If it is your intention to assume that nothing can get any better so we should just sit back and do nothing, then would you do me a favor? Would you please start doing nothing BEFORE posting the "it's all hopeless" comment. From your point of view it won't make any difference, but from the point of view of those of us who think that one can (on the whole) make (slow) progress by speaking up and taking action it will make a difference.
I am probably the only person who is bothered that this sounds like a deniable call to violent action. "BE CREATIVE"
edit: to be clearer - the issue is that we have left violent action open as an option and it isn't hard for a few people to take that option. Is this what we want politics to be?
Edit since parent updated: "Be creative" is just too broad and if you want to imply the authors are saying "be violent if you want" then it's what YOU are implying, not them. Besides, I have yet to see a Internet protest that turned out violent because of the protesters. Not in a large scale at least.
So reading "be violent" where it says "be creative" is a long stretch (thus my initial response).
Now, if the authors should be liable if anything violent happens because they did not add "please don't be violent", then this a whole different (and larger) discussion about all the crazy things happening in the judicial system (that would allow someone to be sued). At the end, people are liable for their own acts.
Let's leave this discussion for when/if they actually are explicit about using violence, instead of trying to read between the lines so early (and with so little information to base it on).
You're probably the only person who is bothered, because you are probably the only person who can see anything remotely resembling a "call to violent action" in something as milquetoast as the nonsense we're discussing.
I see what the GP is talking about though, and would probably explain it as "fight" being used as a malapropism, not as a rallying ethic. That is, calling something "fighting" which is pretty much the furthest thing from it, rather than exhorting people to fight in whatever way they deem fit.
Well, when socially networked narcissism is the order of the day in general, why expect anything else? I'm not particularly concerned about the Black Chamber doing what the Black Chamber does, but if I were, I'd certainly hope to see those who shared that concern aiming a little higher than merely to say "I'm agin' it!"
Well, it's a start. However, I agree that it's far more of a branding exercise than an agenda, not dissimilar to professional activists organizing a crowd and then handing out a bunch of preprinted signs to the people that arrive. I don't blame the organizers for this; it's symptomatic of how internet culture works (bootstrap a meme, leverage resulting audience attention) and of the difficulties of organizing in a representative democracy context.
The ideal would be some model legislative proposals or some sort of nominally nonpartisan congressional committee with teeth along the lines of the Church committee in the 1970s (but even that ran into significant opposition at the time, being accused of treason and so on by the usual self-appointed superpatriots.
The basic problem is threefold.
1. The United States has a strong economic and strategic interest in preserving the international status quo or moving it in a more liberal direction (qua trade, promulgation of legal mutualism and so forth). Naturally, maintaining this position is going to involve extensive intelligence-gathering activities.
2. While this is often denigrated as a form of neo-colonialism, there's a fair degree of evidence that it results in better overall outcomes globally; were it to withdraw and leave a power vacuum, that space would be occupied by less scrupulous actors. Although the EU is second to the US in economic power (or even first by some measures) the EU is ineffective at projecting power and less able to provide security to its allies, both practically and politically (consider the rather milquetoast response to the protests in Ukraine, for example). For examples of the alternative, consider the autocratic and cynically populist governance of the Russian Federation or the relative opacity of Chinese jurisprudence.
3. Given the ever-lower barriers to collection and aggregation of data resulting from technology, private actors are able to accumulate and leverage huge pools of data, from Facebook to credit bureaux and consumer intelligence brokers such as Axciom. Until people are willing tolerate limits on private sector activity (and thus financial opportunity) similar to those resulting from EU data protection laws or the like, it's simply not realistic to expect that government should limit itself to technological capabilities that are less than the private sector or even abstain from aggregating publicly available data. This would just result in a a different kind of power vacuum. For all its faults, government is procedurally accountable to the citizenry, whereas private entities are accountable only to shareholders, and shareholdings are fungible in a way that citizenship is not.
As I've said a few times before, I think the US needs a movement for a privacy amendment to the constitution that spells out the scope and limitations of individual's control over their personal information, as opposed to the hand-wavey and contentious judicial interpretations we operate under at present. Putting this in place is a decade-long project, at minimum.
The banners appear to be able to let you put in your zip code and then help you contact your relevant representatives in congress. If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.
However, there probably needs to some kind of bill to support or other action to be urging representatives to do, other than contacting them saying that "spying is bad". The Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow [1] mentions some of these, but the campaign site here doesn't seem to contain any mention of them.
> If enough high-traffic sites participate, like what happened with the SOPA blackout, I could see this actually having an affect on policy.
The policy didn't change with SOPA or CISPA or whatever name they've snuck some of the same shit in by now. The policy is: more surveillance, more police state, less liberty.
Well, if you're politically opposed to the NSA's surveillance they probably already know, so it won't make much difference whether you've revealed support for this campaign. The bigger problem is that the campaign seems entirely vacuous. What exactly are we doing to fight back? Complaining a little bit online? The NSA must be running scared.
Feb 11th is after the SOTU, where Obama will announce what will in effect be the only changes we're likely to see. Any attempt to influence policy should come before that.
We did consider this very, very carefully. Our conclusion was that any reforms that Obama announces are very unlikely to result in meaningful change, and that legislation will still be necessary. Had we set the date before the SOTU, our activism would have concluded with no way to respond to his proposals.
So, what's your plan re: pushing legislation? Have you identified who in Congress will serve as a champion for your cause? Are there any lists of specific demands that any good legislation would address? Changing your avatar on Facebook, Twitter, or G+ won't sway anyone.
If your activism is planned to conclude on a date certain, whether before or after the SOTU, its not going to do anything.
What you really want is to create an ongoing movement both with a visible effect early enough to influence others reaction to what is announced in the SOTU, and which continues so as to itself respond to whatever is proposed in the SOTU.
