Bitcoin 2012 London: Richard Stallman

I'm going to talk about a number of threats to freedom in the digital society not all the ones I would normally cover because I haven't got enough time and talk about how Bitcoin relates to some of these or might relate to some of them the first one appropriately is surveillance digital technology makes possible a level of surveillance that Stalin could only dream of if you do something using digital technology it's easy to make the computers involves keep track of everything you do and that's what they're doing they're trying to keep track of everything you do in the digital world and the only way you can have any privacy at all is by fighting back now this is done by companies Facebook does surveillance of everything its users do and it does surveillance of its non users as well if you look at a webpage and you see a light button that means Facebook is doing surveillance it knows that your computer visited that page because the image of the light button comes from a Facebook server that server knows it sent that image to your computer and it knows which page that image is used in we're going to develop our browser so that it blocks those images and those blocks Facebook surveillance now Facebook is not the only company that does lots of surveillance many websites send information about all their visitors through Google Analytics they could get the same result by running the free software package pee-wee that's the way you should do it if you want to treat your visitors with respect you shouldn't give the information about who's visiting your site to anyone at all but surveillance is even more dangerous when it's done by or for governments because governments have power we need governments to have democracy democracy is the system whereby the many who are not rich combine together to be more powerful than the rich and thus stop the rich from dominating them all and pushing them around and exploiting them we need democracy and to have democracy we need a state but if the state gets out of our democratic control it can turn into an instrument for the rich to oppress us with and that's what's happening nowadays and these states which mainly serve the 1% are doing more and more surveillance of everything we do and now surveillance is done through our own equipment especially if you're running some non free software because it's quite common to find malicious features to spy on the user these are known in Microsoft Windows they've been found in the eye things they've been there found in Flash Player in the Amazon swindle and in nearly all mobile phones well you can resist the surveillance done through your own equipment if your software is free because when software is free the users control it and if they don't want to be surveilled they can turn off the surveillance but surveillance is not only done this way it's also done through systems and one remove from the user for instance the ISPs and the phone companies um the with ISPs well they keep track of where you make connections to and in many countries they're required to keep this information for a long time in case big brother wants to see it and this is being debated now in the UK um telephone companies keep track not only of who you communicate with but where your phone was and they keep that information for a long time and they can figure it out and they're getting better and better if figuring that out even without your phone's help they do it by comparing the time of arrival of the signal of various different hours and they're putting up lots of tiny towers that only cover a small area so if you're talking to that towers and they know very closely where you are so you can't stop that by taking control of the behavior of your own phone so the only way to stop that kind of surveillance is through political organizing hmm we must recognize that surveillance is a bigger threat to our freedom than any of the things supposedly it is meant to protect us from and surveillance has also gone through other systems set up by the state that have nothing to do with our own activities for instance the UK surveilled all car travel it can follow cars in real time or study their movements months in the past because there are cameras by the side of the road that recognize license plates the u.s. is setting up a similar system although not in an organized unified way it's an injustice now in the past there was a tension between two goals one was privacy and the other was ability to investigate crimes and so you could think of it as a that's God's idea to work out a balance between those two goals well with the tremendous increase in digital surveillance that's going on unless that balance was totally out of whack before it's going far much too far in the direction of surveillance now the usual response to criticism about this is to propose to put limits on the use of this collected data typically involving getting a court order but even with that limitation on the use of the data it remains a tremendous increase in surveillance which means that unless that balance was totally out of whack before we will have far too much surveillance even with the requirement for a court order we must do more we must limit the collection of this data for instance we must set up the system to track cars so that it can't any car unless there's a court order for surveillance of that license plate okay that way it becomes a system that we can live with in terms of our freedom and maybe it will help catch some criminals okay I'm not against hashing some criminals as long as it's done in a way that that's not tantamount to tyranny and oppression and that's the big danger that we face now Bitcoin can relate to this because it can be used anonymously although that's not the default mode of use I don't do ecommerce I don't buy things with credit cards have a credit card I use it to fake to buy airline tickets because they demand to know my identity anyway which I think they shouldn't do I don't think people should have to give their identities to travel on a domestic flight or in a domestic bus or a domestic train that amounts to total surveillance affair forced to identify themselves and that's really dangerous but since I am flying and a lot of the time it's an international fight anyway and since they're going to know who I am I lose nothing by using a credit card to buy the ticket so I do but I want buy things that way I buy things with cash maybe someday I'll buy them with Bitcoin some of the time censorship on the Internet relates surveillance on the internet relates to censorship which is another threat as the ways censorship