Tag Archives: Freedom

The importance of the internet

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To all my loyal readers, I really apologize for my lack of posts this month. I’ve been busy with finishing my Master’s thesis, which I finished on Friday. I’m currently hunting for jobs, and will be able to post more diligently. Hopefully, I’ll get back into the groove I was in before I finished.

The Urban Times asked me to tweet some reasons why I love the internet. I think this was a great idea, it really got me thinking about how I use the internet and interact with the world. There are so many different levels possible to use the internet. In some ways, people look at the internet as something bigger than it is, and other times as less than it is.

For example. the RIAA and MPAA assume that Google is the end all be all of the internet. They act as if the internet is directed by and for Google. However, this isn’t the case, Google has to keep up high quality services and constantly be on the look out for new rivals. If Bing or some other search engine was significantly better, people would migrate to that service.

This brings up a larger point. In many cases it’s really simple to see the internet as simply websites and how we interact through these websites. Either through consuming content (many news websites), creating content (blogging and YouTube) or sharing and interacting with each other (Reddit, Twitter and Facebook). However there are many other routes to enjoy the internet. Gaming, discussion boards about specific topics, chatting through instant messaging programs and voice calls through Skype and other competing services. That doesn’t even touch upon the myriad of IRC channels and other systems users enjoy that I’m completely ignorant of the workings of and use of.

The problem with copyright activists and congressional leaders that are trying to restrict the internet, is that they don’t understand the different levels these things interconnect. Most likely they are concerned with the static pages of websites that link to content. It is through their ignorance that they do not understand how these laws would impact the highly fluid world of social media and content creation.

Memes are an important tool to remind us that we do not create content in a vacuum. Someone starts it with a picture or some turn of phrase and it catches on and some one remixes it and reuses it. However, that initial picture someone still owns. At the same time, the idea is like a dirty joke. It goes from person to person and no one really knows who created it. In the end we all own the joke or meme. Preventing the freedom to share, recreate, remix and reshare would destroy not the internet, but our culture. Our ability to share is what makes us human.

The internet has extended that ability to thousands of new people that had never been connected before in new and exciting ways. That is why I love the internet.

The Government Strikes Back

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The internet had thought it won a great victory with the black out of some seriously major websites, however it was a short lived victory as the Fed and its allies the vicious RIAA and MPAA have regrouped and launched a stunning counter attack destroying a rebel outpost on Hoth… errr Actually, The US government has shut down MegaUpload.com and arrested several employees for copyright infringement. You may remember MegaUpload for recently being involved in a dispute with Universal over a YouTube video. Where Universal issued false DMCA take down notices which required YouTube to take down the video. However, this video wasn’t infringing and MegaUpload sued Universal for the false claims. The interesting thing about this video is that it’s about all the legal ways you can use MegaUpload. The video is essentially an attempt by the company to show that there are legitimate uses for their services which, I’m assuming, was an attempt to get them into the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

To me, this action really shows that the US government doesn’t need SOPA to pass for it to censor the internet. It already has the ability to do so. SOPA would just put a rubber stamp approval on the actions that the government is already taking. This should be a wake up call. Yes, we had one with the joke of hearings for SOPA previously, however this is a slap in the face of the internet. It’s basically saying, sure we heard you, but you know what? you don’t matter.

Sure it might not be as easy as it would have been with SOPA passing and it’s not breaking the internet the way that SOPA would, but it’s still happening. As much as I hate Maddox, he’s right in his post about SOPA. We really have been pretty complacent, myself included. Yes, I’ve written a bunch, signed petitions and emailed my senators and congressmen multiple times, but big deal. Right now this is a hot button topic, but this isn’t going to go away. No one spoke up about the NDAA because it didn’t impact your ability to read Reddit or surf wikipedia. That law is as bad or worse than SOPA depending on what you think of freedom and civil liberties.

When I got home last night and saw that MegaUpload had been shut down, I was miserable. It made me feel completely impotent. That I was unable to impact the way the US government acts in any meaningful way. At this point, I’m not really sure what to do about this. If any other government would be doing this the US would be up in arms (perhaps literally) and would put a stop to it. Our government is doing this in our name and it’s horribly depressing that I can’t do anything to stop it.

Maddox is right. SOPA only failed because we were paying attention and we were able to get the tech giants behind us on it. SOPA will rear its ugly head again and we might be sleeping. The empire has struck back and we need to decide what we are going to do about it. Are we going to get some ewoks and take it down or are we going to keep signing petitions?

Anonymous has decided to fight back and has launched a large number of attacks on internet websites. As citizens that are deeply concerned with the MegaUpload action we need to ask ourselves, is this an appropriate response? Is this a way of protesting and assembling in an online space? Should anonymous be locked up for doing this? I think that this is a type of protest. Anonymous is as frustrated as I am and have decided to do something in response. It’s obvious that they felt like this is a direct attack on the internet in response to the SOPA protests and the “abuse of power” the internet displayed in taking down websites to protest SOPA.