Hmmm this is all well and good, but what do we expect NSA and GCHQ to do instead?
I don't especially like them or what they do, but we need them... I'm also surprised at the massive backlash and the revelatory nature of the Snowden leaks... I was expecting that NSA and GCHQ would engage in precisely these kinds of activities - its exactly what they are there for - I am surprised that anyone ever had any different expectations, but clearly a large majority did.
Are we suggesting that society has come far enough that we can do without espionage altogether?
We don't expect, need or want them to go anywhere near as far as they do. This was not done with our mandate and in a democratic society it damn well needs it.
They are there to keep an eye on suspected bad guys, not to watch us all constantly.
What they can do is fire 75% of their staff and stick to the rules.
More-specific investigations to uncover actual threats, real court oversight, and making sure that protections written into law are enforced during data collection.
If GCHQ and the NSA were actually dedicated to securing our networks that would be a start, e.g. helping businesses and individuals migrate to SELinux or something.
It's a valid question: DO we still need things left over from the Cold War? BAOR no longer exists for example. Pretty soon we'll have no tank regiments.
And in the US, as posted on here the other day, the FBI is responsible for national security now.
No, it's not fighting back. Making clever memes online to earn a chuckle or two might help spreading awareness, but in reality changing an online avatar and posting memes online won't affect much in real life.
What I find strange is that(Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians. In truth, technology-related policies should be consulted and heard by people who use and develop the said technologies.
What's worse about this retaliation is that anyone participating it would have an illusion of having done something without actually having done anything(i.e., impact). At the end of the day, you might walk home feeling good about yourself for having fought for a cause, but some harsh reality check needs to be done.
> An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings.
I'm pretty sure EFF, DemandProgress and the like are doing exactly that.
Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.
> What I find strange is that (Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians.
Thank you. As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected.
You're wrong about the lack of groups who lobby. An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings. I've actually done this myself too, on my pet issue of cell phone unlocking, with the help of a lobbyist from D.C. Unfortunately, most of these groups, bar the EFF, are almost completely known in silicon valley and the tech community. There are likely many reasons for that, but two that often get called out are the distance between San Francisco and DC (culturally and physically), and a libertarian bent amongst many technology.
The goal of this is campaign is to drive calls to Congress on 02/11, making clever memes is simply the vector by which we spread word of the campaign. Calls do very much have an effect on how representatives vote. For evidence of this I highly recommend reading the Communicating with Congress series of studies by the Congressional Management Foundation [1]. Alternatively, ask who has worked as a staffer: calls make a big difference.
It's so very, very easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's a trap. It's weird to quote Plato, but he sums it up pretty well: "The chief penalty [of good people who refuse to lead] is to be governed by someone worse."
> > What I find strange is that (Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians.
As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected. Now, awareness of those groups should be more spread, wouldn't you agree?
The first organization on "The Day We Fight Back" is the EFF. If you want to raise awareness, take part in this thing. And go to EFF meetups this month.
No. Why is achievement in our culture positioned to always be this 3-act epic like we have to slay the bad guy? try rethinking your approach here and accept that it is actually totally fine to walk home at the end of the day and celebrate a small victory.
There are indeed technology consultants that inform these govt policy: they're called lobbyists and their influence is often proportional to how much their self-interest will prosper. this is why the system doesn't work and Hacker's like Aaron need to step in. None of us believe we'll walk away from this having fixed anything, it is an ongoing process to keep the system in check. The point, however, is to simply concentrate our anger and focus over a month into, as a hacker, doing SOMETHING proactive against this.
> it is actually totally fine to walk home at the end of the day and celebrate a small victory.
It is fine to walk home and celebrate a small victory.
It may not be fine to walk home and celebrate a victory, however small, when that victory is nothing but an illusion. Exactly what kind of victory will this movement achieve? From what I can tell it's another let's-feel-good-about-ourselves-by-shouting-at-same-time.
It makes you feel great, sure, but in the end what have you achieved? Two child comments from my comment have corrected me of groups who are fighting back. Perhaps a donation? Spreading awareness of the groups?
A political motion needs to happen continuously. A day's worth party may be fun, but in the end it's a party. People walk home and do not follow.
Not just mere lobbyists, they are 'insiders' who make the right people boatloads of money. They become "Board members" and/or consultants &/or get appointed to seats of power away from the cameras. Hell, they draft the laws that the puppet/script-readers introduce & vote on with much pomp & flourish... or surreptitiously, whatever suits their interests best.
I'm also pretty sure a majority of people here @ HN will defend THEIR practices of collecting metrics, too. What's the difference? USGuv was tasked to protect & they took it too far, IMO. The Corps, privates & independents with knowledge, coding skills & processing power are tracking for profit... and have taken it too far, IMO.
I agree. The biggest threat to our rights is neither politics nor three letter agencies it's our own passivity. We would benefit more from a movement rather than an event.
Awareness is good for stopping bad things that are coming down the pipe, but it pretty worthless for getting rid of bad things that are already in place.
To change the entrenched you need big industry players behind you and a willingness as a customer to lose something in the exchange for their new benefit.
Yeah, did you even click on the link and try to understand before you made your original post? Aaron Swartz, the face being used for this movement who fought back, was behind the creation of reddit. He is much more involved with these technology-related policies than 99% of those Google, Verizon, etc. policy makers.
a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians
Excuse my pedantry, but I think the need is not so much to lobby against politicians (which is to implicitly reject the concept of a polity and go for an everyone-for-themselves model instead), but to lobby against competing interests. In short, technologists need to lobby for their interests more effectively, which will mean doing a better job of articulating what our interests are, and why others should accept some crimping of their interests for the greater good. One recent and good example of this is the observation that compromising privacy limits our ability to export hardware and software and thus comes at an economic cost to taxpayers.
