out of line. Society will be populated with cowed, nervous sheep, waiting to be herded, fearful of acting without permission. It’s not only Orwellian, it’s H.G. Wellsian!

Who wants to live in such a society? Have our politicians and bureaucrats forgotten their history? Don’t they have any common sense? As the often repeated joke goes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a blueprint for government!

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

—Thomas Jefferson

---

Edit: In a world in which “intellectual property” holders are becoming increasingly bullish and are accruing powers to initiate police action, to issue take down notices and even block access to The Network, these developments should also be viewed by alarm by Free software creators and users, because we know that collaborating to create unrestricted software has ruined many a corporate business plan…

I wonder if by his patronizing insinuation that Internet conversation is merely the negligible product of a surfeit of free time, The Guardian’s Tim Dowling is referring to *all* those who participate in online conversations, or only to those Internet users who are offended by expressions of anti-Bush sentiment? If the former, he’s managing to demonstrate disdain for hundreds of millions of those who daily post comments on online newspapers and magazines, use social-networks, who blog, who Twitter, who contribute to mailing lists, and perhaps those who upload images to photo-sharing sites and who author and promote Free software, not to mention the rest.

Just when you thought professional journalists had conquered their “old media” view of the Internet and its users, and had accepted the reality of a billion souls chattering away 24/7 on the network — just as they often do in their homes, at social venues and in public spaces when they find themselves with a “surfeit of free time”.

Fantastic. UK taxpayers are paying to be spied upon. Technology will make slaves of us yet; this is not how it was intended to be.

UK.gov dishes out £19m for comms snoop data silos