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It's always illuminating when the longtime enemies of security and free speech come out from the shadows, making their intentions and sensibilities crystal clear for all to see and understand. Nope, I'm not talking about terrorists of whatever stripes -- we've always known how criminal scum like that thinks and how they desire to remake the world in the image of their tiny minds and 13th century mindsets. Nor am I speaking of Putin, Kim Jong-un, Ali Khamenei, Xi Jinping, or the like -- the iron fist with which these leaders desire to control speech and suppress domestic dissent is all too obvious even at a glance. No. I'm painfully forced to note the new threat matrix aimed squarely at shedding our free speech and security rights that is spewing squarely from Western governments -- from the U.S., U.K, and across the length and breadth of Europe. It's tempting to suggest that this renewed push to strip us of these fundamental rights was triggered by the recent devastating terrorist attack in Paris -- but that horrendous event serves only as an excuse for a long simmering, long sought crackdown on Internet speech and security that has been smoldering for ages. Going all the way back to 1993 and the fiasco of the proposed U.S. "Clipper Chip" reveals the U.S. intelligence community's fear of strong cryptography. And today, the EU's enthusiastic embrace of the nightmarish "Right to Be Forgotten" concept, and their push to apply that EU censorship system across the entire world, gives us clues to European motives along these lines. So for anyone really paying close attention to these matters, the dots were already pretty much in place, certainly sufficiently so that the latest proposals from Western leaders shouldn't come as any kind of significant surprise. And those repulsive proposals have been arriving hot and heavy over the last few days. President Obama is reportedly to offer a vast expansion of criminal penalties for "computer hacking" broadly defined, and as part of that legislative package also to vastly expand the definition of hacking in the process. If you thought the late Aaron Swartz really had the book thrown at him by DOJ, the new proposals would likely make that look like a paperback novel compared with a wall of ancient encyclopedias dumped on the heads of future defendants. The details we've heard so far reportedly suggest that at the discretion of prosecutors, merely clicking the wrong link on a public site, or conducting perfectly legitimate cybersecurity research, could net you being shackled in a federal cell for a decade or more. But it gets worse. Western leaders, led by David Cameron of the UK, appear poised to demand that all Internet communications be subject to data retention and monitoring by governments, and that no applications be permitted to deploy encryption that the government could not disable or defeat on demand. Prime Minister Cameron has said this explicitly of late, and is seeking support from other European leaders and President Obama for this disastrous concept. Let's be crystal clear about this. While the initial discussion might revolve around instant messaging apps, it's obvious that the logical and inevitable extension of this concept is to require the undermining of all Internet encryption. Email. PGP. SSL/TLS. The works. And what you can't backdoor or otherwise undermine you simply outlaw, with criminal penalties draconian enough to scare off all but the most dedicated or masochistic of free speech and security activists. The word "security" is critical here, because while these leaders are claiming that such proposals would enhance security to "protect us from the terrorists" -- in reality the proposed decimation of the foundational structures of cryptographic systems would put all of us -- our personal information, our power systems, our industrial facilities, and so many other aspects of our lives -- at the mercy of cyberattacks newly enabled by such weakened and so inevitability exploitable encryption ecosystems. Without any exaggeration, this may easily be the most serious threat to Internet security -- and so to the entire global community that now depends on the Internet for so many facets of our lives -- since the first ARPANET messages clattered over a teletype at UCLA decades ago. Legitimate and measured means to fight against the scourge of terrorism are essential. But those do not include trying to convert the secure communications of law abiding citizens -- billions of them -- into "tap on demand" portals for government snoops, no matter how ostensibly laudable or graphically terrifying those officials attempt to frame their arguments. We've all come to expect the "government owns your communications" propaganda from Putin and his ilk. To hear the same sort of twisted reasoning -- no matter how candy coated or sprinkled with excuses -- flinging forth from our Western leaders is disheartening in the extreme, and must not be accepted without vigorous challenge, debate, and due consideration for the enormous damage such proposals could easily wreak on us all. --Lauren-- |
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You can watch and hear it spreading virally around the world -- a chant of defiance against evil: "Je Suis Charlie" - "I am Charlie" -- crowds, signs, hashtags -- it's everywhere, and it deserves to be. And in the wake of the hideous mass assassinations at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, suddenly France, Europe, and the rest of the world are very suddenly very enthusiastic indeed about free speech. Lest there be any confusion about the matter, free speech -- even obnoxious, ridiculing speech -- even speech that sometimes is immensely disturbing and painful to innocent parties, is a fundamental aspect of this phenomenon. For provocation via free speech was Charlie's stock in trade, and the proud avocation of its murdered staff. They had been physically attacked before. At least one now senior staff member -- killed in this attack -- reportedly had continuous police protection. Recorded employee interviews display clearly not only that Charlie's writers and cartoonists understood how offensive and disturbing much of their publication was to many persons, but also that they were fully cognizant of how potentially dangerous to themselves this could be. They routinely rejected outside suggestions, even by world leaders such as President Obama, that in some cases they were exacerbating problems rather than helping to solve them. For indeed, the freedom to say something doesn't necessarily mean that it's always appropriate to actually say it. But except in a relatively minuscule number of situations where immediate, direct physical risk to individuals or property are involved, we must hold the right to free speech as inviolate, as one of the most fundamental of human rights. For when speech is censored or otherwise controlled by governments, we lose access to the fundamental raw material -- information -- by which we can determine what's really going on around us affecting the lives of ourselves, our colleagues, and our loved ones. It is entirely appropriate in the wake of the Paris horror that we also now hear people around the world quoting Evelyn Beatrice Hall's famous illustrative line from her 1906 biography of French writer, historian, and philosopher François-Marie Arouet -- Voltaire -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." So it is notably ironic indeed that it's from Europe itself that the single most dangerous and potentially damaging anti-free speech abomination has spewed forth -- the EU's notorious "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF), since the very concept of RTBF -- which the EU is now proposing be applied as a global censorship mechanism against Google and other websites -- is utterly and absolutely in conflict with the entire basis of free speech. Even if for the sake of the argument we momentarily ignore the slippery slope nightmare of RTBF-type laws in the hands of evil leaders and others whose goals are to cleanse history of search results of which they don't approve or appreciate, the foundational idea of RTBF, the false belief that it is possible to slice and dice and micromanage free speech without destroying it, is utterly specious and immensely dangerous. If we are to stand as a world in support of free speech in the vein of the murdered patriots of Charlie Hebdo, we must also stand united against the gross hypocrisies represented by The Right To Be Forgotten and similar concepts around the world. To do less would be to dishonor the many brave persons who have died in the name of free speech -- not only in Paris this week, but throughout history. We are all Charlie. And we are all the Internet. And free speech must remain truly free. Take care, all. --Lauren-- |
