Repression: Documents have emerged from the European Commission that give a glimpse of the planned crackdown on online freedoms of speech post-ACTA. We’re seeing entirely new mechanisms and means of squelching dissent, mechanisms and means against pretty much anything online.

A European Commissioner responsible for the governing of 500 million people who refers to his constituents as “consumers” and describes complying at legal gunpoint as “cooperation” is just a small taste of the newspeak in the documents we find here, documents that are intended for the post-ACTA timeframe. Oh, and he doesn’t rule out shutting down your income streams either. It is not hard to see where this particular mindset comes from – and no, it is certainly not Locke’s ideas of a constitutional government or anything similarly responsible. It’s filled to the brim with terms we would otherwise only see in reports from the copyright industry lobby.

The first document is named “Proposal for a Revision of the Directive of Intellectual Property [sic] Rights”, and the second document is named “Notice and Takedown procedures”, refering to eroding the common carrier status of the ISPs (the European mere conduit).

Repression is good, so more repression is better, says the European Commissar... eh, Commissioner.

Let’s take a look at what these documents say in more detail, and translate it from the dangerously newspeak legalese. Here’s what the first document outlines as policy roadmap in the post-ACTA timeframe:

The policy options being considered include: (a) rendering the rules on obtaining evidence from intermediaries more detailed thus making possible the identification of those infringing intellectual property rights on a commercial scale and of the financial circuits involved.

Yeah, this is a lock-in of what was voluntary in IPRED1: giving the copyright monopoly cartels the subscriber identities of IP addresses accused of infringing the monopolies, something the police can’t even legally get in most European countries (including Sweden).

Yes, this specifically means that the copyright industries get more far-reaching powers than the Police.

But do note the ACTA/TRIPS keyword “commercial scale” being used. Also, note that “financial circuits” are being mixed into the things that must be identified by an ISP. This can refer to any income stream.

This would be particularly important to fight IPR infringement in the on-line environment.

Yeah, the Net is a problem. Again. Everything was better the way it used to be.

This would also require a clearer definition of “commercial scale”, so as to make sure that professional counterfeiters rather than individual consumers are targeted;

Here, we note three things:

First, this small part sounds good in substance. Today, uploading of a single music track by a random teenager is deliberately seen as targetable and targeted (refer to the US Cables on the matter of IPRED1, for instance). At the end of the day, though, I would be careful to draw the conclusion that individual citizens wouldn’t be targeted – especially since the rest of this roadmap specifies the means and methods for doing exactly that (for instance, with the IP Address subscriber data we just read about).

Second, the ACTA keyword “commercial scale” is used. However, this might just as well refer to the old TRIPS definition of “commercial scale”. It is impossible to know if ACTA redefines “commercial scale” in any meaningful way, as the negotiation protocols are still secret.

Third, having said that, the overall thought pattern here is thoroughly alarming. The European Commissioner refers to his constitutents using the word consumers. That is not a mindset I want to see in any policymaking.

(b) fast-track lowcost civil procedures (including as regards the granting of injunctions, the award of damages, the use of corrective measures etc) for straightforward infringements of intellectual property rights

Whoah, whoah. A whole lot of bad things here.

Fast-track, low-cost civil procedures: Civil procedures means “lawsuits against ordinary people”. Fast-track means “without delays caused by due process of law and exercising of rights”. Low-cost means “preferably in bulk”.

Including…: Granting of injunctions means “cutting of net access before a trial takes place, one way or the other”. Award of damages, well, we know about that one all too well. Use of corrective measures can be many things, but specifically includes destroying goods used for infringement.

and (c) the possibility to act against webpages holding content that violates intellectual property rights (see in this regard the Roadmap regarding the initiative on procedures for notifying and acting on illegal online content).

Ah, so we’re talking about censoring entire websites as well. The roadmap referred is appropriately named “Notice and Takedown”.

These policy options would require the amendment of the existing directive.

Ah, so this is indeed a resurrection of the horrible but previously killed IPRED2 – only much worse than the original IPRED2.

Complementary measures in softlaw instruments designed at disrupting the business/value chain of counterfeiters and at increasing the cooperation between intellectual property rights holders and intermediaries (e.g. internet service providers, shippers and couriers, payment-service providers etc) could not be excluded

Whoah! Whoah! Hold your horses!