is done on the Internet is firstly total surveillance then see if people are transmitting anything that they're not supposed to transmit and then stop but censorship of course is wrong whether it's done on the internet or not we used to think that the internet would protect us from censorship because it was too hard to censor the Internet but thanks to the deciduous efforts of various companies in the US do you pay France so on it is now possible for governments to censor the Internet they just and also surveil it completely they just need to put enough effort in and this is not limited to obvious charities such as China and Iran we see a lot of supposedly free countries imposing censorship on the Internet hmm for instance I mean Denmark several years ago imposed filtering on the internet blocking a secret list of sites the list was leaked and posted on Wikileaks hooray for WikiLeaks we're upon Denmark block access to that page - so it was Oh everyone else could know what Internet users in Denmark were blocked from seeing except those people now I my understanding is that there are pages that are blocked in France and Germany for political reasons and there are sites that the UK has ordered ISPs block hmm Australia does not have internet filters but it does have censorship of leaks Electronic Frontier Australia was ordered to remove a link to a foreign political website because it's had photos that were considered disgusting I believe it was an anti-abortion website I don't agree with their views but I defend their right to state those views but their right is not allowed in Australia so EFA was told to delete this link on pain of a fine of $11,000 a day this is very strict censorship a few years ago Internet users in Turkey we're told they would have to choose between censorship and more censorship and even more censorship and even more censorship for different levels of censorship but the true Internet would not be an option India closes websites without trial I believe on many different kinds of grounds including offending anybody's religion but however that threat is not unknown in the UK various student of atheist and secular humanist groups were ordered to remove their copies of Jesus and Moe cartoons which by the way are tremendously funny you should look at them and one of those disputes at the London School of Economics is still going on hmm so censorship is quite a danger and part of that censorship of course is interfering with the distribution copies and part of the mechanism of censorship is blocking payments as was done through icky leaks so if Bitcoin makes a way for people to donate to WikiLeaks it can help with this problem in a tangential way another threat to our freedom in the digital society comes from software that the users don't control someone else controls the software and the software controls the user this is a form of tyranny which is known as non free proprietary software lists off where there are two possibilities either the users control the program or the program controls the users the first case we call free software free in the sense of freedom because this is not an issue of price whether you pay it money to get a copy of the program that society issue which I'm not particularly concerned about when I say free software it refers to freedom so this first case where the users control the program is free software because in order to control the program the users need certain freedoms there are four essential freedoms which are the criteria for free software freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish for any purpose freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and change it to make the program do your computing the way you wish make it function for you as you wish these two freedoms give an individual user individual control over the program but that's not enough because most users don't know how to program they don't have the knowledge to exercise freedom one change course code the way they wish and even if you're a programmer there's so much free software in the world you couldn't do everything yourself so individual control is necessary but it's not sufficient we also need collective control and for that we need two more freedoms freedom 2 is the freedom to help others that's the freedom to redistribute exact copies of the program's to others when you wish and that includes both non-commercial and commercial redistribution it includes giving away copies and selling copies either one you're free to do either one freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community that's the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others when you wish and so these when we add these two freedoms we get collective control which means that a group of users can exercise control over its version of the program so this kind of collective control is not limited to society as a whole it applies at that level and in every other level any group two people can be a group a thousand people can be a group a million people could be a group and which groups you you join it's totally up to you the result of this is that the users can make sure the program treats them decently if you in proprietary software proprietary software is a software that controls the users because if the users don't have these freedoms then they don't control the program which means the program controls them and the owner controls the program and through it subjugates the users in fact this non free program is inevitably an instrument giving some entity power over whoever uses that program this is why non-free software is an injustice it's a system of power that should be that nobody should have and the owner is aware of the power it has over the users and therefore feels a temptation to put in malicious features now I mentioned one kind which was a spy features but there's another kind of malicious feature called the digital handcuffs those are the features that restrict what the users can do and I'm talking about not errors or omissions these are intentional restrictions like saying you can watch this but you can't copy it Digital handcuffs also known as the RM digital restrictions management and another kind of malicious feature is the backdoor which allows someone else to give commands to make the program do some nasty thing to the user of course doesn't ask users permission before it does this digital handcuffs are found in almost all the widely used on free programs backdoors are known in Microsoft Windows in the eye things in the Amazon swindle and in the majority of portable phones in some cases these are Universal backdoors meaning they