[gargoiler80]

In your opinion they matter.

I'm unconvinced. The majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. Not less.

Outside this niche, people seem pretty uninterested that governments monitor the internet. They pretty much assumed as much.

Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually want.

[CanSpice]

People should be allowed to share what they want. At the same time, people should be allowed to restrict others from sharing information about them.

These two are not at odds with each other. The whole idea of "look at these people with 15,000 Foursquare checkins complain that the NSA is watching them" is fallacious. People choose to share their location with Foursquare; they don't choose (and currently cannot choose) to share their location with the NSA.

[cookiecaper]

Any information placed into a communications medium like the internet without proper precautions should be considered publicly accessible, including accessible to governmental intelligence services. The user chooses to upload a history of his/her location. Tag-along listeners, whether it's a shoulder surfer or a packet sniffer (including highly sophisticated state-level packet sniffers), should be considered and accounted for before this information is published.

Instantaneous perfect replication of massive strings of digits (into which meaningful information is encoded) is a double-edged sword, and it's scary for the same reasons it's valuable, and that's what people need to be educated on if they want to able to conduct private business on a major public communications platform.

I love Bruce Scheiner's quote: "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Fast, viral, sometimes uncontrollable replication is an inherent property of the medium we've established. It cannot be extracted without fundamentally modifying the essence of the 'net. We must learn to accept and cope with this.

[Amadou]

The problem here is that government intelligence services exist to serve the people. If the people do not wish for their government to spy on them, it needs to stop.

This isn't about making bits uncopyable, this is about keeping our employees on task and within scope.

[cookiecaper]

The point is that it's a public comms platform and you can never be sure who's listening, even if you're on a supposedly-private website. Who's looking at that data on the other side? Which of your friends is lax about logging out and will leave your info exposed for the next visitor at the library to peruse? Which of your friends is running a crawler and saving all of that data for posterity, and what will happen to these archives?

It's just like going out on a public square -- you may hope that you'll have basic dignities respected and that no nefarious or malicious players are observing/recording, but since you can't be sure you must take reasonable precautions against potentially egregious misuses.

If Congress says the NSA is no longer allowed to this, it doesn't really affect anything -- because the NSA or a close cousin will most likely defy the essence of such an order via loophole exploitation, etc., but mostly because any reasonable expectation of privacy from any and all entities, intel service or not, while sending comms through a public platform like the internet, requires heavy, explicit defensive measures like correct usage of PGP.

That's how people need to view the network, because that's the reality. In almost all cases, your packets go through a dozen or more routers all around the world before they hit the intended recipient, and it's ridiculous to presume that none of these many nodes are an entry point for an actor who may not have your best interest at heart. It's like going out to the mall naked, and getting upset that someone took and published photos. We may hope that the people at the mall at a given time would not do this, but people realize that this is not realistic and wear clothing to prevent the exposure of their nude bodies. They take the initiative directly and personally.

That is how the internet must be viewed. If you don't want something exposed, you can hope that no "bad people" will come in contact with it, but it's much wiser to personally ensure it's covered before you take it out "in public" (aka, bouncing between dozens of anonymous nodes, sitting on a server which any employee can access (including the cleaning lady, or someone posing as the cleaning lady...), exposed to hundreds of "friends", all of whom have total freedom to copy those bits and replicate them elsewhere, intentionally or not).

[Amadou]

Everything you wrote is indeed true, the one key point you miss is that while we should plan for dealing with the worst-case scenario that should not stop us from holding our government a higher standard than that worst-case scenario.

In fact we can do both - develop tools to make centralization of collected data harder and develop laws that make that centralization harder. Neither will ever be perfect, but the effort is still vitally important.

[mhurron]

Except they are at odds. People are making information publicly available and are then turning around complaining that people are looking at their publicly available information.

People get to choose to share or not to share, but when they scream it out in public they do not get to choose who hears it.

[declan]

This is incorrect. I haven't seen any complaint about FBI agents perusing public web sites, or deputy US Marshals poking around public portions of Facebook to try to track down a fugitive.

The flap over the last few weeks has been about government surveillance of information that was not intended to be public. Private email, private IMs, private Facebook messages, etc. Where Americans do have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

[nkassis]

I don't think the majority of the complaints with NSA surveillance is about publicly available information. The issue is with information that they assume is private such as emails, im conversation, call records etc...

