

In defense of digital freedom - denzil_correa
http://www.marietjeschaake.eu/2013/05/in-defence-of-digital-freedom/

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synctext
A European Politician with Digital expertise. An interesting read with a grasp
of the ongoing issues.

Did I die and goto heaven?

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EliRivers
That's a common reaction when confronted with the Dutch :)

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smutticus
That's such an arrogant thing to say :(

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EliRivers
Does it seem less arrogant when I tell you I'm not Dutch and I don't live in
the Netherlands?

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synctext
Political rhetoric reached peaks with Wikileaks, Stuxnet and now it seems
Pentagon subcontractors got hacked by China years ago.

So digital freedom is taking a pounding (while Wilders is being forgotten
already). The security industry did not have their own security in order,
that's more an internal Pearl Harbour.
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-01/china-cyberspies-
ou...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-01/china-cyberspies-outwit-u-s-
stealing-military-secrets.html)

Disclaimer: I'm Dutch and live there.

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lucb1e
I never expected to click this link and see a politic party. Much less a Dutch
one. Much less the party that I wanted to vote on - last elections I was
allowed to vote for the first time - but didn't because my parents both voted
something else, and I thought they'd probably know better. In hindsight I
think choosing D66 would actually have been smarter...

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cinquemb
I found this part to be interesting:

" _These companies may well be complicit in grave human rights violations. A
criminal case against a French company for exactly this business behaviour is
now under consideration of a Paris court and could set an important precedent
for others. Can we hold companies and their executives accountable for
complicity in human rights violations and creating security threats by
knowingly selling digital arms to repressive regimes?_ "

Should/Can we hold weapons manufactures accountable for helping aid nation
states/organizations in their conquests or for individuals during crimes?

Somehow this comes off to me as these tools are only ok for some ...hardly
digital freedom.

I also like how there is little (or no) discussion on about individuals and
the role they should take in ensuring their digital freedom. I guess only
nation states and corporations are the enlightend despots who must insure
freedom upon us. Sounds kinda doublespeaky to me.

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sophacles
I don't know the details of the French case, but there is a valid question
here:

If I make some widget, that turns out is used widely, and happens to be used
by an oppressive regime, am I helping commit opression?

What about if I make a tool that really only has uses that look like
oppression, but some of those cases are not opression and some are (say web
filtering - parents can use it to protect their children, and opressive
regimes can use it for censorship)?

What if I create machine learning software that finds activists and determines
the best time to arrest them?

What if I work with a regime on custom extensions to a medical program that
helps find the optimal torture times and methods to break people the fastest?

At some point the use of "your freedom" is just a shield behind which one
tries to hide complicity in removing others' freedom.

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cinquemb
_At some point the use of "your freedom" is just a shield behind which one
tries to hide complicity in removing others' freedom._

Unless one happens to find themselves on the side of the people who get to
define what is "oppressive regime" and "others freedom".

It's not as clear cut as one may think when you consider the perspectives of
other societies and the people in power there (even as individuals who learn
how to create their own tools for their own means become more powerful). The
whole UN regulation issue makes light of this
[[http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2012/12/04/un-control-of-the-
in...](http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2012/12/04/un-control-of-the-internet-an-
idea-whose-time-will-never-come/)].