permit remote installation of software changes without ESD permission Microsoft Windows has a universal backdoor so it's not just malware it's Universal malware likewise most portable phones have a universal backboard their software is universal malware and this backdoor has been used to remotely convert them into listening devices in store you've heard of software that has bugs well the software is a bug why do they do it well they know that they have total control over every aspect of that software if they see an advantage in putting in a malicious feature why would they hesitate only moral scruples could make them hesitate and usually they're psychopaths meaning corporations corporations by their structure are psychopaths if there's a small corporation or controlled by a few people with moral scruples then maybe that corporation won't act like a psychopath but once it's big once it's controlled by people only looking for profit it acts like a psychopath so every time they see an opportunity to profit by using the software against its users why would they hold back and so the result is the most widely used non-free software packages have no one specific malicious features but what about all the rest are thousands of non-free programs and we don't know whether they have malicious features or not all we know is that the same party that could have put in malicious features is stopping us from checking for in so in effect every non-free program that doesn't give you freedom one is just trust me software we're being asked to just trust a corporation because of course no corporation would ever mistreat you so you can't trust those programs but with free software nobody has that kind of power over anybody else because all the users are free even if you don't know how to program well you're certainly not the only user of that particular free program because there are other people who wrote it and will work on it and anybody who uses it is free to study the source code and people do that from time to time for whatever reason like they found a bug and they want to fix it or they want to add a feature and in the process they had a chance to spot anything malicious and if they do they're free to fix the problem to and report and make a big scandal of course because it would be a scandal the developers know that they don't have the power to make the malicious features stick and that it would be a scandal that they lose their reputations they would be the object of general public condemnation that's not so tempting so the result is free software is the only known defense against malicious features in software it's not a perfect defense it's not guaranteed but it's a lot better than being defenseless like the users of any non free program so I began in 1984 to develop a free software operating system Koga knew millions of people use to do today but they mostly don't know it because they think they're using Linux now Linux is in fact one particular program a kernel which filled the last gap in new Linux was made free software in 1992 first appeared in 1991 as proprietary software but in 92 mr. Torvalds changed the license and made it free so Linux filled the last gap in the new system which was almost complete at the time and the combination is you do plus Linux however a lot of people call it Linux which means other people to mistakenly think that mr. Torvald started the whole thing in 1991 at which point we already had most of it done so please don't repeat that error please call it the gnu / linux or to do plus Linux it's it has to do it has lit up it was a lot bigger and we started so please give us equal mention and in any case we did this specifically so users to have freedom that anyone using computing could have control over that computing but some of the people in the community don't agree with that goal for instance mr. for vowels never agreed with it so during the 1990s there was a big debate between the free software movement those of us who said business a matter of freedom a non-free program is an injustice we will struggle to escape from not free software we want to get rid of it completely and then there were the other people who also were in the free software community they used and promoted free software some of them helped write free software but they didn't see it as an ethical issue they didn't consider that non-free software was evil but they resented the practical consequences of being under somebody else's thumb because from time to time and screws you so well so there was a debate between these two camps but in 1998 the people in the other camp coined the term open-source they didn't want to say free software partly this is because the word free can be misunderstood some people what we were talking about gratis software well we explained it every chance we got and still Lou we're talking about freedom not price but that is it's true that the word free in English has this drawback but also they didn't want the freedom meaning to be heard either because they didn't want to present this as a question of right versus wrong good versus evil justice versus injustice they wanted to present it as just a matter of practical convenience which could be greater or lesser they wanted everything else not to be brought up so with their new term they constructed a new discourse a way of talking about the issue that didn't raise it as an ethical question so instead of saying if you develop a program you are ethically obligated to respect the users freedom by distributing it is free software if you distributed all they said if you develop a program it's in your practical interest to let the users change and redistribute the software because they'll make the code better so whereas we appeal to ethical values they appeal only to practical convenience values now they did some good convincing some people in that way to contribute to free software and if a program is in its manner of distribution respects your freedom then its ethical you know what the opinions of the developers are that's not relevant at that level but the problem is that people who don't value freedom don't see why they should fight for their freedom if somebody is convinced by the arguments of open-source and he is a convenient program that isn't open-source they'll say well I'm surprised you were able to make it so good in this way without letting the user share but I can't deny the fact so give it to me whereas a person who understands the issue of free software and says I want freedom and sees a program that's very convenient and takes away his freedom says I won't let that on my computer I'm going to work on making