AUTISTICI org in trouble: This is not a private matter, even if it's a privacy matter
http://autistici.org/ai/crackdown/comunicato_en_210605.html ARUBA-POSTALE 1 / PRIVACY 0 When we started the autistici project, we thought in our cosmic pessimism that the worst thing could have happened could have been the seizing of our server, a idiot-sniffing of our data traffic and that cryptography should have been enough to keep relatively sure communications of our users. We were wrong. There are no conditions in italy to let you talk about privacy protection. On 15th june 2004 officers of the postal police, under an order coming from Bologna attorney, reached the Aruba provider where one of our association's server is hosted. Aruba switched off our machine, without telling us anything, and let them copy what they wanted to. We contacted the provider by telephone to ask what was going on and they told us it was an electricity failure. >From that moment on, as we can see from the legal acts available since some >days ago, they eavesdropped continously the webmail account named [EMAIL PROTECTED] Potentially, they had the chance to eavesdrop and decrypt all the other communications passing by our machine, and they still can. For these reasons, as soon as possible, we're going to switch off our machine, retire it from that provider and think about our next steps. By now we invite everyone who houses a server or hosts a website in the Aruba webfarm and who values his/her privacy, to find another place and leave Aruba rotting in its meagerness. Privacy conditions in italy were dire themselves: we have just tested on our skin that we can unplug the machine and declare the clinical death of the patient. We cannot know how many other commercial providers give help to police without giving any communications to their costumers; we cannot know how many and which are the informations that police can get from your and our servers or websites. We cannot know what kind of use they will do of those data; we cannot know if the provider let others do this special treatment after being well paid from competitors or personal informations traffickers. The scene is worthy of the best negative utopias: to organize a potential mass-eavesdropping for about 6000 mail users and 500 mailing lists, excusing it with the need to read one single mailbox, it's by itself the farest point from the meaning of 'freedom of speech'. THIS IS NOT A PRIVATE MATTER, it's not something regarding only us, we guess we are a good guinea-pig on whom to experiment new kind of controls and eavesdropping, like all the people involved into file sharing inquieries or other repression episodes. THIS IS NOT A MATTER ABOUT JUST AN ASSOCIATION OR A SINGLE INDIPENDENT SERVER. We're talking about the same inquery in which the FBI misused a federal decree excusing it for acquiring one log file and seized the entire Indymedia Italy server, on the october, 7th 2004. Into the next and more technical press releases, we'll try to explain better the sort of the attack and our contermeasures, and also the political events we're going to bring up, as we are sure to be not alone in this struggle. As we can't grant anymore a reliable service, we're going to retire the server for some days, during which we're going to clean it up and put it back on line. We don't plan to give to police and to servant providers any satisfaction about giving up: the downtime will be shorter than possible, few days and no more, and we'll use this bad fact to rise again like a wounded phoenix from the ashes. THIS IS NOT A PRIVATE MATTER, EVEN IF IT'S A PRIVACY MATTER. READ and SPREAD this email ORGANIZE & ACT autistici.org / inventati.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Time Machines and the Constitution of the Globe.
