I think what is really needed is political will from the executive 
department. It is rare that initiatives like these will come from the 
legislature. And even if it did, if the executive dragged its feet, 
nothing significant will happen either.

Cheers,

Obet

seekuel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I hope DOST-ASTI <http://www.bayanihan.gov.ph/> can gain more momentum 
> and this administration will also support opensource.
>
> Is there a move by senators/congressmen towards opensource?
>
> Just my thoughts.
>
> Regards,
> Sandeil
>
> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Roberto Verzola <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>     Here's an encouraging story below about FOSS adoption by the
>     Russian govt, as
>     ordered by prime minister Putin himself. Hopefully, they will also
>     release as
>     FOSS any improvements or new software they make. Russians are
>     great programmers.
>
>     Obet
>
>     To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>            http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>     or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>            [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>
>     ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>     Message: 1
>     Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:43:46 -0500 (EST)
>     From: Alan Sondheim <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>     Subject: <nettime> putin on open source software (fwd)
>     To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>
>     ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>     Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 01:39:42
>     From: Jonathan Marshall <[email protected]
>     <mailto:[email protected]>>
>     Reply-To: Philosophy and Psychology of Cyberspace
>     <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>     To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>     Subject: putin on open source software
>
>     http://mashable.com/2010/12/27/vladimir-putin-free-software-by-2015/
>
>     Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has signed a government
>     order that
>     lays out the groundwork for the transition of federal bodies and
>     agencies
>     to use free software, including Linux, by 2015.
>
>     The 25-point document (available
>     
> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://filearchive.cnews.ru/doc/2010/06/17/2299p.doc&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1
>     
> <http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://filearchive.cnews.ru/doc/2010/06/17/2299p.doc&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1>)
>     outlines specific steps the government must take in order to move off
>     proprietary software and onto free and/or open source alternatives
>     like
>     Linux. The government order was approved on December 17 and
>     affects all
>     federal agencies of the federal budget.
>
>     Each point of the document names the specific action that must be
>     taken,
>     the agency responsible for implementing that order, the time frame for
>     implementation, and the expected result. For example, point #5
>     instructs
>     Russia?s Ministry of Communications to form, ?the base package of free
>     software solutions for typical problems of the federal executive
>     bodies,?
>     with the expected result a free package of software that includes
>     operating
>     systems, drivers and application software for servers.
>
>     Order #5 calls for, ?creating and maintaining a single repository
>     of free
>     software used in the federal bodies of executive power,? while
>     order #20
>     requires, ?the development of departmental plans to move to the
>     use of free
>     software, including plans for transition of subordinate budget
>     institutions.? The final order, to be implemented in Q3 2015,
>     calls for,
>     ?preparation of the draft orders of the Government of the Russian
>     Federation on the adoption of a phased introduction of free
>     software for
>     the next planning period.?
>
>     Russia has been moving in the direction of free software for the
>     last few
>     years. In 2008, the government ordered schools to implement free
>     software
>     packages in all of its computers. Schools that now want to use
>     proprietary
>     software have to pay for it out of their own pockets.
>
>     [Source: CNews via Open...]
>
>     UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F
>
>     DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments
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>
>     ------------------------------
>
>     Message: 2
>     Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 17:38:45 +0100
>     From: "Patrice Riemens" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
>     Subject: <nettime> (Rolling Stone): Jacob Appelbaum,    The American
>            Wikileaks Hacker
>     To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>     Message-ID:
>          
>      <[email protected]
>     <mailto:[email protected]>>
>     Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
>
>     original to:
>     
> http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/368-wikileaks/4402-the-american-wikileaks-hacker
>
>     (http://bit.ly/gB6Xrg)
>
>
>     The American Wikileaks Hacker
>     Jacob Appelbaum fights repressive regimes around the world -
>     including his
>     own.
>
>
>     On July 29th, returning from a trip to Europe, Jacob Appelbaum, a
>     lanky,
>     unassuming 27-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with the slogan "Be the
>     trouble you want to see in the world," was detained at customs by
>     a posse
>     of federal agents. In an interrogation room at Newark Liberty
>     airport, he
>     was grilled about his role in Wikileaks, the whistle-blower group
>     that has
>     exposed the government's most closely guarded intelligence reports
>     about
>     the war in Afghanistan. The agents photocopied his receipts,
>     seized three
>     of his cellphones ? he owns more than a dozen ? and confiscated his
>     computer. They informed him that he was under government surveillance.