First, the newspeak here causes my bullshit bingo cards to spontaneously explode. To begin with, let’s highlight the word cooperation. In normal speak, cooperation is an action of mutual consent and mutual gain. Here, there is no such thing as mutual consent or reciprocity; the Commissar^H^Hioner tries to force “cooperation” where one part gains and the other loses massively at legal gunpoint – specifically, internet service providers are ordered to bend over for the copyright industry. All in the spirit of, eh, “cooperation”.

In other words, ISPs are going to be forced to police the net in some fashion, going against its users and customers – all spun in the language of the positive resulting worldview of the copyright monopoly cartel.

But there’s more. Did you notice “payment service providers”? This is the first time I’ve seen credit card companies and similar being threatened with “cooperation” with the copyright industry in a European context. If you’re thinking of SOPA, you’re drawing the right parallels here.

Other measures aiming at promoting the legal offer could also be envisaged.

“Other measures” have previously included sending political propaganda to schools promoting the copyright monopoly. It could be pretty much anything, it leaves the door open.

All in all, this is a completely horrible document that shows how the European Commission prepares to legislate post-ACTA. The proposals above have already entered the legislative process and will result in a real legislative proposal. We need to stay more vigilant than ever.

The second document, the one about Notice and Takedown procedures, doesn’t contain much of real substance (yet). However, it should be noted that it specifically mentions caching. Just like TPP, it may therefore try to regulate technical caching in the infrastructure with regards to the copyright monopoly, which would be… quite insane, frankly. But we don’t know yet; it just mentions caching in passing, which is cause enough for alarm.

See also La Quadrature du Net‘s press release on who’s who in this game.

Freedom of Speech – Andrew Norton: The US as an ‘idea’ is dying. The country that used to pride itself on free speech, democracy, and being ‘the last remaining superpower’, is now apparently drunk on its own power. With unchecked powers expanding at every turn, and terror laden missives booming out from government departments, the country seems to be taking a counterbalancing position from those who embraced freedom in the Arab Spring of last year, and is actively cracking down on freedoms previously embraced as a national advert.

The US likes to be known as the land of freedom and integrity; indeed the first verse of the US National Anthem – the Star Spangled Banner – ends:

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Over the last ten years, the answer has turned into a resounding NO!

Over the last ten years there have been many laws passed ostensibly about ‘fighting terrorism’, but which boil down to naked fear. A fear from the populace that some nebulous ‘terrorist attack’ will kill them all (despite the fact you’re more than 70x more likely to be just plain ‘murdered’ and 150x more likely to die on America’s increasingly poor quality roads than be present at a terrorist attack) which has supported a government that is increasingly spineless and cowardly. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the many instances over the last few months involving the uses of the police, when it comes to the First Amendment.

There have been many well documented clashes between police and the various ‘Occupy’ camps around the country in the last few months. Police officers have on occasion responded with excessive violence and weapons that did not fit the situation. In those instances, video recordings have made it clear what has happened, and often contradicted police reports and claims. Yet, as was pointed out a few months ago, there’s usually very little in the way of repercussions when police officers break the law.

Take for instance Joe Arpaio. The self-described ‘toughest sheriff in America’ is no stranger to controversy. There have been a number of wrongful death cases which his department has lost, his central jail lost a lawsuit about unconstitutional conditions in 2008, and the verdict was reaffirmed in 2010 when he still hadn’t improved them. He was feeding inmates bad food (commonly known as ‘poisoning’) and was broadcasting video footage of in-processing after arrests to the web, prejudicing trials (otherwise known as perverting the course of justice) and because of general misconduct, his whole department had their ability to enforce Federal Immigration law stripped by the Department of Homeland Security (and I remind you, that’s the same department that has no problems with sexually abusing 6yo’s in the name of ‘security’, so you KNOW it’s bad) which was why Arizona passed SB 1070 – the ‘papers please’ law. He’s also under investigation for witness, voter and candidate intimidation, harassment of newspapers, and for ignoring serious sexual assault cases. So has he been punished in any way? No, of course not. As Sheriff, he is almost untouchable.

It seems that both police officers and politicians have an allergic reaction to video cameras being pointed at them by the public. A search on YouTube will return LOTS of videos of police officers reacting ‘badly’ to being videotaped. Often the argument put forward by the police is that people are interfering in their work by videoing them. In other states, with two-party consent for audio-recording where there’s an expectation of privacy, police officers going about their duty have arrested people for wiretapping, a felony which often carries 5-10 year prison terms just so you’re aware, recording video is ok, recording audio is the no-no. Generally when these cases are made public, some prosecutors back down, but some stick at it. Almost inevitably the courts decide that no law was broken, because there was no expectation of privacy at the time of filming.

