Freedom: The Big American Lie

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-u-s-and-the-n-s-a-scandal-freedom-the-big-american-lie-12263704.html

by Riesling • 13 years ago

169 105 13 years ago

brokenmusic7• 13 years ago

The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act.

That's why action should not come as an open fight. History is full of examples when revolutions only lead to blood, after which other elites simply take over and keep exploiting everyone else. Or, alternatively, revolutions fail and after a bloody fight the same elites stay in power.

If you want real change and bloodless revolution, start using Bitcoin. Don't pay them a cut if you disagree with what your money are spent on. It's not democracy that keeps politicians in check. It's simply money. If they have none, they're powerless.

princeverma• 13 years ago

Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else...

Just saying,..

brokenmusic7• 13 years ago

All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?

qwertzlcoatl• 13 years ago

You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.

MisterWebz• 13 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.

brokenmusic7• 13 years ago

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.

cpursley• 13 years ago

The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.

daeken4• 13 years ago

One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable.

I think that there's a clever missing step.

pekk2• 13 years ago

Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.

eli_gottlieb4• 13 years ago

The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults.

That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.

monsterix3• 13 years ago

Here is an alternate dimension too.

If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc.

I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here.

This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words.

We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ...

Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know!

So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too.

I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal

dasil003• 13 years ago

The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans.

The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.

pekk2• 13 years ago

What kind of 'third front' do you want? The fact that you don't actually detail what sort of politics it would have makes me suspicious. Who is it that you want me to give power to?

sehugg• 13 years ago

There are the very real issues of apathy and media-influenced distractions. For example, here's the last 30 days of Google search traffic on "NSA" vs. "Paula Deen":

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa%2C%22paula+deen%2...

daeken4• 13 years ago

If you want real change and bloodless revolution

... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain.

I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems.

A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless.

I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.

brokenmusic7• 13 years ago

Why do you want a government so much?

sigkill2• 13 years ago

In Cory Doctorow's book...

This is a really cool concept. You have just sold me to read this book man, I'd been putting it off for so long.

jl62• 13 years ago

Reality check: for all the ills of warrantless wiretapping, computers are still an overwhelmingly positive force for enlightenment, empowerment and liberation of people across the world.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

We think we have been enlightened, empowered, and liberated, but really all we have done is concentrate our activity in to one nice easily monitor-able state, which means we can now be more controlled than ever before.

Chat in a park? Good chance its private. Chat on line? Good chance its recorded. I could go on...

Your "reality check", I'm very sorry to say, is exactly the lie we are being sold.

jl62• 13 years ago

Nobody's claiming computers can't be used for evil. I'm just saying let's not lose sight of all the good stuff they enable which is orthogonal to whether or not their users are being monitored.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

Computers have also been crucial in facilitating many, many horrible things - with massive investments by all of the standing militaries and secret police of the world.

chasing• 13 years ago

Christ, what a terribly written article.

EGreg5• 13 years ago

You know what, this is silly (except for the part about Obama's record on civil liberties and security).

First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. If the web was decentralized, as it was meant to be from the beginning, there wouldn't be such outrage. Remember all the outcry of privacy on facebook, no government involved? I do. Or how about companies like Path sucking up your phone records from your phone and sending it to their servers?

At the end of the day, it is we who choose to have an account with a large company running web software so they can "take care of" our email. Giant data centers delivering our movies to our doorstep instead of P2P. It wasn't always like this. People used to run desktop software on their desktop.

It will be like this again, but it will take a long time. My favorite example is how git and mercurial have eclipsed svn a long time ago, and github / bitbucket are way more popular than, say, sourceforge. Bitcoin has gotten a lot of attention over currencies that can be controlled by a central authority. Adobe Cirrus and WebRTC are growing. The same kind of revolution is going to happen in multi user communication platforms. Once that happens, and everything is encrypted end-to-end and there is off-the-record messaging, those using it will take back control.

We can already do almost everything in a decentralized manner except good social networking. Privacy "nuts" can run their email, etc. on a VPN and store encrypted backups in other places. To make it more mainstream, however, we will need friendlier clients. And social networking!