Fellow Nettimers A draft of a paper I intend to give in a few weeks. A text version is below without footnotes. With footnotes you can find it in pdf here: http://openflows.org/~auskadi/timemachines.pdf Comments, critics and flames welcome here or offlist best Martin European Ways of Law, First European Socio-Legal Conference, July 6-8, 2005, Instituto Internacional de Sociolog?a Jur?dica, Antigua Universidad, O?ati, Gipuzkoa, Euskadi. Time Machines and the Constitution of the Globe. Martin Hardie.i Introduction. This is a presentation of some preliminary work I have been undertaking on an excavation of the development of the Unix computer operating system. This research forms a part of my quest to come to grips with the logic and rhetoric of free (libre) and open source software or linux machines, (hereafter Floss) which is the stated field of my research ? as such it can be seen as partly a prehistory of Floss. One thing that has arisen as I progress in these investigations, is how American notions of freedom, innovation and law feed into the global machine of sovereignty. This is the hinge or link between my work and the theme of this conference - European Ways of Law. The conference title assumes special European characteristics not only of law on the books but also of law in action. The conference accepts that these characteristics may differ considerably from the American way of law. What my research suggests is that the telling of the story of Floss and law carries with it peculiarly American overtones. These American notions of innovation and intellectual property (IP) extend globally. This logic of IP pilots the technological processes and the way these processes are portrayed in popular story telling. What I find is that these stories also feed back into the broader meaning of freedom in today's globalised world. That is how freedom is understood and how it is achieved. Here, at O?ati, by way of a progress report on my research I wanted to relate some questions concerning this American way of law. A survey of the manner in which, outside of formal or traditional legal proceses of law making, the logic of law in Floss feeds into the constitution of a global system, and how these traits are in the contemporary context becoming, increasingly, the norm, or standard of freedom in our world.ii Biopolitical. The work I am undertaking is I think fairly classified as biopolitical. Biopolitical in the Foucauldian sense. I am making a sort of excavation of one story within the big globalisation story, and in so doing trying to focus in on some minute detail, some minutiae. It is where things like science, academia, law, technology and mythology all get wound up together. Where power relations seem exposed but strangely at the same time they are hidden by a popular story and its rhetoric. It is at once in this regard a social, political, philosophical, technological and legal investigation. It is biopolitical because it appears as related to how society is ordered, disciplined and controlled in this global context. Here law seems to tell a popular story which codifies a myth and a complex of stories. This story, whilst being dressed up in the clothing of freedom, at the same time, acts as an agent of discipline and control. It is also biopolitical in that the distinctions between private and public all seem jumbled up and mixed together. A private legal topic, such as IP seems to take on a public status at times ? with flashes of sovereignty, property, freedom and even policing. What appears to us as a public space from one perspective, seems to really be a privatised space. And from another perspective it seems to be just the opposite. What seems to be a question of IP, authorship and new forms of producing and innovating, seem to carry with them characteristics, or overtones, that reflect processes occurring in the constitution of a global and supranational form of sovereignty. So here in part is what I am trying to investigate: to what extent does this form of production march in step with, or even produce in a machinic way, this form of sovereignty. To borrow from physicist/historian Peter Galison ? the mixture appears as critical opalescence ? the point at which water and vapour no longer appear stable but flash back and forth between each other.iii In this research two threads ? broadly, authorship/innovation and sovereignty/society; appear as networked machines and both machines seem to flash signals back and forth to each other. Free as in Freedom In the telling of the popular story of Floss law plays a unifying role. It presents a linear or unified story that masks over many of these signal flashes throughout the network. The story of Unix and Floss is one that flashes between science, commerce, academia, sovereignty, the law, the military and counter cultures. In its detail it seems to defy the sort of unification that the popular legal story portray
Using copyright to stop the publication of 'mein kampf'
Here's an interesting use of copyright for all of those who track its (ab)use for political reasons. In Poland, publisher Marek Skierkowski is being investigated on behalf of the state of Bavaria for infringing on its copyright on the works of Adolf Hitler. The case is the following: The publisher, who has no history of neo-Nazi sympathizing, decided to publish Mein Kampf purely for commercial reasons. Now, Poland -- like many other countries in Europe -- has a law criminalizing distribution of fascist propaganda (?246 of Polish criminal code). However, the publisher could convince the state attorney that Mein Kampf does not constitute current political propaganda, but has to be viewed as a historic document and that making it accessible would serve historic and scientific purposes, not the least because he is clearly not politically motivated. Since he does not try to convince anyone of any political views, his publication do not constitute propaganda, so the reasoning of the attorney. What does this have to do with copyright and Bavaria? After WWII, the state of Bavaria was given by the allies all the copy- and author's rights belonging to Hitler, because he was officially registered as a Munich resident by the end of the war. And now, Bavaria tries to use its copyrights to stop the publication in Poland after the application of national criminal law failed to do so. Bavaria holds the copyrights for another ten years (70 years after the death of the author) after which it falls into the public domain. Source: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,361691,00.html +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
