I am sympathetic to the side of 'Anonymous' because the only way to stop them is to destroy the freedom of the internet.
To me the statement 'Information wants to be free' isn't the statement it appears to be. It is a statement of policy and intent, not of literal fact.
It is not a true statement because I actually believe that every piece of data in the world literally should be available in the public ___domain, it is a true statement because the only way to achieve the alternative is to lock down and destroy a world of freedom and information that I have come to love with an abiding passion.
Successfully solving the problem of securing private government data from anonymous release over the internet requires that the internet as it exists now be destroyed.
Stopping me from freely copying music that exists on my computer requires that full control of my computer be unavailable to me.
Successfully solving the problem of ensuring centralised and secure online identification of individuals to stop online libel destroys the freedom of anonymous political dissent and organization.
I am deeply sympathetic to the political ideals of 'Anonymous' not because they are always right but because the nobody else in any position of authority or power appears to even recognise the problem.
Effectively, I am sympathetic to 'Anonymous' because there is no way for me not to be without also being against the freedoms that make them possible.
"The next day, February 6, the attacks turned serious, and Barr realized the extent of what Anonymous had done to him and to his company, which was currently in negotiations to sell itself to a pair of interested buyers."
My guess is (and I haven't read the emails, or any non-public information), Barr was hoping for a massive amount of (positive) publicity, followed by the inevitable rich rewards of a much higher buying price. What better way to get this publicity than to take on the current Public CyberEnemy #1, aka Anonymous?
Makes you wonder what kind of security company has such a sophomoric SQL exploit on their website + someone in a power position who claims to be able to locate and identify the actual owners of a social network profile solely by guess.
The only thing that irks me is: If his methods were so off, then how did he have the Facebook profile of 'CommanderX' to be able to have the conversation in the logs? Did he determine that through his methods, or was that a proxy profile that CommanderX uses that is not hidden (i.e. freely given)? Just something that doesn't seem to fit with the idea that his methods were not able to identify anyone associated w/ Anonymous.
His methods were flawed in that he thought he had pinned CommanderX as a leader of Anonymous, not that he couldn't figure out who these people were. He was trying to make Anonymous this centralized group when it isn't.
For a parallel example, look at Al Qaeda. People keep trying to make all of these Al Qaeda in X groups as one giant organization when in fact the only thing they have in common is the name and idea. 50 years ago there'd almost always have to be a personal connection for a group's idea to spread to another group. Now with the internet and other means of cheap and easy communication, it's easy for these ideas to spread anonymously. Anyone who identifies with these groups can take the ideas and run with them without the original group even knowing.
Law enforcement and governments are going to have a hard time figuring out how to deal with this, as their old tactics of decapitating the group's head doesn't work when there is no head.
I think it depends on what you mean by "leading". As I understand it, Bin Laden is a kind of "thought leader" to the AQ movement - sort of how you could say Mick Jagger leads the rock n roll movement (terrible example!). No doubt BL has a lot of influence over AQ and used to be very active, but I very much doubt that he's still involved in deciding who gets hit and how. I suspect he could be removed with no noticeable impact on the movement.
CommanderX may or may not be in a similar position.
I would say Bin Laden is more in the position of giving out "grant money", so to speak, if I understand it correctly. He is more of a financial backer than a "thought leader", and I am certain he is not alone in that position.
IIRC, the Afghans see/saw him as a hero from the war with the Russians. Apparently there are stories of him bravely manning the front lines, etc. Whether those things are true or not, being a folk hero brings something to the table when one of the major factors to success is recruitment.
They are leaderless in the fact that there is willing cannon fodder to take up 'arms' at will. The action is similar to a 'pick up where others left off mentality'.
You are assuming that 'CommanderX' had a clue what he was talking about.
A perfectly reasonable interpretation of those logs simply assumes that 'CommanderX' rather liked the idea that Aaron thought he was some kind of super criminal, and didn't see any reason to deny it.