>     They questioned him about the trove of 91,000 classified military
>     documents that Wikileaks had released the week before, a leak that
>     Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg called "the largest unauthorized
>     disclosure since the Pentagon Papers." They demanded to know where
>     Julian
>     Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was hiding. They pressed him on his
>     opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appelbaum refused to
>     answer. Finally, after three hours, he was released.
>
>     Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time
>
>     Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the
>     leading
>     evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak
>     possible. In
>     a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's
>     ambition
>     is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has
>     dedicated
>     his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist
>     street kid
>     raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school,
>     taught
>     himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia
>     along the
>     way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched
>     all the
>     time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I
>     don't want
>     a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our
>     most intimate and personal information ? our bank accounts, e-mails,
>     photographs, phone conversations, medical records ? to digital
>     networks,
>     trusting that it's all locked away in some secret crypt. But Appelbaum
>     knows that this information is not safe. He knows, because he can
>     find it.
>
>     This article appears in the September 2, 2010 issue of Rolling
>     Stone. The
>     issue is available in the online archive.
>
>     He demonstrates this to me when I meet him, this past spring, two
>     weeks
>     before Wikileaks made headlines around the world by releasing a video
>     showing U.S. soldiers killing civilians in Iraq. I visit him at his
>     cavernous duplex in San Francisco. The only furniture is a black
>     couch, a
>     black chair and a low black table; a Guy Fawkes mask hangs on a
>     wall in
>     the kitchen. The floor is littered with Ziploc bags containing
>     bundles of
>     foreign cash: Argentine pesos, Swiss francs, Romanian lei, old Iraqi
>     dinars bearing Saddam Hussein's face. The bag marked "Zimbabwe"
>     contains a
>     single $50 billion bill. Photographs, most of them taken by Appelbaum,
>     cover the wall above his desk: punk girls in seductive poses and a
>     portrait of his deceased father, an actor, in drag.
>
>     The Battle For Facebook
>
>     Appelbaum tells me about one of his less impressive hacking
>     achievements,
>     a software program he invented called Blockfinder. It was not, he
>     says,
>     particularly difficult to write. In fact, the word he uses to
>     describe the
>     program's complexity is "trivial," a withering adjective that he
>     and his
>     hacker friends frequently deploy, as in, "Triggering the Chinese
>     firewall
>     is trivial" or "It's trivial to access any Yahoo account by using
>     password-request attacks." All that Blockfinder does is allow you to
>     identify, contact and potentially hack into every computer network
>     in the
>     world.
>
>     The Hottest Live Photos of the Week
>
>     He beckons me over to one of his eight computers and presses
>     several keys,
>     activating Blockfinder. In less than 30 seconds, the program lists
>     all of
>     the Internet Protocol address allocations in the world ? potentially
>     giving him access to every computer connected to the Internet.
>     Appelbaum
>     decides to home in on Burma, a small country with one of the
>     world's most
>     repressive regimes. He types in Burma's two-letter country code:
>     "mm," for
>     Myanmar. Blockfinder instantly starts to spit out every IP address in
>     Burma.
>     Blockfinder informs Appelbaum that there are 12,284 IP addresses
>     allocated
>     to Burma, all of them distributed by government-run Internet-service
>     providers. In Burma, as in many countries outside the United States,
>     Internet access runs through the state. Appelbaum taps some keys and
>     attempts to connect to every computer system in Burma. Only 118 of
>     them
>     respond. "That means almost every network in Burma is blocked from the
>     outside world," he says. "All but 118 of them."
>
>     These 118 unfiltered computer systems could only belong to
>     organizations
>     and people to whom the government grants unfettered Internet access:
>     trusted politicians, the upper echelons of state-run corporations,
>     intelligence agencies.
>
>     "Now this," Appelbaum says, "is the good part."
>
>     He selects one of the 118 networks at random and tries to enter it. A
>     window pops up asking for a password. Appelbaum throws back his
>     head and
>     screams with laughter ? a gleeful, almost manic trill. The network
>     runs on
>     a router made by Cisco Systems and is riddled with vulnerabilities.
>     Hacking into it will be trivial.
>
>     It's impossible to know what's on the other side of the password. The
>     prime minister's personal e-mail account? The network server of
>     the secret
>     police? The military junta's central command? Whatever it is, it could
>     soon be at Appelbaum's fingertips.
>
>     So will he do it?
>
>     "I could," Appelbaum says, with a smile. "But that would be illegal,
>     wouldn't it?"
