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Fantastic article. Eben Moglen's ideas tie in well with Lewis Hyde's on common wealth and copyright. More power to them.
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"We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” [Moglen] said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
(...)
In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
(...)
Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year hav

eben_moglen internet freedom security democracy software

This is a very important article by Ted Striphas about a serious issue. Among its many points, consider this:
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Also troubling is the potential of e-readers like Kindle to render users vulnerable to new levels of government surveillance. Library loan records and bookstore sales receipts are well-established mainstays of criminal investigations. The assumption is that evidence of what a suspect has been reading may ultimately help investigators to establish a pattern of behavior leading up to a crime. In such cases, the police only have to acquire a subpoena to access the information they need. But if the same investigators wanted to sift through a suspect’s own library of printed books for evidence of how she or he had been reading, that would be a different matter. A 4th Amendment “probable cause” standard would apply, meaning that investigators would have to go through the motions of obtaining a search warrant from a neutral magistrate. The standard increases because of the heightened privacy expectation that surrounds our reading activities.

Tethered appliances like Kindle run afoul of this heightened privacy expectation. Amazon, for its part, possesses detailed records of not only what but also how Kindle users read. And because the data is transmitted electronically and then archived in the company’s computer cloud, US law doesn’t consider it to be private information. It belongs instead to an exceptional category, something called “stored communications.” These types of exchanges exceed the scope of the 4th Amendment, because they’re shared with and maintained by a third party. The upshot is that the reading activities of Kindle owners suspected of crimes aren’t subject to the usual probable cause/warrant standard but instead to the more relaxed requirements of obtaining a subpoena. And as is typical of tethered appliances, Kindle has been engineered so that users have practically no choice but to allow their civil liberties to be undermined in this way.
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About author/ article:
Ted S

kindle amazon e-books freedom free_expression law ted_striphas

Here's a sobering article on the general hysteria over "terrorism," which has resulted in getting street photographers arrested or detained or questioned. Anyone seen taking photographs, especially covertly or seemingly so, is likely to get in trouble these days. But how can you be a good street photographer if you don't conceal just a little bit the fact that you're taking photos in the first place? You want that candid moment, right?

freedom paranoia photography public_space street_photography terrorism