A second perfectly reasonable interpretation of that conversation is simply that 'CommanderX' thought Aaron was a twat and pretended to be some kind of leader for the 'lulz'
If you are inclined to believe that CommanderX is a criminal mastermind, then the conversation could certainly be interpreted that way. Personally I struggle with the idea that a criminal mastermind would simply reveal himself to anybody who asked him about it.
My own interpretation of that conversation is that CommanderX said what he thought Aaron wanted to hear, and implied things that flattered his own ego.
Which speaks not at all to the actual level of involvement CommanderX may have had in the events that transpired, or his knowledge of them.
- Is CommanderX really a mastermind behind Anonymous?
- Is CommanderX on IRC the same person that Aaron contacted on Facebook?
I was commenting on the latter question. The conversation seems to imply that the 'CommanderX' from IRC is the same person he was talking to on Facebook, regardless of his/her level of involvement in Anonymous.
From my reading, there were multiple efforts in play -- he was 'infiltrating' Anonymous with multiple personas, and (if my reading is correct) trying to correlate that information with Facebook data.
Otherwise, none of it really makes sense. You can't investigate the friends of somebody on Facebook without knowing WHO the somebody you're investigating is. So, he had to at least have ideas for leads for people to start stalking.
I think we can all agree that correlating random activities across all Facebook users (whose profiles are public, which is of course another catch) would be really close to impossible with one reluctant developer and an 'analyst'.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised at the number of people who had a difficult time identifying who I mean. I'm actually a little-l libertarian and no great lover of government, so I understand the knee-jerk inclination, but why would I be stretching for the definition of a mob when there is another thing that can be called a "mob" in the story with no stretch at all?
Taxation on things is a normal thing that is allowed to all individual entities within their sphere of control. If you own some item, you can effectively set up any taxation system on the usage of that item that you want. The governmental entity is allowed taxation powers because the people under its authority utilize its public benefits, such as police work, court systems, legislative considerations, and so on.
Likewise control of commons exists on an individual level as well -- if you are near a certain amount of water, you are generally free to own and control it. To the extent that you don't secure and maintain your property, your ownership is a vain deed.
Rearing and teaching of young is a really easy one, commonly given to individuals. Do you think all children should be taken out of individual households and placed in government-run child-rearing centers? That's what this one sounds like, and that is horrifically scary and ridiculous.
Definitely agree with you I'd hate to see Anonymous individuals restricted from actions that HBGary, its subsidiaries, its employees, and clients take.
If a mob overthrows the government that means that there were a lot of people upset with the government and it can be taken as the 'will of the people.' If a single person overthrows a government it could be seen as a dictatorship. I think that the Rand-ian sound byte fails here.
Define mob? It's ok for the government to imprison people. But when I do it it's called kidnapping.
Edit: Just to clarify, I agree if you mean mob as in an actual mob. However you're replying to a parent who's talking about government, so that led me to think you're implying government is some form of a mob.
A representative government with powers endowed to them by the people and working within the limits of a codified legal system is very different from a mob.
I took it that the OP was referring to Anonymous as a mob... which is essentially one of the big draws of huge mobs - their anonymity.
Although I'm intrigued by the whole drama unfolding, I don't know that we can say there's justice/liberty in what the mob does if when one person did the same thing we'd say otherwise.
Yes. It makes me very uncomfortable when the fact that "Anonymous" is committing some fairly serious crimes is apparently just glossed over because hey, we didn't like the target, so thumbs up!
It also makes me uncomfortable that I'm a bit nervous posting this point. This is not progress. This is not good. This is mob rule. We should be fighting this, not applauding it.
I don't really disagree with you, but I'm not sure what you mean by glossed over. It sounds like you'd like the journalist here to be condemning the actors or tsk-tsk-ing about the whole episode. But the lack of that isn't Anon getting a free pass, it's just how most neutral reporting is done. When you read a feature on a violent gang, or organized crime, or a serial killer generally you'll see a lot of matter of fact type of reporting, with the editorializing left up to the reader. It's not different here just because it's a mob.
And surely they're not getting a pass on the actual legal repercussions. The FBI took dozens of doors over the earlier DDOS's - I'm sure that they are quite keen at rolling up this incident into what is likely a very well staffed task force.