[pron]

> Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually want.

Isn't that the mark of a thinking man? A drug dealer gives people what they want; a thinker tells them what they should want. So what if they don't listen? That's the normal division of labor: the prophet warns and the people ignore him.

[gargoiler80]

I'd say Stallman has a very extreme set of priorities.

For most people, they just want a computer/games console/cellphone that works, and operates in the way they want it to. Whether the source code is free or not is completely irrelevant, if it fulfils the purpose.

If I buy a plastic toy for my kids, I don't feel the need to have the schematics, plastic moulds, and full assembly details for it. It's enough that it fulfils the purpose for which it was made.

Personally, I think you have to trust other people at some point. You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government, just like you have to trust closed source software.

[jlgreco]

Stallman is under no delusions, he makes concessions all the time. He uses computers in a very extreme manner, finding fault with even all major Linux distros, but does not demand or expect that other do the same. He knows that other people will make practical concessions.

Fucking hell, even of Steam, the popular game distribution and DRM software (which distributes primarily DRM'd closed source games) running on Linux, he says:

“This development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux,” he wrote. “My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?”

Would he use Steam? I can assure you not. Even so, he thinks that Steam being on Linux will likely do more good than harm. This is not extremism, this is pragmatism.

[steveklabnik]

> finding fault with even all major Linux distros

I guess you did say 'major,' but http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

[Leepic]

Sure, but it took him a while to get to the stage of accepting what he considers "the lesser evil" (talking about Steam from his point of view).

[mpyne]

Perhaps, but he was also pragmatic enough to kick off the GNU Project from a proprietary base and work on replacing the OS with Free software incrementally. So he has demonstrated pragmatism often when it aided his overall goals, which is something you can't say about many principled idealists.

[Leepic]

So he understands the reasons why people use proprietary software. Is that what you say?

[dinkumthinkum]

You're making a strawman out of Stallman's position though. It is not lost on Stallman that some hotel clerk doesn't care about the source code running on his phone. This is sort of not relevant in a very real and fundamental way. Think of it this way, do you think the same hotel clerk cares about the congress following parliamentary procedures, or tort law, or anything like that? No. But, does our society depend on such things (at least in some capacity)? Yes.

Stallman doesn't care that you don't care about getting the source code; that's just not the point at all. Also, Stallman's issue about free software is not just about not being spied upon -- and also his ideology mostly deals with software. :)

[reeses]

I think you largely made pron's point.

Torturing your analogy further, you don't care about the provenance of the plastic toy until it turns out that the factory in China used lead-based paint to decorate it. As an average statistical westerner, you are very angry when you learn this and want to know why your children were not protected.

Stallman is merely stating that you may want to check that your Hot Wheels car isn't going to take fifty IQ points every time your kid sticks it in his mouth.

(You don't even want to know about Barbie.)

[pron]

I don't think Stallman's agenda stems (only) from paranoia. To me, Stallman represents a reminder to always think about the power structure of everything - even software. For an interesting comparison of Stallman's and Tim O'Reilly's ideologies look here: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

[Uhhrrr]

I get it - not everyone has the bandwidth to worry about these things. But that is what makes RMS all the more valuable. Because the alternative is toys you can't fix yourself, and software which you can't fix yourself. Eventually every third party goes out of business and then you're stuck with useless bits.

Or worse, the trusted software company goes out of business and it turns out they were gathering up all sorts of data, and you didn't know that because it was closed source, and the way you find it out is that someone buys it all at the bankruptcy auction and you start getting a dozen calls a day and your identity gets stolen.

Also - seriously? You never fix your kids' toys?

[gargoiler80]

Yes, I fix my kids toys. But I don't require the manufacturing details to do that.

Just as I don't need source code to modify/analyse software.

[Uhhrrr]

You use a hex editor?

[dllthomas]

Not that it defeats your broader point, but there are certainly better tools than a bare hex-editor for reverse engineering and hacking binaries.

[GoodIntentions]

>>You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Kinect/PrivacyandOnlineSafety

Weren't these the guys signing onto prism in what? 2007?

Stallman is extreme in his views. This has always tempered my respect for him. Gotta say though, he seems less extreme and more insightful given recent revelations.

[andmarios]

Stallman supports knowledge as much as freedom.

