
Eben Moglen: The alternate net we need, and how we can build it ourselves - zoowar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gORNmfpD0ak
======
chefsurfing
Eben is a very skilled rhetorician. Anyone trying to sell anything would do
well to take notes. If he had a dash more narrative to the story, I think he'd
nail it.

"Ok, that's the next 15 years of your life and mine. You're going to try to
end anonymity on earth and I'm going to try to keep it. Because without
anonymity the human race will not be human anymore."

"They [governments, business] are not going to be left to their devices...
They are going to be left to our devices. And our devices are going to be
about Freedom!"

~~~
maeon3
With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to
say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.

Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to
say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me
trouble.

Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the
right to bear arms. Governments shall not infringe on the right of the people
to encrypt any data that they use between two parties. This is not a trivial
matter, this is the future of the human collective taking form here. Will
everything we do be tracked, or will some of it be private?

Here is Eben talking about what he's doing on CBS:
<http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358702n>

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the
> right to bear arms._

Err, I don't think so, based on the following utilitarian argument:

First, more freedom in the network means more freedom in general. Evidence for
this is easy to find. Encryption in particular does one thing and one thing
only: preventing eavesdropping. That helps freedom of though, and even of
speech (for small groups on a chat room, for instance).

Second, more arms means more dead people (not much, compared to car crashes
and ageing, but still). Evidence is even easier to find. And as far as I know,
it doesn't increase freedom in any interesting way.

Even beyond my judgement call, it should now be obvious that encryption and
ammunitions have very different effects. Using one as an analogy for the other
would be wildly inaccurate.

~~~
sukuriant
More arms means more dead people? The potential, perhaps, but I don't believe,
even though for many years, we kept ramping up more and more nuclear arms,
there was more and more nuclear destruction. You might say the presence of
those weapons dissuaded another's use of them.

~~~
bandushrew
If you really want to make the argument that nuclear weapons haven't been a
hugely destructive force, you need to wait until the game has ended. They are
still there, and the opportunity for them to generate a lot of dead people to
prove you wrong may still arise. That game isn't over yet.

------
Ygor
When I think about all the issues being addressed in many talks such as this,
one thought comes to mind:

"This is why we can’t have nice things."

We have the technology, the skill and the knowledge to do so much we couldn't
even dream about a decade ago, but everything we do seems to raise so many new
issues of possible abuse. Always the same dual-use dilemma [1].

With every step forward, we need to make an additional step in every other
direction just to make sure we aren't walking the plank.

[] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_use_technology>

------
atakan_gurkan
He is talking about the plans and especially the motivation for the Freedom
Box project:

<http://freedomboxfoundation.org/>

------
technomancy
The irony of this not being viewable in WebM is pretty thick.

~~~
taken11
works for me

~~~
technomancy
Hmm, you're right... apparently Youtube decided to turn off the html5 preview
for my account. Re-enabled it and it looks fine.

Boggles my mind why it's not enabled as a fallback for browsers without flash.

------
EGreg
Why not just use freenet? :)

Or perfectdark

~~~
a3_nm
He wants to make something that everyone can use. Freenet isn't there yet.
(This doesn't meen that the FreedomBox software couldn't be built on top of
Freenet or ship with Freenet, however.)

------
tzs
After he claimed that Apple is sponsoring LLVM/clang solely to undermine
freedom, and said “The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr.
Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the
human race than anybody else his age", I have a hard time taking Moglen
seriously.

~~~
hristov
Neither of these claims were made in the linked video btw. I would definitely
recommend the linked video.

I am not sure when or how he made the LLVM claim, but I would understand
Zuckerberg claim. Eben considers the right of anonymity a very important right
and facebook has made the biggest assault on anonymity on the net ever. It is
actually erie how they have managed to remove anonymity from a huge swats of
the net without the users complaining at all.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _It is actually erie how they have managed […]_

Hidden, uncertain, common costs just aren't accounted for.

The loss of freedom is easily invisible, and the actual cost very hard to
measure. Plus, it's a common. More individual freedom for others often mean
more for yourself. (Case in point: anonymity: more _other_ nodes means you're
harder to find.) With those three effects, it's no wonder "no one cares" about
freedom.

Facebook _feels_ gratis, and even free, because (1) you don't pay money, and
(2) you have an easy way to talk with other people. The advertisement you can
live with, and the spying you don't even see. Few people could actually link
Facebook's spying to changes in their present lives. (I'm not sure those that
can are at liberty to speak their mind right now.)