Glossed over by us on this site and the Internet at large, not the press. I have no problem with the reporting. It bothers me that 30 comments in I appear to be the only person who even has concerns.
See my replies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2203359 . The gist is that people don't really endorse Anonymous's actions, but the actions are unsurprising and generally uninteresting. The interesting part is the psychology and behavior of HBG[F] and its executives, specifically Aaron Barr, so that's what everyone is talking about. The silence shouldn't be taken as an unspoken endorsement of script kiddies.
- An issue that you're not addressing well is that it's hard for a single person to DDOS, but it's a lot easier if you can get a group of people to run LOIC (i.e. the group's power draws from numbers).
- A group of people that decide to do something is not necessarily a mob.
- Anonymous is just a description for a set of people. The set of people most likely to participate in these raids. The entirety of Anonymous doesn't participate in each and every raid. Just the raids that they have the time, and motivation to do. If you can describe Anonymous as a mob, then you can also extrapolate that to the entire population of the planet. The entire planet of a group of people where sometimes some people decide to form a group and do things based on common interests.
From your moral high horse can you see what the correct action to take is? More useless voting between two parties who take near identical actions?
Anonymous did what their target did. It was no more legal or illegal. If you want to punish them fine, but make sure you punish both criminals equally.
As we see in Egypt, fighting within the laws (which are just a list of rules made up by people in control) doesn't always give you the option to win.
I'm not sure that being "better" is what they are going for.
In one corner you have wikileaks, and anonymous challenging the state and a security firm, showing their cards against their will. In the other corner you have the government and a corporation trying to eliminate sources of criticism and dissent.
Wikileaks and Anonymous have won this round it seems, but when you have a battle on this scale that touches the very foundations of our government -- the very organism that determines what is legal and illegal, it seems that the normal rules just don't apply.
You shouldn't confuse legality with morality. Pointing out that something is illegal is not a very compelling argument that it's wrong. Imagine how ridiculous it would sound to chastise the Egyptians for breaking their curfew.
So you're saying intimidation, harassment and restricting speech is morally OK as long as it's loosely tied to an issue that you personally agree with?
People have been whining about how the DDOS is restricting the speech of MasterCard, not realizing that it has nothing to do with speech, and everything to do with adding an economic incentive to do the right thing.
While it also may be 'restricting speech' (corporate personhood has come a long way...) that's a side effect, not the reasoning or purpose.
"After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks. But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline. Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous. Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest. Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it's impossible to imagine that ever happening.
Why? Because crimes carried out that serve the Government's agenda and target its opponents are permitted and even encouraged; cyber-attacks are "crimes" only when undertaken by those whom the Government dislikes, but are perfectly permissible when the Government itself or those with a sympathetic agenda unleash them. Whoever launched those cyber attacks at WikiLeaks (whether government or private actors) had no more legal right to do so than Anonymous, but only the latter will be prosecuted."
Throwing around the term 'mob justice' is as meaningless as calling someone a 'freedom fighter.' Your freedom fighter is someone else's traitor/rebel/terrorist. I'm sure that Mubarak things that the Egyptians in the streets are trying to apply 'mob justice.'
As long as we're going all Socratic, why does the question of which is "worse" even matter?
We know what mob rule looks like. It's a failure state of human governance. Supplementing an imperfect system that can be metaphorically likened to mob rule with actual mob rule is not progress. I am not advocating for peacefully standing by while being beaten; I'm saying this is a bad tactic.
If you are concerned about injustice in the world, you can't make a more just world by committing your own injustices. No two people agree on how bad an injustice is; even if you think such things can be objectively measured somehow it is obvious that people in the real world don't agree on those objective measurements. Group A hits for 1 point, Group B measures that as a 2 point injustice and strikes back with a 2 point injustice of their own, Group A sees that as a 3 point injustice and strikes back with 3, and so on forever, until someone breaks the cycle. No amount of retaliation will ever make the society of A and B just, even though in my hypothetical example both sides are acting with perfect restraint and proportionality. (As you might imagine, this is the most unrealistic assumption my model makes.) However you intend to get to a just society, that's not it.