It also begs the question, what will these website attacks actually accomplish?

What are some of your thoughts on this?

Update 1: I just saw that some 9,000 Hackers have joined Anonymous

Update 2: Apparently Anonymous is using a link that directs users to a Low Orbit Ion Canon DDoS tool that uses the users computer to attack a website. This is an interesting tactic as it will make it very difficult for agents to determine who was malicious and those that were  ignorant of what they were doing. Thus making the tool a more effective protest tool. It will be interesting to see what the ramifications of this new tactic are. I think it will be used again in the future and will make it as “easy” as signing a petition to join a DDoS without having to do the hard work of setting up the LOIC on your computer. Interesting.

Economics, Philosophy and Science

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has spawned a great deal of branch protests. It has increased our awareness of economic, educational and governance issues. We have seen a series of aggressive police actions and amazing responses from victims. Historically, universities have been a sites of unrest. Berkeley had it’s riots in the 60’s, there’s the famous Kent State shooting picture and there are many other examples. What do much of these have in common? The state has used it’s authority and power to overly aggressively clamp down on protesters. However, violent protesters can’t be accepted, but non-violent protesters cannot be met with force. It’s part of our heritage to protest the government.

However, it’s important to understand what we’re protesting and why. It was clear from the beginning of the OWS movement that most of the people didn’t really understand what they were protesting. Very broad general things like Wall Street making too much money or the fact that no one has gone to jail. I think it’s important that for protesting to be effective the leaders and a majority of the protesters need to be well educated on what it is exactly they are protesting.

In this case the protesters needed to be educated on economics and philosophy/morality. Why economics, those guys are like the bad guys man? Well, sadly, to have an actual conversation with these people you need to speak their language. You don’t have to actually accept their assumptions as true or accurate, but you need to be well educated on the topics. Additionally, if you are well educated on economics, you’ll know there are different capitalist perspectives on economics that indicate that a more equal society is a safer and happier society. Using evolutionary economics, policies can be crafted to help protect economies from crashes. In addition, being educated in slightly beyond the basic supply demand curve, it will help prevent the wool from being pulled over our eyes. This will also allow more members of our society to enter public discourse and understand and speak intelligently about the topics that impact all of us. People will actually understand what socialism and communism actually mean.

In addition to a good economic ground work, we also need to understand some basic philosophy. People are accused of moral relativism, we need to know what it actually means (morality is flexible based on the situation) and how that impacts people’s actions. We also need to know when our leaders are behaving morally, immorally and what sort of freedoms we should be giving to people. Our country is founded on the philosophical ideas of the enlightenment. The US government was founded on rights, which all people should have regardless of sex, race or whatever. This includes speech and protest. If these are within our rights, then we need to protect them from people that believe it is their right to physically assault you when you exercise your rights. Morality and ethics can also drive our legislature to define laws based on humanist principles to ensure living wages and the right to live for all people. Or at least the need to create the social mobility claim to have in our society. Decreasing costs of education reduces the initial burden after school which allows people to take more risks, which may allow them to move from one social strata to the next. These should be done for moral reasons and because education and research has been shown both neoclassical economics and evolutionary economics to be a huge driver of sustained economic growth.

We also need a strong scientific foundation, which will provide a healthy dose of skepticism for government and data published by any group on either side. It gives the tools to decide if we should accept these data or open our tool box and figure out where the flaw in the data is. Science is the driver of current economic growth. It is what allows the next big break through at the platform level. We’ve had several platforms, coal, steel, rail, and we’re currently on the silicon platform/computing platform. To develop new platforms we need to continue to drive to the frontier of science.

Our founding fathers embodied these ideals. Jefferson was a philosopher that wrote his own version of the bible. He and Franklin were both accomplished scientists. All of them believed in the rights of the people that exist not because they are given to them by the government, but because they are natural rights all people have. It is important that we acknowledge these rights and make sure we are educated in these topics to ensure an actual debate over the problems we’re facing as a society. Without being educated in the importance of these topics we’ll begin to argue based on the best sound byte and not on the content of the message.

In closing, all people need to become literate in these topics to provide the best foundation for an argument. Without being able to speak the right language, you’ll sound like whining children that’s wondering like a child lost in the woods, or out of your element if you will. With these tools, anyone can talk coherently and powerfully against the very things our own government protests in other countries.

