On ICT law, politics and other digital stuff
A lot of people – politicians, “gurus” and “activists” use the word “Big Brother” and “Orwellian” without having read even the cover of a George Orwell’s book.
They rather want to have a look at this TED-ed short lesson, to discover what they’re actually talking about.
According to NBC, Apple has been ordered by a federal judge to support the FBI in decrypting the Iphone used by the people accused of having slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last December, 2, 2015. The court order has been necessary since Apple refused to voluntarily provide such support.
These are the bare facts, that have been turned into a horse of different colours by? bad-faith anti and pro encryption activist. The former sang the usual song “Strong Encryption Smooths Criminals”(FBI Records), while the latter waged the old flag “Weak Encryption Affects Civil Rights”.
The federal court neither asked for a backdoor nor for the enforcement? of a weaker Iphone security, but just said Apple to support the after-crime investigation. This court order doesn’t hampers people’s legal right to strong encryption, because the justice said something like “you have the right to own a strong safe, but the State has the right to try to open it whatever the mean in case of a criminal investigation”. In this context, then, the fact that Apple has been ordered to provide support to the FBI is not constitutionally illegal.
I still support strong encryption for the masses (and for companies too), but I don’t think that making a case out of this court order might help the civil right cause. It only works as as a (maybe unintended) advertising stunt for Apple that can portray itself as a “privacy shield”.
The Web is ISIS’s Nuclear Bomb. This is what Loretta Napoleoni, author of books on the economic side of terrorism, wrote in an article for the leftwinger Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Napoleoni claims that – as the Marxist ideology did in the past with the “word-of-mouth” or, better, “word-of-book” – ISIS’s propaganda gets its power from a new “ideology-spreading-tool”: the Internet, and thank to the Internet will last, no matter what:
Even though, hypothetically, we should succeed in taking out all of ISIS’s warriors by bombing them and killing al Baghdadi, the ideology that these people have created and their universal message will last on the Internet. 1
I don’t have enough authority to challenge the curious association Napoleoni did between Karl Marx philosophy and ISIS’s vision of the Islamic religion, but I find grossly superficial and offensive for the victims of (every) war to compare “the Web” to a nuclear bomb.
As I wrote in a post, war is made of bullets, and bullets hurt as do (nuclear) bombs. Bombs make carnage, slaughters, shred a human being in pieces, burn, annihilate, vaporize, wipe communities, blindly kill innocents, pollute lands for centuries or millennia (ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors for additional info, just in case.) E-mail, newsgroups, chats, FTP (yes, Napoleoni, the Internet is not only made by HTTP) are tool of freedom designed by free people to give humans a free chance to communicate with no physical and social barrier.
Those like Napoleoni – and her cultural associates, member of the “Internet-as-a-threat Club” – should simply accept the fact that ideas are countered (and sometimes, fought) with ideas and that the worst way to challenge a disturbing statement is to censor it.
The idea that a sole statement might change somebody’s personal philosophy up to turning him into a human bomb carrier is simply wrong. Change of mind happens by way of? tragedies, loneliness, apartheid and injustice and not because of a tweet.
As per the “Internet Patrolling” advocated (not only) by Napoleoni – though sadly labelled by her as ineffective – again, let’s go back to basics: as the East Germany, Russian and Italian political police history show, to fight an enemy and prevent attacks there is no substitute for an actual, massive, ruthless and pervasive physical control. But t this is disturbing and, rightly so, nobody in the Western world is available to give a government so much power.
And here comes the brilliant solution: let’s fall back on the Internet and blame “the Web” as a radicalization tool.
No, Napoleoni, ideologies will not last because of a blog. They will stand until there will be inequality in world, it means until the end of time.
Italian politcians’ mantra, starting from the Chair of the Low Chamber, Boldrini and down to local parties’ minions is “The Internet is an opportunity but…” and then a stream flows of statement like “we need to regulate it”, “we need to keep it free for the righteous citizen”, “we must block hate speeches” and so on.
This reminds me of an old, untitled essay I read on Giancarlo Livraghi’s gandalf.it:
Yesbutters don?t just kill ideas.
They kill companies, even entire industries.
The yesbutters have all the answers.
Yesbut we?re different. Yesbut we can?t afford it.
Yesbut our business doesn?t need it.
Yesbut we couldn?t sell it to our workforce.
Yesbut we can?t explain it to our shareholders.
Yesbut let?s wait and see.
All the answers. All the wrong answers.
For the positive part, dedicated to the Whynotters, just follow this link.
The collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbor: Solving the new privacy Rubik?s Cube is a post on the official Microsoft’s blog that is gaining momentum since it is possibly the first “cooled down” analysis of the EUCJ decision on Safe Harbour. Though well articulated, nevertheless, I think that the “hook” where the chain of reasoning hangs is weak.
I don’t think we should go for “global laws” because of the technological evolution.
“Global laws” means “Single Government” or, in other words, the end of democracy.
From a legal standpoint, the technological evolution is irrelevant because technology only affects the way things are done and not the right to do it.
You don’t need to amend the provision that punishes killing or manslaughtering everytime that somebody figure out some “creative” mode to put a R.I.P. stone over somebody else head. Or, dealing with the technological “evolution”, you don’t need a new provision to sanction hate speeches, personal life intrusions, libel and defamation, stalking and so on “just” because of the Internet. The illegal behaviours were already there before the computer era.
Furthermore, we all know that law is rather Lobbyists’s pressures, political mediation, economic and financial differences driven, than God-inspired.
Guess who would going to write this “Global Regulation”?