Compounding this is that most police cars in the US have dash-cams recording both audio and video, even in those states. So while the police officer is free to record audio and video at all times, a person involved in an encounter with that same police officer can’t record their own copy, because the police officer has some expectation of privacy? It’s an amazing double-standard. (The pinnacle of such double-standards goes to the Claremore Police Department in Oklahoma, who do not consider the dash-cam recordings to be public records under the state’s Open Records Act, and amazingly, a court agreed. The Department of Public Safety, aka the State Police force, also lobbied successfully in 2005 that the state legislature exempt state patrol dash cams from that legislation.)

Thankfully MOST courts are standing behind citizens and saying clearly that recording police officers in the course of their duties is NOT wiretapping, or a felony, but is in fact a protected 1st Amendment Activity. Yet that doesn’t always stop the police. In Pennsylvania, despite rulings that it’s legal going back to 1989, police there will sometimes arrest for ‘wiretapping’, with documented cases as recently as 2007, and still no adequate recourse for the victims of officers acting outside the law.

The occupy movement has also brought another spotlight onto the First Amendment. The ability to petition the government and protest is the less well known side of it, but it’s there. However, the ability to do so has been severely curtailed in recent years, from the ‘free speech zones’ created during the Bush era (and later copied by the likes of China) to the storm-trooper raids on the Occupy camps. The arrests and intimidations of the police against media attempting to cover the camps, and the police actions against them are further attacks on the first amendment.

In fact, the US has dropped a significant number of places down the current Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, from 20^th to 47^th, because of this. NYPD’s Deputy Inspector Bologna, and UC Davis Police’s Lt. John Pike are now symbols on the net of excessive violence. And their punishment? Bologna has been reassigned to Staten Island, and Pike has been on ‘Administrative leave’ (with pay, which was $110,000/year in 2010).

Oakland, which also made a splash with video of a young ex-Marine getting shot in the head and then pelted with flash-bangs is already in trouble. They’ve been under court orders to improve their behavior for almost ten years now (after a gang of police officers called the Rough Riders were planting evidence, using excessive violence and falsifying police reports) and have been given a March ultimatum, or else the city will have control of its police force taken from it. It’s a step that should have been taken 5 years ago, when Oakland PD failed the original order, yet unlike any normal person that had failed a court order, they were not disciplined, but let slide for another 5 years.

Politicians are also getting in on the act. One of the more unusual stories this week was the arrest of a documentarian from a US Congress committee hearing. The hearing, on fracking, was going to be recorded by Josh Fox, (who has already produced one documentary on the topic, the Oscar Nominated Gasland) as well as credentialed ABC news reporters. The Republican chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, Andy Harris (R-Md.), directed Capitol Police to arrest him for ‘unlawful entry’. The issue there was not so much one of ‘not wanting to be filmed’, as the cable-funded C-SPAN network was filming the hearing, but an attempt to deny Fox the ability to have his own high-quality shots for a follow-up documentary.

As far as violating the First Amendment, there can’t be a clearer example. Worse, the oath of office Rep Harris took on assuming office is as follows:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

In undertaking his actions on February 1^st, Rep. Harris violated his oath of office, by actively acting against the First Amendment. So what’s the consequence of that? The same consequences as when Joe Arparo violated the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th amendments, as when Pike and Bologna attacked protesters, using chemical weapons on people exercising their 1^st Amendment rights. Nothing.

The serious issue is, there’s no accountability – no respect for the law – by those whose job is to write the law or enforce it. This goes for former members of Congress who have turned into lobbyists as well, demonstrated by Chris Dodd’s blatant admission of bribery when SOPA lost its support.

One North Carolina State Rep, Larry G. Pittman, made news last week for suggesting public hanging should be brought back to increase the deterrence of murder (and he included abortionists there, making him part of the ironically named ‘pro-life movement, better characterised as anti-choice), and that appeals should be filed all at once. Given the often questionable nature of US Capital convictions, it’s rather disturbing. Especially as violations of what is deemed the country’s HIGHEST law, the Constitution, are rarely punished at all. Funnily enough, there are laws specifically to deal with it.

