[DMCA-Activists] Re: [DMCA_Discuss] Declan on Public Knowledge on Declan

[Jean-Michel Smith]

On Friday 16 August 2002 02:40 am, Seth Johnson wrote:
> (Forwarded from POLITECH.  This is really a non-debate
> except inasmuch as the parties attempt to articulate the
> nature of the public interest in information freedom.  --
> Seth)

I think this is important...

> The text of Public Knowledge's reply is below. It makes some
> good points,  but includes some misstatements too. It says,
> "No amount of good code can  overcome harmful laws and bad
> policy." Of course good code can do just  that: Even if
> wiretaps are omnipresent, encryption can keep our
> conversations safe.

Declan just doesn't understand how pervasive, and how vicious, government 
oversight can become.

The laws of mathematics may be more "trustworthy" than the laws of men, but 
the laws of mathematics don't break down your door at night, haul you and 
your family off for weeks, or months, of detainment without trial (or even 
public knowledge that you have been hauled off), or worse.

If our government gets it into its head to take away our basic freedoms, and 
we are unsuccessful at stopping this politically, no amount of code, however 
well written, will protect us.  Does he really believe those tapping our 
phones wont recognize the static of an encrypted phone call and just resort 
to more direct means, like breaking down our doors and getting the 
information they want out of us with a rubber hose?

If the worst should happen, should we resist, however we can, and write 
whatever code we can to subvert the omnipresent eye of the state?  You bet we 
should, but make no mistake about if, if things go that far a lot of us will 
end up in prison for the best years of your lives, and some of us will 
probably be killed.

I think it would be far wiser to confront the issue politically, while we are 
still a nominal democracy, before throwing our hands in the air and resorting 
to civil disobedience alone.

And if you doubt me, just ask the Mormons how secure freedom of religion is in 
the United States (they were burned out of every town the settled during the 
early-mid 19th century, until they went off into the Utah desert, and even 
there they were nearly exterminated), or blacks in the south about how secure 
we are from government biological experimentation on unknowing subjects, or 
blacks in South Africa who struggled for a century or more before having 
their rights recognized, or people in the former Soviet Union for whom civil 
disobedience wasn't enough to prevent over 70 years of authoritarian rule, 
and the list goes on.  Or, for that matter, the thousands of non-violent drug 
offendors here in the United States who are in prison for life, without the 
possibility of parole.

As long as we have physical bodies that can be imprisoned, tortured, maimed, 
or killed, we will be subject to whatever depradations our government takes 
upon itself in the name of whatever 'war on' whatever it is currently 
fighting, and no amount of coding, however skillful, will change that 
unpleasant but very real fact.

We need to win this political battle, and that is where are energies would be 
best spent.  If we lose, then we can look at long term resistence, but make 
no mistake, we're very likely talking about a digital dark ages in that 
event, and a form of resistence (even if it is just preserving free software 
in archives) that may well have to last generations, and will have many 
casualties.

Of course, if we fight the political battle while we yet remain a democracy, 
and perhaps even win (or fight to a stalemate), we can avoid all that.  That 
is something certainly worth striving for.

Jean.