Probably the reason that you can afford raising kids and buying them toys, is that at some point of your life you got educated, you learned to read, write, you learned math and everything else needed to land your job.

If one can hide how he made a plastic toy through legislation, then tomorrow the legislation may be used to control what one is allowed to learn.

True equality requires access to and sharing of knowledge.

[belorn]

> If I buy a plastic toy for my kids, .... It's enough that it fulfils the purpose for which it was made.

I sincerely doubt that. If the toy was made by child labor, would you still buy it? What if the toy was created from oil in war zones with child militias? Or what if the toy was made by companies that dumped oil in the oceans?

If you do indeed say yes that all you can about is the functionality of the toy, then I would claim that it is some strange priorities. Otherwise, you do have priorities other than the functionality of the toy.

[cookiecaper]

People in fact purchase products that hit all of those points as a matter of routine. When you're in the store and your child sees an affordable, well-deserved toy that he wants, do you say, "OK, let me just run some thorough background investigation into the manufacturer's history and hiring practices before we decide if they're worthy of our money, and if they pass we'll come back and get it next week"?

For most people, they see a product for sale, they recognize that they want said product, and they purchase it. Buyers implicitly assume that the product was developed and produced basically ethically or its purveyors would be imprisoned, and that's pretty much as much thought as you can expect from the market. That's why regulatory bodies like the EPA and FDA exist.

I think more people would say the priorities of a curmudgeon who will not purchase an occasional gift for his son due to corporate politics are uncalibrated, rather than the priorities of one who simply buys the desired gift.

[dman]

Systems being open have a trickle down effect of enabling many creators - that means if your kids dont like the mainstream toys they can very likely find some toys created by some small creator. Innovation is correlated to systems being open. Without open and free operating systems / compilers / debuggers we would not be seeing the proliferation of technology that we see today. Advocating for openness does not imply the expectation that every single user will use the schematics and source code to build things from scratch, it just implies that the subset of users who are unhappy with the status quo have some means of changing it.

[greyman]

> You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government

Dude, but did you hear about the recent surveillance leaks? ;-) What was revealed is almost exactly analogous to toy having the secret hidden camera. I am puzzled a bit - you say that you have to trust other people at some point, just after revelations that we can't trust them. ;)

But if you believe that the data collected about you will never by misused by anyone, then fine - but we shouldn't dismiss Stallman's concerns, especially when they turned out to be almost exactly true.

[nicholassmith]

And the majority of people don't care about whether software is open source, but it's important irregardless.

[pron]

Say "free software", not "open source": http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

[reeses]

You focus on that, not on the use of 'irregardless'? What kind of pedant are you?

[gargoiler80]

Why do you think it's important?

Is it important when I buy a wooden table that I'm given full details of how it was made, how the pieces fit together, what glue was used, what size router bits, etc?

[crpatino]

Imagine you lived in the Potter-verse...

Now the species of the tree your table's wood was taken confers it with quite distinct qualities and, some would dare to say, "personality". The particular process used to assemble it may or may not imbue it with additional properties by performing (potentially nefarious) rituals. Ditto for the different substances that may be used as glue. The router bits may have magic properties themselves, even if the table is otherwise ordinarily Muggle-made.

The problem is not that all this could happen. The problem is your mental model of a wooden table is so dissimilar to reality that you have no way of making informed decisions on what piece of furniture to bring into your home/life.

[reeses]

You got your surrealism in my absurdism.

[tjr]

What if you wanted your wooden table to be two inches shorter? Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from sawing two inches off each of the legs?

What if you wanted to build your own wooden table? Maybe you don't need the original schematics, but should you be both technologically and legally prevented from examining your own table to learn how it was constructed?

What if (for whatever perverse reason) your wooden table did in fact come pre-installed with a miniature surveillance camera that sent footage of you back to the manufacturer. Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from removing such a device from your table?

[gargoiler80]

Your arguments are all against reverse-engineering/code modification being illegal - which I think most people would agree on - not on free software.

Allowing reverse engineering is a matter of allowing people freedom.

Trying to force people to provide source code for everything is the opposite.

[tjr]

I thought this was a discussion about "free software" in the context of how FSF/GNU defines "free software":

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

[gargoiler80]

Access to the source code is not a precondition to understanding how software works. It certainly helps, but it's not a requirement.

If anyone believes that, they're effectively saying that it is absolutely impossible for a human to program in machine code. Which is obviously false.