18 USC § 241
If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; or…
… They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both

and

18 USC § 242
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both;

Perhaps hanging, with only one appeal, would deter people from violating the country’s highest tenets, not that it will happen. Those that wield the power rarely feel the need to submit to the rules they lay on everyone else. And that’s the REAL problem. Until that problem is fixed, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.

Repression: In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.”

There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA:

“Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier  to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards.

This is very, very serious. For what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for. To 250 million Europeans who share culture and don’t see anything wrong with defying an immoral monopoly, this is an arrogant slap in the face, but it’s more  than that and worse  than that. Any qualifier  to what can be communicated — “non-pirated” in this case — always means “government-approved”, that only governmentally approved communications may take place.

And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent.

At the same time as the government takes itself the right to determine what can be communicated and what cannot, a communications technology stops being compatible with dissent.

Now, the prudent question here would be if it isn’t true that some information has never been free to share, and that you can get prosecuted for doing so? This would be a very relevant observation.

There are many things you’re not allowed to share in terms of information. Military secrets, medical journals, libel/slander, ongoing criminal investigations, just to name a few. All of these have always been possible to share on the net, but if caught doing so, you can be hauled off to court for it. After the fact.  The postal service has always still been usable  to share this information.

And yet, the one single thing listed as impossible to share over the net is violations of the copyright monopoly. If the Commission really was referring to things that you were legally  unable to share, you’d expect military secrets to come first, followed by governmental hush-hushy documents. But no.

This is an obvious slip trying to calm people into saying that everything will be as before, but the forced factual correctness of it reveals that we are indeed talking about censorship.

Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted:

Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment;

It looks fairly innocent, like most legal text where you don’t have the full context. To fully appreciate the impact of this text, one needs to know the background leading up to it and the negotiations. Hax writes a bit about it here (in Swedish). The gist of it is that it’s enforcement of extrajudicial censorship, plain and simple, through threats of third-party liability.

UPDATE – seeing that this story is climbing on Reddit, and now hitting frontpage, I’m inserting the fuller explanation from the summary of today’s anti-ACTA rallies:

…there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138″ in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138″, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping, shutting people off outside due process of law at the copyright industry’s fingerpointing as well as trying for live, realtime censorship. Hence, ACTA.

(original article continues)

ACTA will bring censorship. Extrajudicial censorship. At the request of a bloody entertainment  industry. That is shameful. 

Tomorrow, Saturday February 4, large-scale rallies against ACTA take place. I will be at the rally in Stockholm, Sweden at Plattan at noon.

Repression – Thijs Markus: A recent article by Rick Falkvinge posed the question: If ACTA doesn’t change anything, why are they pushing for its passage as if their life depended on it? Well, the answer is rather hilarious: it does, actually.

While this question is obviously a rhetorical device, its answer is none the less relevant to the discussion. And here, I would like to propose an answer to said question. You see, to understand the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, we need to go a little further back in time than the 00′s. We need to go back somewhere to the late 80′s, early 90′s.

During this time, a new fashion came over the industries of the day: as pioneered by Nike, large corporations decided to put all their factories overseas, the company would be only its brand. Anything that could be done cheaper at the gunpoint of this or that dictatorship would henceforth be done there. This means pretty much all the dumb labor is done overseas. Thus the trademark, as intended, as a means of identifying who produced what, pretty much ended there.

Why? Well, to take Nike for example, they figured that if they could produce and bring a shoe to a store for $5, and sell it for $150, they get a whooping $145 profit margin. This profit margin could then be spent on marketing, which is why you know the Nike logo with your eyes closed. The whole idea of the operation was exactly that: by making the shoe as cheaply as possible, the largest possible margin could be spent on marketing, thus ensuring the largest possible market share.

So here you have a company that takes in $5 shoes from third world countries, brands them, and sells them for $150. That’s pretty damn clever and profitable. However, there is one very minor loophole they overlooked in this manoeuvre. I could train a chimpanzee to take a logo and apply it on a product, and slightly more industrious primates all over the planet are doing as much. And now, some 20 years later, they begin to realize that in fact they have nothing to sell, their sole asset is the legal right to the logo they spent billions, even trillions to idolize.

Realizing that their scam is running thin, hanging only by the thread that people in fact respect their right to brand something, they swung into action the lobby apparatus to tell the rest of the world how very naughty they are when they don’t respect said right. And the result, amongst a long list of treaties-and-such, is ACTA.