>
>     No one has done more to spread the gospel of anonymity than Appelbaum,
>     whose day job is to serve as the public face of the Tor Project, a
>     group
>     that promotes Internet privacy through a software program invented 15
>     years ago by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He travels the world
>     teaching spooks, political dissidents and human rights activists
>     how to
>     use Tor to prevent some of the world's most repressive regimes from
>     tracking their movements online. He considers himself a
>     freedom-of-speech
>     absolutist. "The only way we'll make progress in the human race is
>     if we
>     have dialogue," he says. "Everyone should honor the United Nations
>     human
>     rights charter that says access to freedom of speech is a
>     universal right.
>     Anonymous communication is a good way for this to happen. Tor is
>     just an
>     implementation that helps spread that idea."
>
>     In the past year alone, Tor has been downloaded more than 36 million
>     times. A suspected high-level member of the Iranian military used
>     Tor to
>     leak information about Tehran's censorship apparatus. An exiled
>     Tunisian
>     blogger living in the Netherlands relies on Tor to get past state
>     censors.
>     During the Beijing Olympics, Chinese protesters used Tor to hide their
>     identities from the government.
>
>     The Tor Project has received funding not only from major
>     corporations like
>     Google and activist groups like Human Rights Watch but also from
>     the U.S.
>     military, which sees Tor as an important tool in intelligence
>     work. The
>     Pentagon was not particularly pleased, however, when Tor was used to
>     reveal its secrets. Wikileaks runs on Tor, which helps to preserve the
>     anonymity of its informants. Though Appelbaum is a Tor employee, he
>     volunteers for Wikileaks and works closely with Julian Assange, the
>     group's founder. "Tor's importance to Wikileaks cannot be
>     understated,"
>     Assange says. "Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes
>     of our
>     cause."
>
>     In July, shortly before Wikileaks released the classified
>     Afghanistan war
>     documents, Assange had been scheduled to give the keynote speech at
>     Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), a major conference held at a hotel
>     in New
>     York. Federal agents were spotted in the audience, presumably
>     waiting for
>     Assange to appear. Yet as the lights darkened in the auditorium,
>     it was
>     not Assange who took the stage but Appelbaum.
>
>     "Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international
>     surveillance," Appelbaum began. "I am here today because I believe
>     we can
>     make a better world. Julian, unfortunately, can't make it, because we
>     don't live in that better world right now, because we haven't yet
>     made it.
>     I wanted to make a little declaration for the federal agents that are
>     standing in the back of the room and the ones that are standing in the
>     front of the room, and to be very clear about this: I have, on me,
>     in my
>     pocket, some money, the Bill of Rights and a driver's license, and
>     that's
>     it. I have no computer system, I have no telephone, I have no keys, no
>     access to anything. There's absolutely no reason that you should
>     arrest me
>     or bother me. And just in case you were wondering, I'm an
>     American, born
>     and raised, who's unhappy. I'm unhappy with how things are going." He
>     paused, interrupted by raucous applause. "To quote from Tron," he
>     added,
>     "'I fight for the user.'"
>
>     For the next 75 minutes, Appelbaum spoke about Wikileaks, urging the
>     hackers in the audience to volunteer for the cause. Then the
>     lights went
>     out, and Appelbaum, his black hoodie pulled down over his face,
>     appeared
>     to be escorted out of the auditorium by a group of volunteers. In the
>     lobby, however, the hood was lifted, revealing a young man who was
>     not, in
>     fact, Appelbaum. The real Appelbaum had slipped away backstage and
>     left
>     the hotel through a security door. Two hours later, he was on a
>     flight to
>     Berlin
>
>     By the time Appelbaum returned to America 12 days later and was
>     detained
>     at Newark, newspapers were reporting that the war documents identified
>     dozens of Afghan informants and potential defectors who were
>     cooperating
>     with American troops. (When asked why Wikileaks didn't redact these
>     documents before releasing them, a spokesman for the organization
>     blamed
>     the sheer volume of information: "I just can't imagine that
>     someone could
>     go through 76,000 documents.") Marc Thiessen, a former Bush
>     speechwriter,
>     called the group "a criminal enterprise" and urged the U.S.
>     military to
>     hunt them down like Al Qaeda. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from
>     Michigan, said that the soldier who allegedly provided the
>     documents to
>     Wikileaks should be executed.
>
>     Two days later, after speaking at a hackers conference in Las Vegas,
>     Appelbaum was approached by a pair of undercover FBI agents. "We'd
>     like to
>     chat for a few minutes," one of them said. "We thought you might
>     not want
>     to. But sometimes it's nice to have a conversation to flesh things
>     out."