Finally, the web itself was built to be client-server, which kind of indirectly encouraged this sort of centralization. Clients were easy to install -- netscape's business model even involved giving it away for free -- but not many people ran servers. And so it led to this. The long and short of it is, we need more user-friendly opensource servers, standardized protocols, and encryption. Those who care will then run their own servers.

sneak2• 13 years ago

First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet.

No, the problem comes from the maliciousness of the US military.

Centralization on the internet got us Google and AWS and the iPad.

(The iPad wouldn't be the iPad if it wasn't locked down with a centralized App Store.)

EGreg5• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but why do you think Google and AWS are the best we can do?

We have to rely on Google to "not be evil". A lot of businesses depend on traffic from google, and if it decides to cut them off, well too bad. Many governments including the US government constantly look into google to prevent a monopoly. You want a monopoly in search? And how about the direction of where your hosted software will go ... when Larry Page took the reins, he decided that Google+ should feature prominently in every product. I agree with him but others may not. And what about killing off Google reader just like that? Do you think people come to rely on these things and then the centralized company can just kill the product?

And as for building stuff "in the cloud", what happens when your AWS availability zone goes down? Lots of big internet sites go down. Centralization on the internet also got us facebook, and when facebook goes down or shuts off a site, "Connect with Facebook" doesn't work on that site anymore until they fix it.

(responding to your edit) As for the iPad, etc. ... yes, the original platforms are usually proprietary walled gardens, but eventually the tech gets commoditized (sometimes after a protracted software patent fight). Rather than expound on it here, you can read my complete thoughts on multiple app stores and reputations: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114

NOW THE DISCLAIMERS: I will admit, that Google is also full of extremely bright people and does awesome stuff with all the money it makes. Self-driving cars, google glasses, and much more. But you are still relying on Google to maintain its data liberation and open technologies, and to some extent their commitment has lessened.

Also, Amazon's impressive commitment to low margins is a net win for all of us consumers (including the developers). At the scale that Google and Amazon build, a lot of amazing research is possible. That is the upside of centralization. And I am not saying that we should "abolish" centralized services. Especially the ones which are open and have great tools.

What I AM saying is that the open source foundations need to step up their game and produce SERVERS that are user friendly and easy to install, maintain and run. This new generation of servers should automatically link together. I really do believe that at the end of the day, history has shown that open PLATFORMS lead to the greatest good for humanity, as everyone can build apps on top of them without favoritism. For example Apple's iOS favors twitter and facebook sharing over any other companies, because they made a deal with them. There needs to be competition between the "centralized sector" and the "open source sector", which will lead to the server software becoming commoditized and more user friendly, just as browsers are today.

eli_gottlieb4• 13 years ago

First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet.

Which is a matter of government policy. When the internet was invented, hackers and cypherpunks said it should be decentralized. Lobbyists and Congressmen said it would be subsidized as something along the lines of television: few senders, many receivers. And then ISPs even said: we'll take public subsidies for infrastructure and not even build the infrastructure.

The result is that America and Canada in specific have crappy net access, and the world at large has a centralized internet rather than a decentralized one. Why? Because nobody ever required that we commoners receive publicly-visible IP addresses and symmetric bandwidth with which to run our own servers.

EGreg5• 13 years ago

Very well said. These things are certainly relevant. But now that we have WebRTC and Adobe Cirrus, etc. can we start building decentralized, P2P apps?

After all I don't care how the connection is opened as long as it's encrypted I have choice in how it's opened.

unclebucknasty5• 13 years ago

I hear what you're saying, but I think it's a bit of a red herring. The real problem is the abuse, not the topology of the Net/Web.

That is, even if we all ran our own email servers, etc., the government could work with the ISPs to protocol-sniff or otherwise hook into our communications if it had the will. At the end of the day, data must be put on the wire (or in the air). Outlaw encryption above NSA-crackable standards (as they did for exported browsers/software) and away they go. This is not to mention wireless carriers which must be centralized to some extent. At the end of the day, it is not a very practical matter for many of these services to be decentralized, especially for those who are not tech savvy.

And, yes, we could try to evolve technologies which decentralize more of these services for the masses. And, we can hope that endpoint encryption wouldn't be outlawed (in fact, as we now all know, the NSA now claims the right to hold on to encrypted communications indefinitely as it attempts to crack them), but this is not unlike the cat-and-mouse between virus writers and antivirus companies. Stronger encryption would be cracked, data would traverse some centralized conduit, and the government would get the information.