a free replacement for that because users shouldn't give up their freedom and you shouldn't be asking me to give up mine totally different responses people who understand freedom will fight for freedom people who've never heard the concept or not unless they have a stroke of insight you've come up with the idea on their own but that's hard to do we need to help people think about this bite showing them the concept and that's why I support the free software movement and I do not support open-source your political views are up to you if you agree with the open-source people you've got a right to think that way and a right to say so please don't give the idea that I agree with them because that's factually untrue hmm the last point I want to make about free software is that schools should teach exclusively free software and this is not just for the possibility of cost savings which most people will bring up that's a side issue this is not about how to do a little more education for a little less money this is about how to do education that is good instead of education that is bad schools should not teach dependence so they should not teach proprietary software why do some proprietary developers offer gratis copies of their non-free programs to schools because they want to use the schools as instruments to teach dependence to society so they say here is these here these gratis copies and the school teaches our students to use them the students become dependent and then they graduate after they graduate the developer doesn't offer them gratis copies and some not very many anymore but some of them go to work for businesses and the developer doesn't offer those businesses gratis copies it's like giving the school gratis needles full of addictive drugs saying inject these into your students to make independent the first thousand is gratis but the school must not teach dependents in this way because the school has a social mission to educate good citizens of the strong capable independent cooperating and free society and in computing that means teaching people to be skilled capable users of free software ready to participate in a free digital society and it should never teach a proprietary program because teaching dependence is wrong hmm but there's a deeper reason for the education of the best programmers you see every program embodies knowledge if its proprietary that knowledge is withheld from the students so if the students is curious about programming for instance a natural-born programmer and wants to know how does it do this the teacher can only say I'm sorry we can't find out it's the secret and thus education is not permitted a proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of Education since schools must constantly show their loyalty to the spirit of Education that non-free program must not be tolerated in a school but if the program is free the teacher could explain what he knows and then give these kids copies of the source code saying read it and then you'll understand em and they'll read it because they're fascinated and the teacher can say if there's any point you can't figure out by yourself show it to me and we'll figure it out together and that way our natural-born programmer has a chance to learn a crucial lesson that piece of code is not clear you shouldn't write it that way that's bad writing and this is how they develop from natural-born programmers into good programmers how do you learn to write good clear code you learn by reading Lots code and writing lots of code well only free software gives you the chance to read lots of code of large programs so we really use and then we've got a write lots of code which means writing code for large programs but when you start out writing code for large programs you're not yet ready to like to write an entire large program yourself do a good job you got to start small which means small changes in existing large programs and only free software gives you the chance to write changes for small ones that bigger and then very big in large programs we really use so any school can offer those who have a talent for programming the chance to perfect their skill if it's a free software school but there's an even deeper reason for education and citizenship moral education schools must do more than teach facts and methods I have to teach the spirit of goodwill the habit of helping others so every class must have the following rule students if you bring a program to class you may not keep it for yourself you must share it with everyone in the class including the source code in case someone in this class wants to learn because this is a place where we share our knowledge so bringing a non-free program to class is not allowed to set a good example the school must follow its own rule now there are several ways of making something free software in fact there are dozens of different free software licenses I wrote the gnu general public license that's a copyleft license meaning modified and extended versions have to be under the same license in other words the middleman who gets the program for me is not allowed to strip away the freedom and pass it on to you as a private Airy software no he's free to redistribute it with or without changes but whatever version he distributes to you has got to come with the same freedoms to you what copy left is not the only kind of free software license there are also non copy left free licenses at the other extreme there are the lacks permissive licenses which say you can do anything you like as long as you keep this notice in there somewhere for instance there is the modified BSD license on the x11 license these are a couple of widely used lacks permissive licenses I think it's usually better to copy left things but there are occasional example casual exceptions where for some tactical reason it's better not copy left now Bitcoin Bitcoin clients are typically not happy left it and maybe that's a wise decision in this case are typically the kind of tactical reason where it's good for the community not copyleft is where there's some really powerful reason why we need to get this code into as many applications as possible even if they're not free so for instance the player code for the OGG format was originally copy lifted and then the developers thought it might be better to take off the copy left and they asked what I thought and I agreed because it's really important in order to encourage people to distribute in the odd formats we want players to support all formats and therefore it's just for this strategic goal it's a useful tactic to uncopyable player code so that there's to get rid of it as much