>
>     Appelbaum has been off the grid ever since ? avoiding airports,
>     friends,
>     strangers and unsecure locations, traveling through the country by
>     car.
>     He's spent the past five years of his life working to protect
>     activists
>     around the world from repressive governments. Now he is on the run
>     from
>     his own.
>     Appelbaum's obsession with privacy might be explained by the fact
>     that,
>     for his entire childhood, he had absolutely none of it. "I come from a
>     family of lunatics," he says. "Actual, raving lunatics." His
>     parents, who
>     never married, began a 10-year custody battle before he was even
>     born. He
>     spent the first five years of his life with his mother, whom he
>     says is a
>     paranoid schizophrenic. She insisted that Jake had somehow been
>     molested
>     by his father while he was still in the womb. His aunt took
>     custody of him
>     when he was six; two years later she dropped him off at a Sonoma
>     County
>     children's home. It was there, at age eight, that he hacked his first
>     security system. An older kid taught him how to lift the PIN code
>     from a
>     security keypad: You wipe it clean, and the next time a guard
>     enters the
>     code, you blow chalk on the pad and lift the fingerprints. One night,
>     after everyone had gone to sleep, the boys disabled the system and
>     broke
>     out of the facility. They didn't do anything special ? just walked
>     around
>     a softball field across the street for half an hour ? but Appelbaum
>     remembers the evening vividly: "It was really nice, for a single
>     moment,
>     to be completely free."
>
>     When he was 10, he was assigned by the courts to live with his father,
>     with whom he had remained close. But his dad soon started using
>     heroin,
>     and Appelbaum spent his teens traveling with his father around
>     Northern
>     California on Greyhound buses, living in Christian group homes and
>     homeless shelters. From time to time, his father would rent a
>     house and
>     turn it into a heroin den, subletting every room to fellow
>     addicts. All
>     the spoons in the kitchen had burn stains. One morning, when Appelbaum
>     went to brush his teeth, he found a woman convulsing in the
>     bathtub with a
>     syringe hanging out of her arm. Another afternoon, when he came
>     home from
>     school, he found a suicide note signed by his father. (Appelbaum
>     saved him
>     from an overdose that day, but his father died several years later
>     under
>     mysterious circumstances.) It got so that he couldn't even sit on
>     a couch
>     for fear that he'd be pierced by a stray needle.
>
>     An outsider in his own home, Appelbaum embraced outsider culture. He
>     haunted the Santa Rosa mall, begging for change. He dressed in
>     drag and "I
>     &#9829; Satan" T-shirts, dyed his hair purple, picked fights with
>     Christian fundamentalists and made out with boys in front of school.
>     (Appelbaum identifies himself as "queer," though he refers to at
>     least a
>     dozen female lovers in nearly as many countries.) When a friend's
>     father
>     encouraged his interest in computers and taught him basic programming
>     tools, something opened up for Appelbaum. Programming and hacking
>     allowed
>     him "to feel like the world was not a lost place. The Internet is
>     the only
>     reason I'm alive today."
>
>     At 20, he moved to Oakland and eventually began providing tech
>     security
>     for the Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace. In 2005, a few
>     months
>     after his father died, he traveled alone to Iraq ? crossing the
>     border by
>     foot ? and set up satellite Internet connections in Kurdistan. In the
>     aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he drove to New Orleans, using
>     falsified
>     press documents to get past the National Guard, and set up
>     wireless hot
>     spots in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods to enable refugees to
>     register for housing with FEMA.
>
>     Upon returning home, he started experimenting with the fare cards
>     used by
>     the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and discovered it was possible
>     to rig a
>     card with an unlimited fare. Instead of taking advantage, he
>     alerted BART
>     officials to their vulnerabilities. But during this conversation,
>     Appelbaum learned that BART permanently stored the information
>     encoded on
>     every transit card ? the credit-card number used, where and when
>     they were
>     swiped ? on a private database. Appelbaum was outraged. "Keeping that
>     information around is irresponsible," he says. "I'm a taxpayer,
>     and I was
>     given no choice how they store that data. It's not democratically
>     decided
>     ? it's a bureaucratic directive."
>
>     Given his concerns about privacy, it's easy to see why Appelbaum
>     gravitated toward the Tor Project. He volunteered as a programmer,
>     but it
>     soon became clear that his greatest ability lay in proselytizing: He
>     projects the perfect mix of boosterism and dread. "Jake can do
>     advocacy
>     better than most," says Roger Dingledine, one of Tor's founders.