The problem here is not the topology of the network, but the government's intent and its frank violation of our privacy, period. We are a nation of laws, and the government should be constrained, not by the limits of technology, but to the law itself and to both the letter and spirit of our Constitution.

EGreg5• 13 years ago

What do you think of my proposal for “shadow organizations with reputation for verifying software for security holes”

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

I just saw a newspaper headline today, a photo of Snowden saying "would you hide this man?". I didn't buy it, so I don't know if the article was pro, contra or informative; but it got me thinking... I know it would never happen, but why shouldn't Germany give asylum to Snowden? Oh, because we're full of shit ourselves.

What about other so-called first world countries? Any offers so far? How many non-offers? So, is it really the big American lie?

It would be easier for rest of the world if the US were more free, sure, and the US kinda has it in the mission statement. But it would also be easier for the US if the rest of the world was more free, and it's idiotic to just follow in the shadow of the "market leader in freedom", and then complain when that market leader has a bad day, or a bad decade, or several, and runs off into a ditch. Don't ask what freedom can do for you, but what you can do for freedom, right?

And hey, I'm sure Putin Polonium also tells the Russian people they're free, too. That just as a sanity check. Not that I want to belittle any of it, but realize that in the US you have freedoms of speech and organization others wouldn't even dream of. Use them! Don't fall into the trap of being like Germans, who tend to moan how bad it is, with being content others have it worse... do that other thing, that American thing, where you roll up your sleeves, kick ass and distribute chewing gum :P (those stereotypes are not meant seriously, but well)

gambiting• 13 years ago

Well, UK openly said that if Snowden arrives in the UK he won't be allowed into the country, so there you have the "democratic and free" countries. But to be honest, people should be really upset about the stuff he leaked about GCHQ since it turns out to be as bad as NSA, yet people hardly talk about it.

unclebucknasty5• 13 years ago

This story has quickly evolved from one of a government violating its citizens rights, to one about Snowden.

Score one (more) for the government-media PR complex.

Joeri2• 13 years ago

Americans have apparently been so succesful in exporting their culture that they've managed to export american hypocrisy as well ;)

krapp• 13 years ago

Technically, we imported that from England, and just rebranded it.

We're really good at that sort of thing.

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

True, the only reason Putin and China oppose intervention in Syria is because they have already fought civil wars to crush dissent in their own countries and are worried what kinds of precedents may be set if they allow Assad to be overthrown through foreign intervention. If China can't roll into Tibet with tanks and destroy separatists and if Russia can't bomb the caucuses into federal submission because the UN prevents it their own dictatorships could be screwed.

Putin also said something interesting after that high profile US/Russia intel agent prisoner exchange happened. He was asked if he thought any of the Russian agents had cooperated with the US and leaked information to them, his response was basically they wouldn't be alive if they had.

That said I do enjoy the antics of Russia Today offering Assange a F/T show and Snowden drama in order to punch the US in the balls repeatedly and politically humiliate the current administration over their declining empire and worldwide influence. The US increasingly is becoming all bark and no bite. Countries can now openly defy their bullying and demands without much consequences whereas in 2001 that was a different story.

iSnow• 13 years ago

why shouldn't Germany give asylum to Snowden?

Because we have an extradition treaty with the US?

mpyne7• 13 years ago

Does it cover political conflicts? That was really the only legit chance Snowden had of claiming asylum at practically any nation he goes to anyways.

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

...rights aren’t ‘rights’ if someone can take ‘em away; they’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter.

— George Carlin, “You Have No Rights"

raganwald• 13 years ago

"It's a club, and you ain't in it."

—George Carlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8

kailuowang2• 13 years ago

Karl Marx maybe be wrong most of the time, but he is probably right on one assertion: in any society there are mainly two classes: the ruled class and the ruling class. The small numbered ruling class controls the majority ruled class by controlling what they believe. Here are a couple of examples:

There is no ruling class and ruled class.

The ruled class has freedom beyond control from the ruling class.

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

Privilege can only be granted, rights can only be seized.