Repression: News reached me this morning that authorities in the United States has decided to harass yet another of my colleagues. Australian activist Asher Wolf’s communications have been subpoenaed by a ridiculously entitled local police force in Boston.

In any normal part of the world, the police force in a city would swiftly conclude that their jurisdiction does not extend to another country on the other side of the planet. But no. Not United States authorities.

Asher Wolf has become one of the key activists across the world in coordinating news and information relating to breaking the old information hegemony. Perhaps it is therefore she is being targeted. The Boston police force demands to see her communications history and is demanding it from a company on US soil, Twitter.

This is the fourth valued colleague of mine that is being harassed extrajudicially and rightslessly. You’ve all heard of the previous three, I don’t have to name them.

I’m so damn tired, so utterly drainingly fatigued, of seeing this holier-than-thou attitude. Pretending the United States to be a shining beacon of freedom and due process, and yet, authorities there stand above not just their own law, but every other law on the planet, in the same instant it’s more convenient that way. The near-term examples are too legion to list.

(Not that a lot of other countries are much better. But they don’t pretend to be, either.)

Citizens of the United States, you know that I have many friends and colleagues in your country that I value dearly and hold in the highest respect, but your administration is a relentless psychopath. And your administration is acting in your name when it behaves like this against the world. Against my friends. Against my colleagues. Against me.

This has to end. It’s time for the United States dollar to collapse, already, to put an end to this arrogance.

So what’s our countermove?

Like I said, pretty much every friend and colleague I have with a United States passport agrees with the values I’m fighting for — the right to privacy, the transparency of government, the right to due process, the right to the same civil liberties online as our parents had offline. It’s not rocket science.

What the authorities are demanding in this case are communications logs. Logs that did not exist in the offline safeguarding of civil liberties. That’s the weak spot, right there. If there are no logs, the violence advantage of authorities cannot translate to the critical information advantage.

So, in my mind, we must make sure that the infrastructure does not keep logs of any kind when it comes to communications. Where telecoms companies – essentially the old national telephone monopolies – insist on keeping logs, we need to replace them with our own infrastructure. We know we can do that already.

We need to ask Twitter and the like to not have any logs. At all. And keep asking. Keep asking, and/or move to a different infrastructure for critical communications.

And above all, we need to explain to reporters that with communications logging and data retention, which politicians worldwide are trying to mandate, those reporters have neither the right nor the possibility to protect their sources anymore. That’s a right that should not be surrendered this lightly.

After all, Asher Wolf is a reporter and a journalist in the truest sense of the world, and a police force on the other side of the planet just asked for her sources. If that doesn’t ring alarm bells all over reporters’ heads, what will?

Repression – Loz Kaye: Over the last few weeks people round the world have been wondering what has happened to England. As the images of burning buildings beamed across the globe, I got texts from friends abroad asking – what the hell is going on in the UK?

But it’s not just the extraordinary scenes of rioting, looting and violence we have have had on our streets that has been causing questions to be asked. It is also the frightening backlash we have seen from the government, press and legal system.

It has been the thrust of the Pirate Party movement’s analysis that freedom of information, and its control, is at the heart of the political battleground for the 21st century. The reaction has shown how far this is now the case.

It seems that whenever there is some new crisis that sections of the media and politicians seek to find the cause in technology, despite the obvious flaw in trying to blame behaviour on things rather than people. There was a feeble attempt to try and pin rioting on an old favourite — gaming. Utterly without any evidence whatsoever, one police officer was quoted as thinking the root was Grand Theft Auto. However one device in particular ended up being demonised — the Blackberry.

Casting around for a name for the disturbances — possibly because there have been riots in Tottenham before RIM existed — they have been dubbed by many as ‘The Blackberry riots’. The change of fortune from being the favourite phone of executives and Obama to being called “the rioter’s handset of choice” by Andrew Hill in the Financial TImes is as striking as it is preposterous. Perhaps it does show the perils in a business environment too fixated on branding and trademarks. At the height of the hysteria it was suggested that Blackberry had become “weaponised”, as if the little black handsets had become flamethrowers.