>     "He says,
>     'If someone were looking for you, this is what they'd do,' and he
>     shows
>     them. It freaks people out."
>
>     The Internet, once hailed as an implacable force of liberalization and
>     democratization, has become the ultimate tool for surveillance and
>     repression. "You can never take information back once it's out there,"
>     Appelbaum says, "and it takes very little information to ruin a
>     person's
>     life." The dangers of the Web may remain abstract for most
>     Americans, but
>     for much of the world, visiting restricted websites or saying
>     something
>     controversial in an e-mail can lead to imprisonment, torture or death.
>
>     Last year, some 60 governments prevented their citizens from freely
>     accessing the Internet. China is rumored to have a staff of more than
>     30,000 censors who have deleted hundreds of millions of websites and
>     blocked an eccentric range of terms ? not only "Falungong,"
>     "oppression"
>     and "Tiananmen," but also "temperature," "warm," "study" and "carrot."
>
>     On a bright afternoon in San Francisco, before Wikileaks dominated the
>     headlines, Appelbaum is dressed in his usual hacker uniform: black
>     boots,
>     black socks, black slacks, black thick-rimmed glasses and a T-shirt
>     bearing an archslogan. (Today it's "Fuck politics ? I just want to
>     burn
>     shit down.") Though his work requires him to sit at his desk for
>     most of
>     the day, he is rarely stationary. He frequently jumps up and
>     executes a
>     series of brief, acrobatic stretches.He kicks a leg up against the
>     wall,
>     cracks his neck violently, tugs one arm across his chest and, just as
>     abruptly, sits back down again.
>
>     He explains that we have to take a cab to pick up his mail. Like
>     being a
>     strict vegan or a Mormon, a life of total anonymity requires great
>     sacrifice. You cannot, for instance, have mail delivered to your
>     home. Nor
>     can you list your name in your building's directory. Appelbaum has
>     all of
>     his mail sent to a private mail drop, where a clerk signs for it. That
>     allows Appelbaum ? and the dissidents and hackers he deals with ?
>     to use
>     the postal system anonymously. Person One can send a package to
>     Appelbaum,
>     who can repackage it and send it on to Person Two. That way Person
>     One and
>     Person Two never have direct contact ? or even learn each other's
>     identities.
>     Tor works in a similar way. When you use the Internet, your
>     computer makes
>     a connection to the Web server you wish to contact. The server
>     recognizes
>     your computer, notes its IP address and sends back the page you've
>     requested. It's not difficult, however, for a government agency or a
>     malicious hacker to observe this whole transaction: They can
>     monitor the
>     server and see who is contacting it, or they can monitor your
>     computer and
>     see whom you're trying to contact. Tor prevents such online spying by
>     introducing intermediaries between your computer and the system you're
>     trying to reach. Say, for example, that you live in San Francisco
>     and you
>     want to send an e-mail to your friend, a high-level mole in the
>     Iranian
>     Revolutionary Guard. If you e-mail your friend directly, the Guard's
>     network could easily see your computer's IP address, and discover your
>     name and personal information. But if you've installed Tor, your
>     e-mail
>     gets routed to one of 2,000 relays ? computers running Tor ? scattered
>     across the world. So your message bounces to a relay in Paris, which
>     forwards it to a second relay in Tokyo, which sends it on to a
>     third relay
>     in Amsterdam, where it is finally transmitted to your friend in
>     Tehran.
>     The Iranian Guard can only see that an e-mail has been sent from
>     Amsterdam. Anyone spying on your computer would only see that you
>     sent an
>     e-mail to someone in Paris. There is no direct connection between San
>     Francisco and Tehran. The content of your e-mail is not hidden ?
>     for that,
>     you need encryption technology ? but your location is secure.
>
>     Appelbaum spends much of each year leading Tor training sessions
>     around
>     the world, often conducted in secrecy to protect activists whose
>     lives are
>     in danger. Some, like the sex-worker advocates from Southeast Asia he
>     tutored, had limited knowledge of computers. Others, like a group of
>     students Appelbaum trained at a seminar in Qatar, are highly
>     sophisticated: One worked on the government's censorship network,
>     another
>     works for a national oil company, and a third created an Al-Jazeera
>     message board that allows citizens to post comments anonymously. In
>     Mauritania, the country's military regime was forced to abandon its
>     efforts to censor the Internet after a dissident named Nasser Weddady
>     wrote a guide to Tor in Arabic and distributed it to opposition
>     groups.