Who am I kidding? I would not fight back even if I did have the time. Even if this were not horseshit. I would be dicking around with golang and flagging banal questions on StackExchange.
edit: I wrote the above because there was no clear "call to action" other than changing one's Facebook profile picture (seriously?) but, according to the "Open Letter" [0], I guess we're all supposed to call our legislators that day.
I thought so too, but the big banner has a way to find and call your political representative about the issue. I'm just worried that the American populace isn't sufficiently interested in the issue to do anything about it.
Now if the top 100 sites in the US shut down for a day in protest ...
To be honest, I had to go back to the website and read it again so I would notice the suggestion to call the legislators. I think my brain has been trained (based on hard evidence) to ignore that option as ineffective (unfortunately).
"If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action."
While government surveillance and open access are both information issues, we definitely should not be construing what he would or wouldn't believe about revelations that were made after his death.
If we're taking a literal interpretation of his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, he may well be on the front lines fighting for a world with zero privacy from anyone.
I think the emphasis on Aaron is really a mistake. I follow this news relatively closely, reading HN every day, and I don't really see how Aaron's abusive prosecutors tie in to the NSA stuff.
The spying scandals are bad enough on their own. Adding Aaron's death into the mix just muddles the message and confuses people who are less informed.
Indeed, it muddies the issue. I am anti-NSA-spying but I am also anti-stealing-IP...
I should point out that I don't think Aaron should have been hounded to his death (tho' equally if he were mentally ill, anything could have pushed him over the edge). But that doesn't make what he did right. It has for 20 years baffled me that people can demand respect for the GPL et al but be happy to ride roughshod over anyone else's licenses.
This project was originally suggested by David Segal, Aaron's co-founder at Demand Progress, back in November. We'd been waiting for the right date to actually build and launch it, and David suggested that using Aaron's passing was likely the best marker, particularly since he and Brian Knappenberger had just uncovered some footage of Aaron talking about the need for a "moment of activism" around state surveillance (which'll be released soon). I can definitely understand the skepticism, but from my understanding it was definitely an issue he cared about.
Aaron's gripe was not having access to publicly funded research, which should be a slam dunk. Trying to tack him on to another cause, however well intentioned, is a disservice. There was an argument during the suffrage debates that they should include blacks as well, and justifiably, but if they had progress would likely have been delayed.
The reason Aaron gets so much sympathy (EDIT: for what he did as well as for how he was treated) is that 1) a substantial portion of the JSTOR data is public domain, 2) a substantial portion of the rest is work funded with public money where it is controversial that it is only available under copyright.
But even disregarding that, I don't get why you are baffled: The GPL is a hack intended to spread freedoms. Many who support the GPL do not support it out of some desire to respect IP laws, but as a means of reducing the use of more restrictive licenses. E.g. to maximise access to knowledge or maximise the ability to modify and use data.
Wanting the data in JSTOR freed up, possibly regardless of copyright status, is entirely consistent with supporting the GPL in those cases.
For some this is a moral or ethical issue - it is perfectly possible to consider the current state of copyright an immoral restriction of personal freedoms.
What the GPL restricts is restrictions. Going with BSD allows more restrictions to be placed on the software by others.
It's similar in essence to forbidding slavery — some rhetorician might suggest that it abridges people's freedom to own each other, but the actual intent is to preserve a greater amount of freedom.
The underlying principle has been given a name by philosophers and political scientists. Its called "Negative Right".
Taken from wikipedia:
Negative rights are permissions not to do things,
or entitlements to be left alone. Often the distinction
is invoked by libertarians who think of a negative right
as an entitlement to "non-interference" such as a
right against being assaulted.
Rights considered negative rights may include civil and
political rights such as freedom of speech, private property,
freedom from violent crime, freedom of worship, habeas corpus,
a fair trial, and freedom from slavery.
"I find it funny that restrictions that in practice prevent people from monetizing software"
No! The GPL and it's ilk are not and never have been about restrictions that in practice prevent people from monetizing software. When are people going to get that? The source code has to be supplied. You can still charge for access to it. I could make $KILLERAPP and charge $1000 for it, and not allow it to be public, but as long as when a customer buys it, I give them access to the source, I'm still GPL compliant.
Yeah yeah, this is where you go off about "in practice". Still wrong. In practice it doesn't prevent anything, in fact is is the practices used by companies (and people) that prevent them from using GPL, not the other way around.
> Yeah yeah, this is where you go off about "in practice". Still wrong. In practice it doesn't prevent anything, in fact is is the practices used by companies (and people) that prevent them from using GPL, not the other way around.
You're glazing over a lot of practical issues. For example, if you charge money for a product you are distributing under the GPL, once it has been purchased once, nobody else needs to purchase it because the first customer can simply give it away to everyone for free and you have no recourse.
Can you think of even one GPL product that has been successful through sales of GPL licenses? Because I really can't. In practice, companies that make money from GPL software almost never make their money from selling the software.
That is patently not true: This Agreement establishes a framework that will enable Red Hat to provide Software and Services to Client. “Software” means Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and other software programs branded by Red Hat, its Affiliates and/or third parties including all modifications, additions or further enhancements delivered by Red Hat.
You are absolutely correct, although the point still stands in the context of the discussion. They aren't making money from accepting money in exchange for GPL software (people can just grab CentOS if that's all they want), they're making money from support, services, and non-GPL software that gets bundled along with a bunch of GPL software.
The discussion is about whether someone could run a business that is every bit as financially successful as a business that sells proprietary software, by asking for money for GPL software, and not having any other sources of income. Some posters seem to think this is feasible; I would disagree.
You are not required to give that first customer the source code with BSD.
The only companies that make money on software containing GPL'd code are doing it server-side with pre-GPLV3 or AGPL'd code. I've worked at a lot of companies that used and created open source software; and the rules are invariably the same: No GPL'd software allowed into the source tree, period.