No one has demonstrated that BBM had a key role in organising disorder — if such a thing is even possible. Why it was thought by David Lammy MP for example that blocking BBM would work, and not simply lead to people finding another method to communicate by makes no sense. A myriad of events, actions and exchanges of messages took place. One may as well as well talk about the “kids running down streets” riots or the “people talking to each other about stealing stuff” riots. The key is the message, not the (Blackberry) messenger. If enough people are determined to burn things down, they will find a way, whether it is via BBM, telephone or smoke signals.

Many authoritarian solutions to the trouble were called for — curfews, bullets on the streets, water cannons. Even bringing in the army — perhaps it had escaped people’s notice that we are fighting wars right now. But the one thing that took centre stage was controlling the public’s flow of information. Rick Falkvinge has already written about proposed social media blocking and its implications in this blog. You can find more background on this subject in the piece I wrote for the Open Rights Group : “How the government turned anti social media”. In the 21st century power no longer comes from the barrel of a gun. It comes from the blocking of a message.

Even since I finished that article to time of writing, just days later the situation has become even worse. All of us who care about civil liberites have been left stunned by the sentences of 4 years prison for posts on Facebook. The charge was incitement to riot, but is vital to point out that no riot took place due to the updates. So in just days we got from the demonisation of social media for causing riots, to the criminalisation of social media even though it didn’t cause riots. Yes, the posts were obnoxious and irresponsible. But it is evident that this sentencing is wildly disproportionate, and in fact tears up the rule book in such judgements. That minister Eric Pickles said they caused people to be “frightened” shows how far all sense of proportion is being lost. If anything left people with nightmares it was the rolling 24 hour TV news coverage with breathless commentary. I think Mr Pickles has probably made the calculation that turning that off might be a vote loser, and a step too far. But it seems that it is difficult to count on anything anymore in the current climate.

It is important to remember that all of this has a context.

The Pirate Party movement has been consistently pointing out the dangers of restricting the free flow of information. In the United Kingdom we saw the Digital Economy Act, with powers to ultimately throw whole households off the Internet forced through Parliament in days, without proper democratic scrutiny. This is the kind of ‘3 strikes’ law seen in various places in the world, and explicitly criticised by the UN as an infringement on freedom of speech. But the (yet to be enacted) law also has a web blocking element to it, which is significant in the light of the current “turn off Twitter” debate.

At the core of our objections to this type of law is how it has created the intellectual and political environment for censorship. It’s not because have a fetish for IP law- current copyright legislation is merely a symptom of a wider malaise. A recent example was the Newzbin2 judgement forcing ISP British Telecom to block access to a site which, after all, only has links not content.

This has exposed how deep confusion in the coalition is on the subject of restricting access to websites. First Conservative minister Ed Vaizey enthusiastically welcomed the Newzbin2 judgement. Then days later Lib Dem minister Vince Cable announced the web blocking elements of the DE Act are to be dropped as being unworkable. Then just days later again we have the Prime Minister signaling curbs on social networking. The government is in utter chaos on digital rights and don’t even appear to realise it. Most nonsensical of all is the Lib Dem media and culture co-chair Don Foster, who both does and doesn’t support web blocking in a recent press statement: “Site blocking may sometimes be necessary, but that doesn’t excuse the Digital Economy Act’s sorry attempt to enable it.“

The new Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition arrived with a promise to turn the attitude to civil liberties around from the ever more restrictive politics of the Blair and Brown years. But like so many of the promises made before the 2010 election this is now looking hollow. Once again our politicians are trying to find new ways to restrict our access to information.The real damage to the United Kingdom may well last well after the broken glass has been swept up, it will be damage to our freedoms done by those we should trust to protect them.

Diversity – Zacqary Adam Green: Most people feel that it is their moral obligation to help those who can’t help themselves; we help others to have healthy, happy, productive lives out of a duty to our fellow human beings. I agree, but forget morals — helping our peers survive and thrive even makes cold, logical sense.

Evolutionary biology and Darwinian theory might have you believe otherwise: the fit succeed and survive, the weak fail and perish, and by interfering with this process, we hold back the advancement of humanity. But the true evolution with which we need to be concerned is our new stage of evolution: ideological.

Our culture, knowledge, and understanding of the world evolves much like how our meaty, fleshy, biological brains evolved: the swapping of information. When breeding biological organisms have sex, their genes — components of biological information — combine to form a new, sometimes superior, whole. When two ideas love each other very much, their basic components also combine to form something new.