as possible if anything that might discourage people from putting the support into their products unfortunately they filled up with them but there are also threats to our freedom and coming from the use of network services now one of them is that in addition to the surveillance that they do they also ask the users to give lots of data explicitly in order to do the service the problem is what are they going to do what else are they going to do with that data are they going to show it to Big Brother so this is a reason why we shouldn't be communicating through central servers especially not servers run by companies that know who we are it's really important or to use peer-to-peer communication methods instead now when you're publishing something that mostly gets rid of this issue because publishing it means everyone's welcome to look at it which means there's nobody who's not supposed to see it so there's nobody they could show it to that you didn't want it to be shown to so what what harm could they do that's the case with Twitter for tweets on the other hand Twitter may also have other information such as your IP address which isn't published and contacting twitter through tor is a way that you could prevent twitter from knowing that but when the data is not meant for publication when it's private data then there's the opportunity to for the site to commit an abuse of showing it to a company for commercial purposes or to Big Brother for nastier purposes but there's a now this threat is generally known but there's another threat that most people don't know exist at all and that is software as a service or as fast we don't have them here but we distribute buttons that say don't ask me because software is a service is an abuse software as a service means that your own computing is done in somebody else's server through programs he chose which means he chooses how it gets done he can change it at any time without even asking you you have no control over your computing if you do it with SAS it's just as bad as using a non free program it's the same that outcome although it gets produced through a different mechanism with non free software you would run your copy but you don't control what your copy does because you don't have this course you can change it etcetera with fast it's not even your copy it's his copy that keep the server owner put in the server and you can't see it or touch it but it still works out the same your computing gets done but you don't control how that gets done but it's actually even worse as I explained some proprietary programs have spy features that spend information about the use of the machine is dumb server well if you're using sass you have to send all the relevant data to the server it comes out the same the server has your data who knows what it will do afterwards with your data but it's even worse as I explained some proprietary programs have universal back doors that allow somebody else to remotely change how the user's computing gets done by installing software changes well with sass the server owner at any time could change those programs and change how the user's computing gets done without asking the user for permission well it's his computer he should be able to install different software in its computer it would be wrong if he couldn't but the effect is when it's used for sass that he has power over the users which he shouldn't have so the only solution is don't use sass now there is one other threat to our freedom that I should mention in this context and that is whatever you do in the Internet you don't do it by right you do it on on sufferance as long as certain companies are willing to let you do it you can do it now if you have some views or some information you want to distribute you can print it on paper or you can walk around on the street and an amount you don't need some company to stay you can do that because you can do you can do the printing yourself and you have a right to walk on the street and hand out papers but if you want to do the same thing in the Internet you need the cooperation of companies such as an ISD a domain name registrar and a hosting company and they can cut you off effectively arbitrarily they don't need to go to court and prove any reason they can just say your service is terminated now suppose you want to collect some money to support the cause on the street you can carry a can and people could put cash into it you don't need any company's cooperation to do that but if you want to do the equivalent on the Internet well you've got to use a payment company and they can cut you off effectively arbitrarily and we discovered this in the case of WikiLeaks when the u.s. launched its distributed denial of service attack against WikiLeaks meaning attacking each service that WikiLeaks depended on it was able to do this without a court case because WikiLeaks like you like me like everyone in the Internet has no rights has no right to do anything they could only do things if the companies want to let them and the companies can be pressured by anyone with enough power to cut them off well we've got to change that we've got to establish the right to do things in the Internet and not be cut off in a lot of places where I live for instance if you subscribe to a phone line the phone company can't cut off your service except for cause there are only a few kinds of cause that they could show like if you didn't pay your bill they could cut off your service but if you keep paying and you don't connect equipment that sends high voltages down or destroys the hardware of the network they've got to leave you on that it doesn't matter whether they like what you say if you rent a storefront if you sign a lease they can't kick you out except by going to court and to win in court they have to show that would reason is like you didn't pay the rent for a few months so we need to establish rights like that in cyberspace but meanwhile Bitcoin can help because it makes a way of stuff of paying money that doesn't require the support of the payment companies maybe it's possible to donate Joey key leads that way so that's one positive step eliminating one part of this general problem but the full solution is to establish the people who contract for a service of southeast Turkey kinds of important services on the net have a right to continued service and can't be denied service because someone doesn't like what they say and can't be denied service in any case without a trial

Channel: Independent POV

Views: 66,576

Keywords: Richard, Stallman, bitcoin, 2012, BBGeekcrypto

Id: FN6Q--zqroM

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2012