If you are concerned about injustice in the world, you can't make a more just world by committing your own injustices. No two people agree on how bad an injustice is
Your second statement is at war with your first. Clearly, people can compare injustices, or else there would be no such thing as "more just". They don't have to be able to assign scores to injustices, they just have to reason that an injustice they can't choose can be replaced by one they can choose. That's pretty much how justice works.
Your example was also shit. While it is common to escalate injustice as a game strategy, that's neither a hard rule nor how it's usually done. In my experience, pardons are far more common, and are in fact closer to theoretical optima. Eventually, someone breaks the cycle (pretty unjust, right?), and the injustices in the world dramatically reduce. And then there's all the undervaluations of injustice you ignored - the traditional justification for secrecy.
"Your second statement is at war with your first."
You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems. You spoke as if either we're only talking about one person doing the comparison or you've casually assumed there is the objective metric I explicitly mentioned in play. No contradiction.
"Your example was also shit."
And you're just looking for reasons to tear something apart without doing the hard work of examining what was actually being said. Your nits are irrelevant to my point. I didn't give a treatise on the full value of how to create justice in the world, I'm speaking to the example at hand of how "Anonymous" retaliated and how people are applauding it when they shouldn't be. No wonder you consider it "shit", you're not even willing to grapple with what I said. You haven't fairly valuated it in the first place.
You missed the switch to differing valuations between two different people, it seems.
No, I refuted the importance of it. My point was that while there might not be a universal, metric, objective measure of injustice agreed to by all involved, we don't actually need one to make social decisions (funny how three of the four qualifiers I used are essentially the same). Near Pareto efficiency exists for justice, and beyond that, numerous partial orderings have been developed over the millenia, based on perceived necessary conditions for the existence of societies.
Your nits are irrelevant to my point.
Then I must have misunderstood your point. It seemed to me that you claimed retaliation is always unjust and perfectly proportional retaliation is one-upmanship, and I don't agree at all. Since that's how I saw your argument, that's what I replied to.
You still are. The core point is different people will measure things differently. The point is that what Person A sees as a minor injustice that he committed against B, B sees as a major injustice because it happened to him. There's an old quote attributed to Mel Brooks where I found it online, though the core quote has been around longer than that: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die." That's the part of my point you're missing (and I do not think merely disagreeing with), people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people, let alone their enemies. Part of why I think you can't be disagreeing with it is this is undeniably true; people are not neutrally scrupulously fair on any level when it comes to their own possessions or desires. Everybody carries around an enormous self-bias, for various reasons, not all of them even bad.
Yes, society has come to some basic agreements, but that's not relevant to my point. I explicitly stated that retaliation isn't always unjust, and for another I also explicitly said that while each side perceived its retaliation as just the net effect is an unjust spiral. The perceptions are not the same on all sides. Every major conflict in the world is between a righteous and holy side that only commits justifiable and regrettable retaliation against the bad guys who inexplicably engage in acts of pure, unadulterated evil just for the fun of it and just won't leave us alone... and this describes the beliefs of both sides. Sticking the happy side of this label on "our side" with Anonymous is not something I'm ready to do, not ready to overlook the means to their ends, however wonderful the ends may be.
And none of this is a refinement of or a contradiction of anything else I've already said, just trying to lay the same basic point out yet more clearly.
people valuate injustices that happen to them much higher than things that happen to other people
That doesn't matter. Sure, people do disagree on things that involve them personally, but they aren't the only ones acting. Very often, people make judgements about matters that may later involve them or people they empathize with, on either side. These future people may or may not have had previous experience with the thing, but all that is required for them to act so as to lower expected injustice is that they empathize with someone on both sides. This act can be both unjust and reduce injustice, as long as the process is ongoing (so that the expected injustices and participants materialize).
> From where should a justice system derive its just powers?