[GhotiFish]

It is if your Costco wooden table suddenly decides it doesn't want to work with your Sears cutlery ^.^

[quadrangle]

"Is it important when I buy a wooden table that I'm given full details of how it was made"

A perfect demonstration of why "open source" is problematic. Stallman doesn't care especially about open source as the way things are made. He cares about freedom. If you can use your table freely how you like, great. Software happens to require access to source to preserve that freedom. Whether it was written using open-source methods is irrelevant to Free Software.

[dinkumthinkum]

Again, this is a misunderstanding. There should be a Free Software Ideology 101 FAQ or something; probably there is but I don't have a link. Stallman doesn't care about your wooden table. However, you might care if when you decide to cut the table in half and put in an extra board to extend or replace the table legs, the government swoops in with army of patent attorneys or wood gestapos to prevent you from having your way with your own table.

[kmazanec]

It is if its from Ikea.

[geg3]

Is this majority you conjecture educated in (or even vaguely aware of) the subject matter? Why should their cynical assumptions be viewed as what-should-be?

I get that importance is subjective. That being the case, why would you choose to support your own opinions by appealing to the cloudy ignorance of the majority?

My opinion: some tides suck and should be swam against. Sometimes it takes an uncomfortable amount of effort to avoid drowning.

[phaer]

There is no thing that "[all] people actually want". There are just things which are important for a subset of people. At least RMS, myself and a few other people seem to actually want an internet without total government surveillance.

[pron]

I think Stallman is concerned about surveillance in general, not only government surveillance. Corporate surveillance is much more prevalent on (and more unique to) the internet than government surveillance.

[gargoiler80]

The internet will always have government surveillance, just as real life always has surveillance and monitoring.

If you don't want to be monitored, either encrypt things, or don't post it online.

[phaer]

Your analogy does not work, at least not where I am living; parts of my life are not monitored by the government. All of them are monitored by someone like my friends, colleagues, etc but I am okay with that, as I can directly interact with them on the same level and they are not some big, centralized entity to which I never agreed.

And i guess that you, like me, don't know the future; The question if there will always be government surveillance depends on our collective decisions and good portion of historical luck, but it isn't for sure.

[dinkumthinkum]

I don't think you should be downvoted, that's childish. But, I will say I disagree. I am the last one to defend the hysteria over NSA's Prism, for the simple fact that this is such, in my view, low brow stuff that should not surprise any sophisticated person one bit. Nevertheless, many people that are not technologists do care. Now, I haven't done a poll and I imagine the "teeming masses" couldn't care less, nevertheless, intelligent people do care and are interested, if not up in arms. I suspect many may not be up in arms for the same reason I am. I mean really, is it that shocking that the phone companies and Google, Facebook (why would Facebook care about your privacy with respect to the government? They will share your data with anyone and everyone Zuckerberg has basically stated privacy is irrelevant in the past) would share information with the government?

Honestly, I don't see why it is is scarier to think Eric Holder might have access to your data or Eric Schmidt ... Anyway, I think people do care.

[mindcrime]

The majority of people are sharing more about themselves online.

And? What does that have to do with anything? I can share 99.99% of my personal information, but if I want that .01% to stay private, I have the right to keep it private. So what if people have gone from routinely sharing 75% to sharing 98%... pretty much everybody has something they don't share. That's what is at issue.

[shmerl]

The majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. Not less.

So it matters even more. People need to be educated.

[GhotiFish]

You are being downvoted unfairly.

I can understand where you are coming from here, people are submitting themselves to this kind of monitoring even though they have options right now to baffle it. It seems people either don't know enough to do so or don't care. That can be frustrating, but it's not grounds to say: "You've done it to yourself, this is what you wanted."

[latj]

Many people do not know the level of surveillance, propaganda, and violence that is carried out on their behalf using their money. Even more people are not aware of the consequences that this has on their own lives- in a social and economic sense.

[mouseroot]

well its kinda funny to poke-fun at stallman calling him a paranoid freak...but its even funnier when quite recently we find out hmm maybe hes not so paranoid, perhaps he just knows more then we do and I feel that's a safe claim to make I wouldn't mind picking his brain for at least an hour paranoid or not the dudes a bad ass i mean ("gnu" gnus not unix) hes simply a genius disguised as a madman