The reverse is the cost of complacence.

tootie• 13 years ago

All every human society has ever had is priveleges. What exactly did George Carlin think was the alternative? Who the hell else is going to guarantee your right not to be murdered for speaking your mind?

unclebucknasty5• 13 years ago

That is such a circular argument that it is impossible to determine where it begins and ends.

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

"And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter."

Oh sure... I mean, this country started out with slavery, no voting rights for women, use of child labor, gunning down union workers, etc, etc, etc. And today, things are even worse. (/sarcasm)

Please stop fantasizing about the perfect America of yesteryear. It never existed.

dllthomas4• 13 years ago

"[T]o a depressing extent, [...] our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act."

Let's act: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-Government-Bay-Area

To the broader point, the two party system certainly pulls "to the center", but it's also somewhat random which middle. Those pushed to the fringes of the Democrats and those pushed to the fringes of the Republicans have some substantial points of disagreement, but have some significant overlap as well. We should see how we can work together to pull both parties to a better place.

laurentoget• 13 years ago

The fascinating thing is that this article, which compared to US press, sounds like a liberal paranoid rant, is being published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which is about as liberal as The Wall Street Journal ....

This thing is a PR disaster of the greatest magnitude.

sultezdukes2• 13 years ago

When you have leftist democrats that are statists and country-club type republicans that don't really believe in limited government, and these two groups make up the majority of congress then there's really no hope until the people wake up to the tyranny that is happening.

But the people are ignorant and all the statist politicians and government officials have to say is "security" and the majority of the sheeple fall right in line - "what do I have to worry about, I'm not doing anything wrong. I dont' care if they're spying, if it's protecting the country".

cobrausn• 13 years ago

Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something.

Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person.

sultezdukes2• 13 years ago

Well, you made through three quarters of the comment before typing 'sheeple'. That's gotta count for something.

It's weird that your offended by that.

Your first statement I tend to agree with, though 'tyranny' is a strong word often implying rule by a single person.

No, it doesn't imply rule by a single person.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

May I ask a simple question as a reality check? Granting for the purpose of discussion that the current revelations about NSA in the United States appear to show a slippage to worse conditions from the legal restrictions that originally governed NSA's activities related to Americans living in America, is it genuinely correct, as the article claims, that "idealists have, as the Washington saying puts it, 'nowhere else to go'" besides supporting one major United States political party or the other?

My observation of history is that third-party political movements in the United States have never won the Presidency or a majority in Congress since the fragmented election of 1860 that began the current "two party" system, but the two parties have changed everything about their positions on policy while keeping their names the same. The Democratic Party and Republican Party went through a complete role reversal with each other on many issues from the 1890s to the 1990s, and third-party movements in the United States continue to nudge the parties to respond to popular discontent. United States political parties are not ideological, and have no ideological test for membership. Political parties in the United States are coalitions to aid the efforts of individual candidates to win elections. My state has been governed by a third-party governor quite recently, and I have voted for candidates who are genuinely independent of any party, and candidates endorsed by SEVEN different political parties, in state and federal elections since the 1970s.

As for a broader question about where freedom is available to the common people, what do immigration patterns tell us? The United States is a rare example of a country that has consistent, sustained population growth irrespective of natural increase through immigration. Tens of millions of people around the world have responded to public opinion surveys to indicate that they desire to immigrate to the United States. The United States gains population on a net basis in comparison to almost any other country. If there is a freedom problem here in the United States, where is there not a freedom problem?

Cowen• 13 years ago

The fact that America's two largest political parties are not inherently ideological is part of what's wrong with them.

The fact that they might change eventually does not help those who want change now.

parasubvert• 13 years ago

On the contrary - I find ideological political parties rather abhorrent. No ideology is complete and The Truth.

I would much prefer a party that has clear policy positions that doesn't necessarily hew to any particular belief system across said positions, so long as there is rational justification to believe a particular policy will be effective in achieving an end.

Ma8ee• 13 years ago

Most people that move to the US do it because it is a very prosperous country, not because it is considered particularly free.

People that flee oppression go to Europe, if nothing else because they have a much higher chance of getting to stay there than in the US.

mpyne7• 13 years ago

Your point about 'coalitions of candidates' is a great point. This is how the Tea Party is succeeding in taking over the Republican Party at this point, which has led the Republicans in Congress to being far more intransigent than they normally had before.

Freedom: The Big American Lie

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