One possibility is where a plurality of constituents agree either on a course of action, or believe an individual is qualified to act in their best interest. Obviously, this system has flaws (what happens when an elected person behaves selfishly?), but I'd argue it's more fair, in general, than a self-selected group executing their own agenda. We can't vote Anon out of power if we happen to stop believing their actions are just.
> Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?
It's not, but are you insinuating that it's okay to subvert an unjust justice system using any means necessary? Or any means that work? Or am I reading into this? I don't think the US justice system is so broken that it needs to be fixed by extralegal means, but maybe I'm naive.
> Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?
Altering that system would be a great thing! Abolishing it, I believe, would not. If you're suggesting anarchy as a viable replacement, I'm honestly curious if you can point to any examples of large-scale anarchy that worked well? Again, I might be reading too much into your question, and you might have meant simply replacing it with another system that is not anarchy.
Why have people downvoted fletiz's response to -1? I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it (I'm staying neutral in this discussion), but please - stop downvoting replies that you disagree with. This response, as far as I can see, was reasonable and considered.
I've never understood the idea that downvoting a comment for disagreeing with it is bad. Anyway, I also disagree that it's reasonable and considered. The comparisons are flip and cheap and build in false alternatives. Not all methods of altering or abolishing unjust systems are laudable, and finding anonymous to be reprehensible is compatible with agreeing that some of their targets are reprehensible also.
Downvoting for disagreeing is bad because your brain already does that for you, and very well at that. Votes regulate eyeballs, and should be awarded to comments that give you new insights, not ones that reaffirm your existing prejudices.
If you disagree with a comment that attempts to give thought to the issue at hand, please explain why you believe those thoughts to be wrong. This will force you to consider their thoughts and help others do so as well.
When talking about mob justice, don't just select for the mobs you like. Consider the brown shirts, the KKK, and other mobs, who also carried out there own versions of justice.
Anonymous could provide a lot of red meat for Wikileaks if they tried, I think. Or would that not be a leak anymore but a theft? Anonbreaks - Wikileaks in overdrive.
There's a lot of misunderstanding of what Anonymous is.
adrianwaj is Anonymous if you so chose. You could release a Word Document with "Aaron Barr" in the author field declaring a war on Egg McMuffins and sign it Anonymous. You probably would get no traction and be ignored...
Or a week later you might read about a bunch of 16 year olds throwing Egg McMuffins to the Elephant at the Bronx Zoo wearing woody wood pecker masks while singing Christina Aguilera's version of the national anthem.
There is no "Anonymous" in the sense of a coherent group. There are only specific acts that received enough interest to garner outside attention.
When you say "If they tried" you are missing the point. You could try.
Sort of like Jihad? Except here only for otherwise clearly unsavory responses to perceived threats against freedom vs otherwise clearly unsavory responses to perceived threats against Islam?
The argument lies whether the acts are actually unsavory, otherwise unsavory, if the perception of being a threat is correct and whether that threat is valid enough to justify a response. So when if ever does Jihadism/Anonymous go to far?
So Anonymous is really just a mask that can be put on. There is nothing that can keep either group in check except for how aligned each one is with the core values that it seeks to defend, and how that tension resolves. Why doesn't Anonymous rail against Jihad? Where people that might otherwise be labelled racist, however accurately or not, could then proceed with their actions without having that inhibition.
They do, on a small scale. Some folks create some blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad and post them on imageboards. Some people print them out and post IRL.
Pick anything and you'll probably find a group of people waving the Anon flag and rallying against it.
Anonymous is not an organization. It is just a bunch of people without a leader who hear someone suggest something, hear someone else give instructions, and then do it because they think it sounds smart. It's just like any other bunch of people doing that for any other thing, it doesn't have to be a DDOS or harassment. It could be religion. Some guys hear Muhammad or Buddha speak, think they're pretty smart, and decide to start doing what they say for a while; the group is not the taste-testers, but the devoted followers. Anonymous is the undefined mass; people with leaders in IRC rooms are the individual organizations plucked from an undefined, unorganized mass.