You could conceivably try to claim fair use, in that case, although it would undoubtedly be easier (and easy enough) to replace that one line with something original.
"Yeah yeah, this is where you go off about "in practice". Still wrong. In practice it doesn't prevent anything, in fact is is the practices used by companies (and people) that prevent them from using GPL, not the other way around."
You just said that the GPL doesn't prevent people from doing anything that is allowed by the GPL, therefore the GPL doesn't prevent anything. Like, that is literally the argument you just used. Just sayin'.
I could make $KILLERAPP and charge $1000 for it, and not allow it to be public, but as long as when a customer buys it, I give them access to the source, I'm still GPL compliant.
No you wouldn't. The GPL doesn't allow you to restrict the end user's ability to redistribute it. That "not allow it to be public" clause violates that.
I think this is a completely valid question in the context of GPL (quite off-topic, but invoked in the parent thread) and I do not understand why this was downvoted.
GPL might have been about freedom at the time when it was introduced. Nowadays I and most businesses are scanning every piece of software for GPL in order to verify whether it is free.
GPL software was not created in order to provide free labor and tools to all businesses in the world. If you do not want distribute your software as GPL, scanning every piece of software for GPL is exactly what is expected from you.
I'm not saying that I would not contribute it non-GPL software. I do not mind companies closing their products.
However, GPL people do mind companies closing their software. So, those companies not using GPL libraries, no matter how useful is perfectly OK result.
Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products? See you can't have your cake and eat it. Either you believe there is a thing called a license which travels with your product and binds the user as to how they can use it, or you don't, there isn't really any middle ground there. The alternative is "everything is public domain!" in which case, no GPL.
> Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products?
Nothig. But then, a company wouldn't have the entire governemnt's power to persue and extract money from people using their software. It's a completely different equilibrium, you can't just look at one side of it.
And I'm not saying it's a good thing either. Altough I defend that it's not smart to depend ("depend" excludes games, by the way) on proprietary software, I never tought it was immoral to create it, until the NSA scandal. Now I don't have any firm opinion about it.
There are four freedoms that every user should have:
the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.
The GPL is a clever legal "hack" to achieve this, by allowing the code to be used only by others who agree to play by these rules. If the law were changed to enforce these rules directly, then no GPL would be needed. And eliminating intellectual property law restrictions on the use of code would get almost all the way there. (Companies would still be free to "protect" their code through secrecy: releasing only the compiled version and not the source code, but decompilers are pretty darn effective.)
"This is exactly what the GPL is designed to avoid."
...sort of. Source code access is important, sure, but here are a few more important issues that are basically orthogonal:
* The right to redistribute software
* The right to modify software (without source code?!?! Sure; imagine if I took Windows, removed the license protection code, and distributed that copy to you).
* The right to use software -- this, incredibly, can be a problem:
There is, in principle, nothing preventing us from applying "if you are distributing software, the source must be made available to your customers" to all software directly in law rather than through hacking copyright.
> Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products?
You can do this even with IP... if you're building SaaS instead of shrinkwrap, due to the GPL's most relevant restrictions here all hinging on the act of distribution of the actual software.
Or we could create a new system, one not based on the idea that you can own math and poetry, one not based on promoting the interests of publishers, and one that instead encourages the sharing of source code. The GPL is just a way to establish such a system by using the existing approach. There is no reason why we could not scrap copyrights (at least on software) and write a law that codifies the GPL more directly -- say, that any software user has the right to request a copy of the source code for their software.
I'm not saying it is a realistic possibility in today's world, but it is not as though the copyright system is the only system we could have.
In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month _one of that movement's leaders_, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.
It muddies the issue, but people acted against SOPA, which is surely what they're trying to tap into.
I doubt they'll miss a few people who don't appreciate the issues being conflated, if doing so gains them some of the anti-SOPA folks who are willing to act.
Even when it came to fighting SOPA, much of the motivated base was under-informed and dealing in half-truths, exaggerations, fallacious arguments, etc.
Whuh? I don't think there's any sort of logical contradiction between:
"Information, such as research papers, that has been written for the purpose of being disseminated and paid for with tax money, should not be locked up"
and
"The government ought not spy on people."
What does the first one have to do with privacy at all?
Not related in particular, and maybe a little selfish, but as someone who is also named Aaron, I sure would like it if people would, when referring to Aaron Swartz without honorific or qualifier, do so by last name, as is done with pretty much everyone else on the planet.
Not only would it be more specific to do so, it would be more respectful as well. Referring to someone by his first name, who has not given you that name himself, arrogates an degree of familiarity which I strongly suspect never existed between Swartz and most of those who, in the last year, have been talking about "Aaron" this and "Aaron" that like they were the best of friends. It's just rude, and jarringly so, given the apparently ubiquitious degree of respect extended to Swartz, especially in the wake of his regrettable suicide.
Am I the only one bothered by how many people are invoking Aaron's ghost? The intent might be pure, but it really bugs me when people speak for the dead.
And let's not forget, Aaron didn't pass away, he committed suicide. Case related stressors may have caused this, but it's also not right to make him the poster child for every anti-government/anti NSA campaign on the Internet.
Aaron was a pretty beautiful dude who had a clarity and pureness of intent to ensuring that information be as free as possible. That Aaron suffered mental illness, and the assumption that his legacy carry less value because he took his own life is kind of gross and disrespectful. Mental illness is stigmatized enough in our communities, and given a lot of the talk of HN users own depression issues, I'm surprised to see statements like this here.
Movements like this are part of Aaron's legacy. We know not the will of the dead. We can, however, celebrate the value and contribution of their lives. His was extraordinary (though all too short). What is so wrong with continuing the work he was so passionate about?
I don't believe his legacy should carry less value at all. If anything, I'm trying to defend his legacy so organizations like this will stop putting words and actions in his mouth/body.
