-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Your Government wants to Break the Internet - --------------------------------------------------
Rickard Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, recently wrote [1]: "Governments all over the world, and in the so-called Free West in particular, look like confused sheep. They are applauding the net activists who are helping people communicate unhindered to get news out from repressive regimes, and at the same time arresting people who use the same technologies in their own countries." The heart of the matter is that governments want the ability to know who you are on the internet. They currently find this difficult, and they want to design the technology of the internet to make identification easy. This was the essence of the recent eG8 summit [2] in France. Leaders from around the world got together to push the idea that "the rule of law" must extend to the internet. We can see examples of this in the HADOPI law in France [3] (which sets up a government agency to regulate who has access to the internet), the warrantless wiretapping law in Sweden [4], and the Obama administration's desire to require backdoors to encrypted communication in the United States [5]. All this is a very bad idea, for one simple reason: the only way to ensure real identity on the internet is to build a police-state. As Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts on computer security, wrote [6]: "Bits are bits; they don't come with identity information attached to them... We simply don't have anywhere near the expertise to build an airtight attribution system... Any attempts to circumvent this limitation will fail, and will increasingly need to be backed up by the sort of real-world police-state measures that the entertainment industry is demanding in order to make copy-protection work. That's how China does it: police, informants, and fear... Law enforcement and others need to understand that the old ideas of identification don't work on the Internet." If the civil libertarians get their way, the internet will still be a playground for capitalism -- but at least it will not be the technological basis for total social control. If you want to assert your ability to communicate on the internet anonymously then try out the RiseupVPN. We are having people try it out this month in order to work out some of the bugs. You can read more and learn how to use it at https://help.riseup.net/vpn [1] http://torrentfreak.com/whos-the-police-and-whos-the-crook-anyway-110612/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-G8_Forum [3] https://help.riseup.net/france [4] https://help.riseup.net/sweden [5] https://help.riseup.net/calea [6] http://www.schneier.com/essay-308.html - -- http://freedom.libsyn.com/ Echo of Freedom, Radical Podcast "None of us are free until all of us are free." ~ Mihail Bakunin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJOOisnAAoJENW9VI+wmYasG6UH/iQhUHDJZX+bTaYwdeMfTxoV 9qsMIlyhK170ag71UIqOlrK3DTz9ErpyDBgWKcpT2sb10P2dUVqGU121YpFL4eib fnNHBYstea3Sb70UncEw6z4XIDeLBuIPKIrbu22syUbDll44dso5pFZEVdBkGOmI MRLigICvHS4FkHn7fQ+o/q3cEYsHUzQGQmbBDWvRZIp6OpBbjh0eg8uESAgKqDit mgyf/usS872v1y3nGO50x0/Fe43urhysgZs/EvsRUf4uIvIltEk19LGeQPpCjLtL UcFqPz5T4c/n7NSn9Z/8PvnvsT72EM3Py16/zlYsbmCq/tOetxrfYoooViW0xQo= =XC26 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ chat mailing list chat@freenetproject.org Archived: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.general Unsubscribe at http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chat Or mailto:chat-requ...@freenetproject.org?subject=unsubscribe