Treating Anonymous as a coherent group with a coherent leader is the same thing as saying "Humanity today DDOSes MasterCard", "I'm publishing a list of humanity's leaders", etc. It's a completely meaningless misnomer; there is no cohesion to humanity whereby one could direct any significant portion of the entirety of humanity, just as there is no cohesion to Anonymous -- it's just a group of people without definition or mission statement, and it is too broad to mean anything.
Heretofore most participants in "Anonymous" raids, etc., have been users of 4chan or similar message boards, but again, that's a very expansive and large group, there is no significant percentage of its users involved in any one attack or following any one leader or chain of command. It, like our previous example of the entirety of humanity, is too broad of a definition to have meaning.
An organization is not an organization until you have leaders and subordinates with definable positions. Before that, it is just a bunch of guys talking about ideas, some liking some, others liking others, and coming and going as they please, some involved in one event under the one marshal and then going to one held by another. That is not an organization, but a bunch of drifting, undecided people. And that's what Anonymous is, too.
You do not have a terrorist or criminal organization just because someone can drop in to a common forum and get a bunch of script kiddies to act as his personal botnet for a single event. The participants are not initiated into his group and they have no obligation, affiliation, responsibility, or position in it, they are just guys who heard an idea, thought it was cool, tried for a while, and moved on.
Not unlike setting up a news.arc forum called Anonymous and letting people upvote ideas to do certain things and anyone can join, and anyone can upvote. A forum like this doesn't exist per se, but that's the archetype. There'd be no (or optional) usernames either.
Things that involve scientology, wikileaks, involve lulz (uploading porn into YouTube), censorship or counteracting actions against the board get the most upvotes and galvanize the most people into action. There is no leader, but on certain items, there is someone that posts, and there are a few key contributors to the outcome of the item.
On that note, does an anonymous (not Anonymous) news.arc exist? Say an anonymous HN? (IE in effect randomizing usernames for each posting ...maybe public randomizing, but privately tied to the one user, that way users can have some degree of vested-ego, ie regarding karma, but publically be without inhibition-- maybe downvoting on the front page too, and more than -10 downvotes per comment)?
Is the cloak and principle that is called Anonymous an outcome of 4Chan?
A lot of what makes 4chan work is the lack of karma. There's no way to keep score on who said something popular or unpopular in the past, so each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms. I don't see a way to add karma to that without destroying that flatness.
"each post or comment is necessarily evaluated on its own terms" there is some extra overhead in doing that, and makes the user experience discontiguous for posters and readers.
Maybe it'd work whereby instead of just randomizing usernames, you'd just give the karma score of that user, (or rather their average comment score, or average comment score per day.)
I am definitely interested in going to a more anonymous forum, but which still has in-built controls against trolling. Given the age of this forum and my time on it, I want to start fresh with a new username (or username system) for some reason, but feel this is not the place to do it, and neither is 4Chan.
So the karma score on a comment would look like:
+/-xx | +/-xx.x | xx.x
comment score / avg comment score per day at time of posting / hours ago since comment posted capped at 24: items shut down after 24 hours.
You'd see if a person has excelled themselves in any one of their comments -- or it may be a troll comment from a smart user, which can also be funny or interesting. So when a comment is first posted, you look at the second number to see it's worth reading, after a while you can look at the first (or the second, or, one's own evaluation of the differences between the first two, or the three.)
There'd be no username tied with a comment, but you could see an extensive comment history privately, and you'd get a self-replying randomized daily email address that you give to someone if they want to see your metrics. Or instead, each comment has a <a href="randomnumber">user</a> link to show the profile page without (or without, not sure) comments, and has a customizable field.
I actually don't think it's such a bad idea for everybody to see Aaron's emails, so long as Aaron can see everybody else's emails. Pure transparency would be as entrapping as it would be liberating initially. So long as the transparency mechanism does not discriminate, I think it'd be awesome. You could pledge to go transparent when say 80% of your contacts do too. It'd be an interesting experiment regardless. Friends could see what you're up to and try to help (and you'd get to know someone better by seeing them in new contexts), emailing becomes like tweet messaging someone -- maybe a good startup idea, something like http://Hackerfollow.com on someone's emails, requiring mutual follows - you have to know who's following you and approve them, and the only emails shown to you are those between two people already on the network that have both approved you - the rest exclude you.