I find this campaign to be in bad taste and on the brink of classlessness, despite the fact that I believe in the cause.
Meh. I see where you're coming from on this, but we as a society do this kind of thing all the time. Do you think Martin Luther King Jr would have approved of every anti-racism campaign that's used his name? Do you think he would have approved of having his birthday used to celebrate anti-racism? Who knows? Either way, as long as his image is being used to do something good, it's kind of a moot point. My issue with this is that his image isn't being used to do something good. It's being used as a means of getting people to post messages so they can feel like they're doing something good rather than actually doing something good.
as a non-US citizen this won't change anything for me.
"free society" here should be really re-worded to "free US society".
as long as there is a intelligence apparatus in the US at all, spying on the rest of the world will continue. by definition.
the NSA is monitoring all internet traffic as it would be really hard to know beforehand if it only pertains to US citizens. not sure what exactly you're trying to achieve here. the NSA either monitors facebook or it doesn't.
Some things in the constitution apply only to citizens, most don't. When it says person, it means person, not citizen. Educating people that this prevalent view is false would already go a long way.
Not quite that clear. There is an (sort of) exemption to the US 4th Amendement warrent requirement for " surveillance is conducted to obtain foreign intelligence for national security purposes and is directed against foreign powers or agents of foreign powers reasonably believed to be located outside the United States"
However, this definition of "person" requires them to be subject to US law (typically by residing in the US) which foreign residents of a foreign country are not.
That is part of the reason we have a detention facility at Guantanemo.
It is not sufficient that the person acting on someone else is subject to US law? That seems kinda broken. Do you have a link that elaborates on this? From the 14th Amendment for example:
> No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note how it mentions citizens, any person, and persons within the jurisdiction as three separate things... ?
What protection is that? Search and seizure is not about privacy; it's about physical intrusion into personal space. Had they meant to address intrusion into abstract privacy they would have.
It's easy to argue that abstract privacy as a concept separate form physical privacy simply did not exist at that time in history because of a lack of electronics. A corollary is that they probably would have added abstract privacy if they had had the benefit of hindsight.
Oh, it certainly existed. Conspicuously no stricture on unwarranted spying for purposes of investigation was stated and that had to be read into it later by the courts (which I consider juristic legislation.) It's not clear to me that the framers didn't intend to reserve that right for investigation.
I'm not saying it is wrong to restrict it, just that the constitution should have been so amended for it to be considered a constitutional question.
Maybe your government should be working to promote the security of its citizens. The US is not alone here, despite being a bad actor -- did your government work to promote widespread use of good cryptography, or did your country's law enforcement agencies whine about how hard it would be to wiretap people? Should I, as a US citizen, feel more comfortable with my personal data being stored in your country than you feel about yours being stored in mine?
You lost me at "(and [spying on] everyone else too)". Spying on other countries is what the NSA is built to do, and it's for good reason. Every country does it, that's how geopolitics work. The issue people have here is spying on US Citizens, which is not what they're supposed to be doing.
> Give me some "good reasons" why spying on the private lives of citizens of ally countries is not an act of terrorism?
Because terrorism is the use of violence or threat of violence directed at civilian populations or otherwise outside the generally accepted norms of warfare to effect political change, and spying, while it may support the use or threat of violence, is, in and of itself, neither the use nor threat of violence.
Doesn't really matter, because as with violence (or “other forms of violence”, if you prefer), spying isn’t blackmail, even if it might be used to support blackmail.
To me this looks pretty much like Don Quixote's fight against windmills. Pointless, and won't really accomplish anything. Do you think the NSA, or whoever else for that matter, would actually care about people changing their profile picture or blacking out their website for a day? I believe protest doesn't accomplish much, specifically if done in a frivolous way. This is extremely frivolous.
This sentence from the page pretty much hints at that:
> Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.
Let's not forget that the NSA revelations are at the base of the mass surveillance outrage.
Clearly part of addressing mass surveillance would be to get changes at the NSA, but they are not the ones we need to make listen. Politicians are. US politicians who support and fund the NSA or doesn't voice their opposition. Politicians all over the world who allow their own surveillance organizations to be complicit, or who are not putting enough pressure on the US government to make it a foreign policy problem instead of merely a small nuisance.
And the large parts of the public who are not yet aware, or not aware enough to care.
The NSA is at the very end of a very long list of targets, each one of which may help put pressure on and/or have some power over the next target on the list.
It's nice to see that important national issues have been reduced to social media campaigns. It's going to take more than Twitter messages and Reddit comments to take down the NSA though.
Something tells me that Aaron would be pissed that they're using his name this way. Aaron got arrested for actually fighting for openness, not tweeting about how he supports openness. If you want to fight the NSA, write your member of Congress. Join a protest. Leak info about what the government is doing. But please don't just post messages to your Facebook so you can feel like you're doing something.
To me its obvious that the current paradigm with a central government that has a monopoly on force and businesses competing against each other with a mandate to increase profits is outdated. I think we need to experiment with rethinking fundamental societal structures in a way that incorporates our current science and technology.
Calling upon what a dead person would have done if not dead is something I have a hard time getting behind. But using facebook, google + and twitter to fight back against surveillance made it clear that this whole initiative is a joke and a bad poorly executed one.
I wish those guys luck in trying to push against government surveillance towards private for profit transnational corporations' surveillance, but there is no way I would support this kind of initiative.
Either you fight against surveillance or you don't, but fighting some form of surveillance and promoting another is not fight against surveillance.
191 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadhttp://www.reddit.com/r/thedaywefightback/
edit: to be clearer - the issue is that we have left violent action open as an option and it isn't hard for a few people to take that option. Is this what we want politics to be?
Edit since parent updated: "Be creative" is just too broad and if you want to imply the authors are saying "be violent if you want" then it's what YOU are implying, not them. Besides, I have yet to see a Internet protest that turned out violent because of the protesters. Not in a large scale at least.