>     "Tor rendered the government's efforts completely futile," Weddady
>     says.
>     "They simply didn't have the know-how to counter that move."
>
>     In distributing Tor, Appelbaum doesn't distinguish between good
>     guys and
>     bad guys. "I don't know the difference between one theocracy or
>     another in
>     Iran," he says. "What's important to me is that people have
>     communication
>     free from surveillance. Tor shouldn't be thought of as subversive. It
>     should be thought of as a necessity. Everyone everywhere should be
>     able to
>     speak and read and form their own beliefs without being monitored. It
>     should get to a point where Tor is not a threat but is relied upon
>     by all
>     levels of society. When that happens, we win."
>
>     As the public face of an organization devoted to anonymity, Appelbaum
>     finds himself in a precarious position. It is in Tor's interest to
>     gain as
>     much publicity as possible ? the more people who allow their
>     computers to
>     serve as relays, the better. But he also lives in a state of constant
>     vigilance, worried that his enemies ? envious hackers, repressive
>     foreign
>     regimes, his own government ? are trying to attack him. His
>     compromise is
>     to employ a two-tiered system. He maintains a Twitter account and has
>     posted thousands of photos on Flickr. Yet he takes extensive
>     measures to
>     prevent any private information ? phone numbers, e-mail addresses,
>     names
>     of friends ? from appearing.
>
>     "There are degrees of privacy," he says. "The normal thing
>     nowadays is to
>     conspicuously report on one another in a way that the Stasi
>     couldn't even
>     dream of. I don't do that. I do not enter my home address into any
>     computer. I pay rent in cash. For every online account, I generate
>     random
>     passwords and create new e-mail addresses. I never write checks,
>     because
>     they're insecure ? your routing number and account number are all
>     that are
>     required to empty your bank account. I don't understand why anyone
>     still
>     uses checks. Checks are crazy."
>
>     When he travels, if his laptop is out of his sight for any period
>     of time,
>     he destroys it and then throws it away; the concern is that
>     someone might
>     have bugged it. He is often driven to extreme measures to get
>     copies of
>     Tor through customs in foreign countries. "I studied what drug
>     smugglers
>     do," he says. "I wanted to beat them at their own game." He shows me a
>     nickel. Then he slams it on the floor of his apartment. It pops open.
>     Inside there is a tiny eight- gigabyte microSD memory card. It holds a
>     copy of Tor.
>
>     As fast as Tor has grown, government surveillance of the Internet has
>     expanded even more rapidly. "It's unbelievable how much power
>     someone has
>     if they have unfettered access to Google's databases," Appelbaum says.
>
>     As he is quick to point out, oppressive foreign regimes are only
>     part of
>     the problem. In the past few years, the U.S. government has been
>     quietly
>     accumulating libraries of data on its own citizens. Law
>     enforcement can
>     subpoena your Internet provider for your name, address and phone
>     records.
>     With a court order, they can request the e-mail addresses of
>     anyone with
>     whom you communicate and the websites you visit. Your cellphone
>     provider
>     can track your location at all times.
>
>     "It's not just the state," says Appelbaum. "If it wanted to,
>     Google could
>     overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy
>     every marriage in America."
>
>     But doesn't Google provide funding for Tor?
>
>     "I love Google," he says. "And I love the people there. Sergey
>     Brin and
>     Larry Page are cool. But I'm terrified of the next generation that
>     takes
>     over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point
>     people are going to realize that Google has everything on
>     everyone. Most
>     of all, they can see what questions you're asking, in real time. Quite
>     literally, they can read your mind."
>
>     Now, in the wake of the Wikileaks controversy, Appelbaum has gone
>     underground, concealing his whereabouts from even his closest
>     friends. He
>     suspects his phones are tapped and that he's being followed. A
>     week after
>     being questioned in Newark, he calls me from an undisclosed
>     location, my
>     request to contact him having been passed along through a series of
>     intermediaries. The irony of his situation isn't lost on him.
>
>     "I'll be using Tor a lot more than I ever did ? and I used it a
>     lot," he
>     says, his voice uncharacteristically sober. "I have become one of the
>     people I have spent the last several years of my life protecting.
>     I better
>     take my own advice."
>
>
>
>
>     ------------------------------
>
>     #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
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>     #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
>     #  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>
>     End of nettime-l Digest, Vol 39, Issue 32
>     *****************************************
>
>
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