Take these words that you’re reading now, for instance. These words were typed on a computer keyboard — a descendent of the typewriter and the integrated circuit. The typewriter was borne of the written word and pressable button mechanisms. And the website on which these words are being displayed to you was borne of HTML, the TCP/IP protocol, and a whole slew of other ideas. I could go on ad nauseam, but I’d hate for the ideas of monotony and the back button to combine.

In order for ideas to have wild, depraved orgies of knowledge and make little baby ideas, two things are necessary. The first is alcohol freedom of information; ideas need to be able to flow back and forth and be built upon without absurd and pointless roadblocks. The second is one that’s oft neglected: freedom of people to form ideas and communicate them.

Billions of people lack the ability to live up to their potential to form ideas and contribute them to humanity. Lack of food, water, and healthcare means people are too distracted by their basic survival to analyze the world. Lack of education makes it difficult to come to valuable conclusions. And sometimes, even when these resources are available, they require hundreds of hours of mindless, meaningless work to pay for — drudgery and stress which snuffs out the most brilliant of minds.

And that, right there, is the key: every day, hunger, sickness, poverty, and oppression holds back brilliance. The pool of ideas from which we have to choose from is limited, severely, by social problems. We only have the perspectives and worldviews of those who have the means to contribute and speak up. Entire swaths of the world, in parts of wealthy and impoverished nations alike, could be the incubators for world-changing ideas. Instead, they are silent, or they speak in voices unintelligible and unheard.

In biology, homogeneous populations are vulnerable to one disease, one environmental change, one crisis, because the entire population shares the same weakness. It’s the same with ideas: if we don’t constantly bring in new and unique viewpoints to challenge our commonly-held beliefs, culture, and knowledge, we run the risk of veering off in a dangerous direction as a species, not noticing a fundamental flaw in our ideas, and doing stupid, stupid things as a result.

I believe that we don’t need a reason to help other people live healthy, happy, and productive lives — it’s just the right thing to do. But there is a reason. Even from an objective, amoral, rational, logical, cold, mechanical, detached, inhuman perspective, it is in our best interest to keep our fellow human beings alive and well, so that they can contribute to our global conversation and further the evolution of our ideas.

Copyright Monopoly: Yesterday, I was on Scottish radio discussing the upcoming verdict of Anne Muir, a 58-year-old grandmother of eight who was about to be convicted for sharing music with other people. She had confessed, so it was just a matter of sentence.

I was pitched live on radio against one of the monopoly industry’s usual shills who did the usual propaganda dance.

But when the verdict was handed down, I would absolutely not believe it. She was sentenced to three years in jail and compulsory psychiatric counseling.

The fact that the sentence was suspended is irrelevant from a legal standpoint; it still counts as a jail sentence. For sharing music!? For infringing on a commercial obsolete distribution monopoly!?

TorrentFreak has also covered the verdict.

Sharing culture and knowledge is not just a non-crime in the mind of the public; it is a good deed. A strong positive The ancien regime is escalating the conflict with the general population to levels never seen before. Just for comparison, physical assault causing hospitalization carries a maximum sentence of two years, usually two to three months.

One of the things that led up to the French Revolution was a distribution monopoly on certain popular fabric patterns. The penalty for infringing on the monopoly was death by prolonged torture, usually three days of agony. Almost everybody knew somebody who had been executed for infringing the pattern monopoly, and it didn’t make a dent in people’s willingness to share.

I have written one blog post about this in Swedish; I should probably make a version two in English. Anyway, my point is this:

Do we really have to go there again?

Activism: Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage. This shows why we must introduce understanding of information policy into the justice system all across Europe. A computer is not just something you can carry away; doing so has consequences. It is not a wrench, and yet the law (and police) treat it like any tool, just like a wrench.

Piratenpartei has a statement out. TorrentFreak writes more. The raid also struck at one of the world’s largest EtherPad deployments, causing concern among many activists who have used the tool to coordinate civil liberty activities. Netzpolitik writes more in German.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the German police website, polizei.de, is now offline. (When the Pirate Bay was raided on May 31, 2006, the Swedish police went offline almost immediately. Tabloids held polls which site people believed would come back up first. 90% thought that The Pirate Bay would restore service first.)

Columns: Today, I have a column on TorrentFreak titled “The Revolution Will Not Be Properly Licensed“. If you like it, please Digg it! That’s really important to me.

It is about how piracy and guarantee free speech are inseparatably linked.