So reading "be violent" where it says "be creative" is a long stretch (thus my initial response).
Now, if the authors should be liable if anything violent happens because they did not add "please don't be violent", then this a whole different (and larger) discussion about all the crazy things happening in the judicial system (that would allow someone to be sued). At the end, people are liable for their own acts.
Let's leave this discussion for when/if they actually are explicit about using violence, instead of trying to read between the lines so early (and with so little information to base it on).
the arm chair politics of Kony 2012 and all those missing children on facebook.
in reality we need to make people sick to their stomachs and use fear tactics the same way US politics does.
Documentaries, advertising, real life examples, sense of urgency.
I mean, we can just follow the doctrines of propoganda set before us daily :D
it's the masses that have power, not the community of hacker news.
The ideal would be some model legislative proposals or some sort of nominally nonpartisan congressional committee with teeth along the lines of the Church committee in the 1970s (but even that ran into significant opposition at the time, being accused of treason and so on by the usual self-appointed superpatriots.
The basic problem is threefold.
1. The United States has a strong economic and strategic interest in preserving the international status quo or moving it in a more liberal direction (qua trade, promulgation of legal mutualism and so forth). Naturally, maintaining this position is going to involve extensive intelligence-gathering activities.
2. While this is often denigrated as a form of neo-colonialism, there's a fair degree of evidence that it results in better overall outcomes globally; were it to withdraw and leave a power vacuum, that space would be occupied by less scrupulous actors. Although the EU is second to the US in economic power (or even first by some measures) the EU is ineffective at projecting power and less able to provide security to its allies, both practically and politically (consider the rather milquetoast response to the protests in Ukraine, for example). For examples of the alternative, consider the autocratic and cynically populist governance of the Russian Federation or the relative opacity of Chinese jurisprudence.
3. Given the ever-lower barriers to collection and aggregation of data resulting from technology, private actors are able to accumulate and leverage huge pools of data, from Facebook to credit bureaux and consumer intelligence brokers such as Axciom. Until people are willing tolerate limits on private sector activity (and thus financial opportunity) similar to those resulting from EU data protection laws or the like, it's simply not realistic to expect that government should limit itself to technological capabilities that are less than the private sector or even abstain from aggregating publicly available data. This would just result in a a different kind of power vacuum. For all its faults, government is procedurally accountable to the citizenry, whereas private entities are accountable only to shareholders, and shareholdings are fungible in a way that citizenship is not.
As I've said a few times before, I think the US needs a movement for a privacy amendment to the constitution that spells out the scope and limitations of individual's control over their personal information, as opposed to the hand-wavey and contentious judicial interpretations we operate under at present. Putting this in place is a decade-long project, at minimum.
I assume all the avatar and banner changing is leading to February 11, the day in which we change our avatars and banners.
However, there probably needs to some kind of bill to support or other action to be urging representatives to do, other than contacting them saying that "spying is bad". The Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow [1] mentions some of these, but the campaign site here doesn't seem to contain any mention of them.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532
The policy didn't change with SOPA or CISPA or whatever name they've snuck some of the same shit in by now. The policy is: more surveillance, more police state, less liberty.
A nice attempt at sorting out people through self-selection who are to be put on a special surveillance list.
What you really want is to create an ongoing movement both with a visible effect early enough to influence others reaction to what is announced in the SOTU, and which continues so as to itself respond to whatever is proposed in the SOTU.
I don't especially like them or what they do, but we need them... I'm also surprised at the massive backlash and the revelatory nature of the Snowden leaks... I was expecting that NSA and GCHQ would engage in precisely these kinds of activities - its exactly what they are there for - I am surprised that anyone ever had any different expectations, but clearly a large majority did.
Are we suggesting that society has come far enough that we can do without espionage altogether?
They are there to keep an eye on suspected bad guys, not to watch us all constantly.
What they can do is fire 75% of their staff and stick to the rules.
And in the US, as posted on here the other day, the FBI is responsible for national security now.
What I find strange is that(Please correct me on this one) there just doesn't seem to be a political group of technologist who lobby(the original meaning) against politicians. In truth, technology-related policies should be consulted and heard by people who use and develop the said technologies.
What's worse about this retaliation is that anyone participating it would have an illusion of having done something without actually having done anything(i.e., impact). At the end of the day, you might walk home feeling good about yourself for having fought for a cause, but some harsh reality check needs to be done.
Addendum:
As per the second paragraph, refer to one of the replies on this comment(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7038058):
> An abbreviated list of groups who do that: EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, CDT, OTI, Free Press. Many of these have multiple registered lobbyists walking the halls of Congress and taking meetings.
I stand corrected.
Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.
Thank you. As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected.
The goal of this is campaign is to drive calls to Congress on 02/11, making clever memes is simply the vector by which we spread word of the campaign. Calls do very much have an effect on how representatives vote. For evidence of this I highly recommend reading the Communicating with Congress series of studies by the Congressional Management Foundation [1]. Alternatively, ask who has worked as a staffer: calls make a big difference.
It's so very, very easy to be cynical about this kind of thing, but it's a trap. It's weird to quote Plato, but he sums it up pretty well: "The chief penalty [of good people who refuse to lead] is to be governed by someone worse."
[1] http://www.congressfoundation.org/projects/communicating-wit...
As I've stated I am rather ignorant of such groups. I stand corrected. Now, awareness of those groups should be more spread, wouldn't you agree?
There are indeed technology consultants that inform these govt policy: they're called lobbyists and their influence is often proportional to how much their self-interest will prosper. this is why the system doesn't work and Hacker's like Aaron need to step in. None of us believe we'll walk away from this having fixed anything, it is an ongoing process to keep the system in check. The point, however, is to simply concentrate our anger and focus over a month into, as a hacker, doing SOMETHING proactive against this.