Occupy Wall Street

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Since September 17th people have been having a live in protest on Wall Street in New York City. The protests are attempting to bring attention to the inequities between Wall Street, CEOs and the rest of the US and world. There has been a media blackout since it started until recently. The Daily Show has covered it twice (Here and Here). There were two reasons for this. First the media didn’t know how to deal with the protests. They act differently, the people protesting aren’t grandmothers yelling about the government, instead it’s a bunch of hippie like people that are protesting corporations. Another problem was that there was no cohesive voice coming out from the movement. However yesterday there was an actual list of “demands” released. Basically these demands explain the need for changes at all levels of government and how corporations behave towards both workers and the environment.

The protests are in their third week now. They have been growing every week. Initially, there were only a few hundred protesters now it’s been reported that up to 20,000 people have started to protest in NYC. The occupy movement has spread from only being in NYC to Boston, LA, DC, and several other cities as well. While the Daily Show is right that these protests are very similar to the Tea Party protests the problems they hope to address the end goals and the means are very different. Both groups also had a lot of uninformed people, for example you had the old lady saying keep the government out of my healthcare when she had medicare (government healthcare), and here you have people just saying they want Wall Street to take less money. These protests have gone beyond just the hippies, unions in NYC have also joined the protesters as well as more “responsible” people from other walks of life.

I think these protests could eventually make a difference. I don’t think it will happen in time for the next presidential election. The changes that they are demanding are structural changes that require socio-economic changes. They require complete changes in our ethics and our goals in lives. These are not changes that happen over night. There are some changes that we can do that will have immediate impacts though, and these aren’t popular among policy makers. We need to get money out of politics, we need to limit how politicians can make money off the laws they pass and we need to use public funds for elections (as well as have elections on the weekend or a holiday). Removing the money by creating public funds will eliminate the leverage that lobbyists can use on politicians. Preventing politicians from making money off the laws through stock purchases will prevent tit-for-tat behavior with lobbyists as well. Making it easy as possible to vote will increase the immediate participation in the government.

The reaction to OWS in NYC has been horrifying. The cops have been brutal towards the protesters and really show that the indignation our leaders displayed during violent responses to protest are just words. If US politicians cared about freedom and democracy they would support the protesters. Protesting is part of being American. It’s part of our constitution because it drives conversation and it drives democracy. Protesting is a form of participation. If we aren’t able to participate we don’t have a democracy. Arresting 700 people for going to the protest isn’t acceptable. Pepper spraying women that were corralled is not acceptable, it’s not how a democracy deals with protests. The right way to deal with these protests is to invite them into the conversation and really take a look at what they have to say. We aren’t doing that in the US. The 99% don’t have the same voice as the 1%. As can be seen from Fox News, that 1% is trying to divide the 99%.

Pseudonymity and Anonymity II

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Yesterday I gave an extensive overview of the debate that is ongoing between “Real name” supporters and “Pseudonym/Anonym” supporters. If you haven’t read it I suggest you check it out. There are quiet a few different groups of people discussing it, American and International.

Why do I think it’s a big deal though? I mentioned yesterday that I made a personal choice to use my real name instead of a pseudonym. This is partially because I’m really bad at coming up with them, but also because I try to speak with my real voice as much as possible. I’m also aware that this is could have some repercussions depending on what I try to do after I graduate. I haven’t also been the most supportive of the US government. At  one point when I was debating with a hardcore conservative he pointed this out to me as well.

The problem is that we don’t know who has our information. We lose control of it as soon as it’s put on the internet. I have no idea who has access to the conversation I’m talking about. I know that Facebook and the people involved in the conversation do, but I don’t know if that information got passed onto any sort of governmental body.

This is a huge change from what has happened in the past. We had control over who we gave our information to. It was easy because it had to be face to face or perhaps through a letter. Once that conversation was finished unless notes were taken or it was recorded most of the information would only be remembered only imperfectly by the people involved. This is not the case now. it can be stored and recalled perfectly through the internet and web records.

This permanence is dangerous, as the past will haunt people for decades to come instead of only a few years and only with their friends. However, that is not all. Forcing people to use their real names in all cases causes a chilling affect on activism as governments try to stamp down on it. Twitter will be a more popular communication tool for activists than Google + or facebook because of their pseudonym policies.

Regardless of if we like it or not, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social networking sites have become our public forums. We don’t have a town square to meet and discuss life. We don’t have the community unity that once used to pervade life so we use the tools that we have. However, all of these new meeting places are controlled by corporations that are required to give data to the US government and other governments as well. The ability to protect your identity from the government, other organizations and from people you don’t want to have find you is important. It allows people to be honest and investigate different parts of themselves or try to fight to bring down repressive regimes.

Pseudonyms are part of the internet’s social norms, a method to protect free speech and to protect yourself. They are very important and we need to fight to keep them. The US government should be seeking to protect our ability to have pseudonyms and not fighting against them. The State Department claims they support internet freedom. Supporting pseudonyms and the ability to be anonymous on the internet is the best way to do so.