Here is the European Commission’s press release summarizing the content of the agreement, and here the fact-sheet.
Showtime!!
What “Big Brother” and “Orwellian” actually mean
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.
Is The IPhone Criminals’ Weapon of Choice?
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”.
Blogging vs Social Networking: different tools for different goals
Blog and Social Networks are very different tools of expression (and, for what it worth, online marketing.)
A blog gives you absolute freedom and exposes your thoughts to potentially a huge quantity of people. People, on the other end, can enjoy the things you do without necessarily disclose their identity, unless they actually want to do.
A Social Network page/profile, instead, implies that the majority of your audience is made by those you already know or, at least, you are acquainted with. Yes, I either know about the existence of “public” pages or the possibility of “following” somebody else, but this doesn’t change the point.
To blog is more like living into the wild, where you can meet other peers, predators or none at all (and in this case ask yourself why are you still blogging if nobody cares.) While “living” in a social network is fairly safer but actually less challenging because of its “Walled Garden” design.
While is obviously possible to use a blog to stay in touch with people and a social network to publish contents aimed at a (personally) unknown audience, it would be more efficient to use the proper tool designed for the specific task.
Unless you are left without options, why should you use a hammer to cut a wire and a screwdriver to hammer in a nail?
The Web is ISIS’s Nuclear Bomb
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.
- Orginal text in Italian: Anche se, ipoteticamente, riuscissimo a stanare con le bombe tutti i guerrieri dello Stato Islamico e a far fuori al Baghdadi, l?ideologia che costoro hanno creato ed il loro messaggio universale in rete rimarr? ↩