What victory? Keep what in check?
Opinions without objective consequences don't matter.
It is fine to walk home and celebrate a small victory.
It may not be fine to walk home and celebrate a victory, however small, when that victory is nothing but an illusion. Exactly what kind of victory will this movement achieve? From what I can tell it's another let's-feel-good-about-ourselves-by-shouting-at-same-time.
It makes you feel great, sure, but in the end what have you achieved? Two child comments from my comment have corrected me of groups who are fighting back. Perhaps a donation? Spreading awareness of the groups?
A political motion needs to happen continuously. A day's worth party may be fun, but in the end it's a party. People walk home and do not follow.
I don't know any but one name on this list, but a quick check leads me to believe we're screwed. DHS Data Privacy Board Members list from '09: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b2EYh7...
Chairman Howard Beals has no conflict of interest, I suppose: http://www.itif.org/publications/stricter-privacy-regulation...
D. Reed Freeman, ex-CPO of Gator Networks will fight for YOUR right to privacy, I'm sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
I'm also pretty sure a majority of people here @ HN will defend THEIR practices of collecting metrics, too. What's the difference? USGuv was tasked to protect & they took it too far, IMO. The Corps, privates & independents with knowledge, coding skills & processing power are tracking for profit... and have taken it too far, IMO.
To change the entrenched you need big industry players behind you and a willingness as a customer to lose something in the exchange for their new benefit.
This is an opinion: They killed him.
Excuse my pedantry, but I think the need is not so much to lobby against politicians (which is to implicitly reject the concept of a polity and go for an everyone-for-themselves model instead), but to lobby against competing interests. In short, technologists need to lobby for their interests more effectively, which will mean doing a better job of articulating what our interests are, and why others should accept some crimping of their interests for the greater good. One recent and good example of this is the observation that compromising privacy limits our ability to export hardware and software and thus comes at an economic cost to taxpayers.
Who am I kidding? I would not fight back even if I did have the time. Even if this were not horseshit. I would be dicking around with golang and flagging banal questions on StackExchange.
-----
edit: I wrote the above because there was no clear "call to action" other than changing one's Facebook profile picture (seriously?) but, according to the "Open Letter" [0], I guess we're all supposed to call our legislators that day.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7037532
Now if the top 100 sites in the US shut down for a day in protest ...
... we'd call them hypocritical.
While government surveillance and open access are both information issues, we definitely should not be construing what he would or wouldn't believe about revelations that were made after his death.
If we're taking a literal interpretation of his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, he may well be on the front lines fighting for a world with zero privacy from anyone.
The spying scandals are bad enough on their own. Adding Aaron's death into the mix just muddles the message and confuses people who are less informed.
I should point out that I don't think Aaron should have been hounded to his death (tho' equally if he were mentally ill, anything could have pushed him over the edge). But that doesn't make what he did right. It has for 20 years baffled me that people can demand respect for the GPL et al but be happy to ride roughshod over anyone else's licenses.
But even disregarding that, I don't get why you are baffled: The GPL is a hack intended to spread freedoms. Many who support the GPL do not support it out of some desire to respect IP laws, but as a means of reducing the use of more restrictive licenses. E.g. to maximise access to knowledge or maximise the ability to modify and use data.
Wanting the data in JSTOR freed up, possibly regardless of copyright status, is entirely consistent with supporting the GPL in those cases.
For some this is a moral or ethical issue - it is perfectly possible to consider the current state of copyright an immoral restriction of personal freedoms.
It's similar in essence to forbidding slavery — some rhetorician might suggest that it abridges people's freedom to own each other, but the actual intent is to preserve a greater amount of freedom.
Taken from wikipedia:
for more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rightsI'm pretty sure the TSA also thinks its restrictions on air travel lead to greater freedom of mobility.
No! The GPL and it's ilk are not and never have been about restrictions that in practice prevent people from monetizing software. When are people going to get that? The source code has to be supplied. You can still charge for access to it. I could make $KILLERAPP and charge $1000 for it, and not allow it to be public, but as long as when a customer buys it, I give them access to the source, I'm still GPL compliant.
Yeah yeah, this is where you go off about "in practice". Still wrong. In practice it doesn't prevent anything, in fact is is the practices used by companies (and people) that prevent them from using GPL, not the other way around.
You're glazing over a lot of practical issues. For example, if you charge money for a product you are distributing under the GPL, once it has been purchased once, nobody else needs to purchase it because the first customer can simply give it away to everyone for free and you have no recourse.
Can you think of even one GPL product that has been successful through sales of GPL licenses? Because I really can't. In practice, companies that make money from GPL software almost never make their money from selling the software.
Actually yes, I can think of a quite a few. Redhat is a good example of a huge industry built around GPL software.
That really isn't the point though, and allow me to summarize your misconception.
"nobody else needs to purchase it because the first customer can simply give it away to everyone for free and you have no recourse."
Explain to me how this applies to GPL and not the BSD, (I doubt you can) and you will see how (at least this particular) argument is flawed.
The discussion is about whether someone could run a business that is every bit as financially successful as a business that sells proprietary software, by asking for money for GPL software, and not having any other sources of income. Some posters seem to think this is feasible; I would disagree.
Is such abuse the most effective way to reach financially success? Maybe. Does it matter?
The only companies that make money on software containing GPL'd code are doing it server-side with pre-GPLV3 or AGPL'd code. I've worked at a lot of companies that used and created open source software; and the rules are invariably the same: No GPL'd software allowed into the source tree, period.
That's only different if you are selling other people's software. If so, why should anybody have any simpaty?
You just said that the GPL doesn't prevent people from doing anything that is allowed by the GPL, therefore the GPL doesn't prevent anything. Like, that is literally the argument you just used. Just sayin'.