So when that comment talks about OODA, all of a sudden with this system the top of a hierarchy can intervene in the bottom, and the bottom knows what the top is talking about. The hierachy becomes a set of intersecting rings of different sizes, there's no top of bottom anymore.
I know some commenters support Anonymous because they would rather have that kind of chaos than government clamping down even further on the internet, and I agree.
But I think it's a false choice. Certainly we can acknowledge the mob that's Anonymous is a phenomenon that is not in our best interests. Surely we can acknowledge that having to choose between censorship and crime is a false choice, right? I don't have to choose between supporting the government in buying a new fire truck and letting my house burn down, do I?
>I don't have to choose between supporting the government in buying a new fire truck and letting my house burn down, do I?
I don't see how this choice is analogous. Anon has yet to threaten my interests, at least to any degree that would concern me. However, they have been a thorn in the side of those who have threatened my interest to a greater degree. This kind of battle is part of a healthy society.
I think democracy is rooted in the ability for a group of citizens to bring significant and disruptive challenges to institutionalized powers. Democracy is a social agreement in which all remains well as long as fairness more or less prevails. Currently, Anon seems a reasonable check.
Also, IMO crime is not something that shouldn't happen. It is just something that should carry risk and consequence. At times, crime should be committed. The protesters in Egypt are committing a crime. In some real ways, economic for one, their actions are disruptive and hurtful. But, they had to weigh the consequences and come to a decision.
Democracy is a social agreement in which all remains well as long as fairness more or less prevails.
"Democracy" doesn't have a darned thing to do with "fairness". Democracy means exactly one thing: the strength of the majority to force their will upon the minority. There's no reason to believe that the result will be fair in any known moral system, and plenty of historical examples where it hasn't been fair.
The problem is that there is no gradient with computers.
I either control my computer, or I dont. There is no middle ground.
I can either surf the internet and post anonymously, or I cannot.
Nobody in power is fighting for my right to do those things.
Everybody is more concerned about their own petty little secrets than about the freedom that I care about.
'Mob Rule' has a bad name, but the simple truth is that democracy and freedom is based around it. Warlords and Dictators, oppressive governments and totalitarian states dont exist because of 'Mob Rule', they exist because of the absence of it.
Eqypt is just now fighting for 'Mob Rule', and it is doing so with a mob.
'Mob Rule' is just another name for democracy.
Sometimes the mob can be ugly, when they hang witches or crucify innocent people, but it can also be awesomely constructive.
He's opposing a viewpoint that assumes that you can only have extremes which strengthens the belief that there are only two choices (two-valued orientation). Perhaps take a read of http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html ("The Edge of the Circle")? Do we really need to have complete anarchy or for the government to have complete authority? Seems like a bit of a slippery-slope fallacy to me.
The interesting bit is that these "security" companies actually work with various government agencies and get tons of taxpayer money. Most politicians are clueless about what computer security means and have even less of a clue about cyber terrorism so companies like HBGary continue to proliferate even though they offer absolutely nothing for public well being.
To me the statement 'Information wants to be free' isn't the statement it appears to be. It is a statement of policy and intent, not of literal fact.
It is not a true statement because I actually believe that every piece of data in the world literally should be available in the public ___domain, it is a true statement because the only way to achieve the alternative is to lock down and destroy a world of freedom and information that I have come to love with an abiding passion.
Successfully solving the problem of securing private government data from anonymous release over the internet requires that the internet as it exists now be destroyed.
Stopping me from freely copying music that exists on my computer requires that full control of my computer be unavailable to me.
Successfully solving the problem of ensuring centralised and secure online identification of individuals to stop online libel destroys the freedom of anonymous political dissent and organization.
I am deeply sympathetic to the political ideals of 'Anonymous' not because they are always right but because the nobody else in any position of authority or power appears to even recognise the problem.
Effectively, I am sympathetic to 'Anonymous' because there is no way for me not to be without also being against the freedoms that make them possible.