No you wouldn't. The GPL doesn't allow you to restrict the end user's ability to redistribute it. That "not allow it to be public" clause violates that.
http://www.redhat.com/
https://www.google.com/
https://www.facebook.com/
Yup, definitely stopping people from monetizing software!
GPL might have been about freedom at the time when it was introduced. Nowadays I and most businesses are scanning every piece of software for GPL in order to verify whether it is free.
I'm not saying that I would not contribute it non-GPL software. I do not mind companies closing their products.
However, GPL people do mind companies closing their software. So, those companies not using GPL libraries, no matter how useful is perfectly OK result.
Nothig. But then, a company wouldn't have the entire governemnt's power to persue and extract money from people using their software. It's a completely different equilibrium, you can't just look at one side of it.
And I'm not saying it's a good thing either. Altough I defend that it's not smart to depend ("depend" excludes games, by the way) on proprietary software, I never tought it was immoral to create it, until the NSA scandal. Now I don't have any firm opinion about it.
The purpose of the GPL is not to prevent people from modifying and building on the code. The purpose... well, let me quote from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html :
The GPL is a clever legal "hack" to achieve this, by allowing the code to be used only by others who agree to play by these rules. If the law were changed to enforce these rules directly, then no GPL would be needed. And eliminating intellectual property law restrictions on the use of code would get almost all the way there. (Companies would still be free to "protect" their code through secrecy: releasing only the compiled version and not the source code, but decompilers are pretty darn effective.)WTF?!? No way! (although to be fair I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "use of code").
Companies would still be free to "protect" their code through secrecy: releasing only the compiled version and not the source code
This is exactly what the GPL is designed to avoid.
As you quoted above "the freedom to change the software to suit your needs" - that requires the source code!
...sort of. Source code access is important, sure, but here are a few more important issues that are basically orthogonal:
* The right to redistribute software
* The right to modify software (without source code?!?! Sure; imagine if I took Windows, removed the license protection code, and distributed that copy to you).
* The right to use software -- this, incredibly, can be a problem:
http://jalopnik.com/192843/robot-let-my-car-go-new-jersey-ga...
Only if distributing software without its source was also made illegal.
You can do this even with IP... if you're building SaaS instead of shrinkwrap, due to the GPL's most relevant restrictions here all hinging on the act of distribution of the actual software.
There are many, myself included, who would be happy with this endgame. As long as no one can ever be prosecuted for creating a work, I am happy.
The GPL is needed because of the effects of copyright, not vice versa.
Without IP, there can neither be GPL (which licenses IP rights) nor close source proprietary (which is another model of licensing IP rights).
I'm not saying it is a realistic possibility in today's world, but it is not as though the copyright system is the only system we could have.
I doubt they'll miss a few people who don't appreciate the issues being conflated, if doing so gains them some of the anti-SOPA folks who are willing to act.
Even when it came to fighting SOPA, much of the motivated base was under-informed and dealing in half-truths, exaggerations, fallacious arguments, etc.
But it worked.
"Information, such as research papers, that has been written for the purpose of being disseminated and paid for with tax money, should not be locked up"
and
"The government ought not spy on people."
What does the first one have to do with privacy at all?
Not only would it be more specific to do so, it would be more respectful as well. Referring to someone by his first name, who has not given you that name himself, arrogates an degree of familiarity which I strongly suspect never existed between Swartz and most of those who, in the last year, have been talking about "Aaron" this and "Aaron" that like they were the best of friends. It's just rude, and jarringly so, given the apparently ubiquitious degree of respect extended to Swartz, especially in the wake of his regrettable suicide.
And let's not forget, Aaron didn't pass away, he committed suicide. Case related stressors may have caused this, but it's also not right to make him the poster child for every anti-government/anti NSA campaign on the Internet.
Movements like this are part of Aaron's legacy. We know not the will of the dead. We can, however, celebrate the value and contribution of their lives. His was extraordinary (though all too short). What is so wrong with continuing the work he was so passionate about?
I find this campaign to be in bad taste and on the brink of classlessness, despite the fact that I believe in the cause.
How about instead we save some energy and invest it in better encryption and security?
"free society" here should be really re-worded to "free US society".
as long as there is a intelligence apparatus in the US at all, spying on the rest of the world will continue. by definition.
the NSA is monitoring all internet traffic as it would be really hard to know beforehand if it only pertains to US citizens. not sure what exactly you're trying to achieve here. the NSA either monitors facebook or it doesn't.
That is part of the reason we have a detention facility at Guantanemo.
> No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Note how it mentions citizens, any person, and persons within the jurisdiction as three separate things... ?
I'm not saying it is wrong to restrict it, just that the constitution should have been so amended for it to be considered a constitutional question.
And if you don't join it, they'll also go out of their way to spy on you.
Because terrorism is the use of violence or threat of violence directed at civilian populations or otherwise outside the generally accepted norms of warfare to effect political change, and spying, while it may support the use or threat of violence, is, in and of itself, neither the use nor threat of violence.
What made you think that's the point of this? This isn't about convincing the NSA of anything.
> Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.
Let's not forget that the NSA revelations are at the base of the mass surveillance outrage.
And the large parts of the public who are not yet aware, or not aware enough to care.
The NSA is at the very end of a very long list of targets, each one of which may help put pressure on and/or have some power over the next target on the list.
Something tells me that Aaron would be pissed that they're using his name this way. Aaron got arrested for actually fighting for openness, not tweeting about how he supports openness. If you want to fight the NSA, write your member of Congress. Join a protest. Leak info about what the government is doing. But please don't just post messages to your Facebook so you can feel like you're doing something.
I wish those guys luck in trying to push against government surveillance towards private for profit transnational corporations' surveillance, but there is no way I would support this kind of initiative.
Either you fight against surveillance or you don't, but fighting some form of surveillance and promoting another is not fight against surveillance.