Eben is a very skilled rhetorician. Anyone trying to sell anything would do well to take notes. If he had a dash more narrative to the story, I think he'd nail it.
"Ok, that's the next 15 years of your life and mine. You're going to try to end anonymity on earth and I'm going to try to keep it. Because without anonymity the human race will not be human anymore."
"They [governments, business] are not going to be left to their devices... They are going to be left to our devices. And our devices are going to be about Freedom!"
With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.
Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.
Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms. Governments shall not infringe on the right of the people to encrypt any data that they use between two parties. This is not a trivial matter, this is the future of the human collective taking form here. Will everything we do be tracked, or will some of it be private?
> Encryption should be declared a munition, and get a slot right next to the right to bear arms.
Err, I don't think so, based on the following utilitarian argument:
First, more freedom in the network means more freedom in general. Evidence for this is easy to find. Encryption in particular does one thing and one thing only: preventing eavesdropping. That helps freedom of though, and even of speech (for small groups on a chat room, for instance).
Second, more arms means more dead people (not much, compared to car crashes and ageing, but still). Evidence is even easier to find. And as far as I know, it doesn't increase freedom in any interesting way.
Even beyond my judgement call, it should now be obvious that encryption and ammunitions have very different effects. Using one as an analogy for the other would be wildly inaccurate.
More arms means more dead people? The potential, perhaps, but I don't believe, even though for many years, we kept ramping up more and more nuclear arms, there was more and more nuclear destruction. You might say the presence of those weapons dissuaded another's use of them.
If you really want to make the argument that nuclear weapons haven't been a hugely destructive force, you need to wait until the game has ended.
They are still there, and the opportunity for them to generate a lot of dead people to prove you wrong may still arise.
That game isn't over yet.
>With anonymity, I can risk being who I want to be. I can say what I want to say and do what I want to do regardless of what anybody else wants.
>Without anonymity, I can't risk being who I want to be, saying what I want to say, doing what I want to do, because someone else might find out and give me trouble.
Yea, I know. Some of the problems can and should be fixed. For example, we need to move away from "legacy" PR based on controlling the message.
When I think about all the issues being addressed in many talks such as this, one thought comes to mind:
"This is why we can’t have nice things."
We have the technology, the skill and the knowledge to do so much we couldn't even dream about a decade ago, but everything we do seems to raise so many new issues of possible abuse. Always the same dual-use dilemma [1].
With every step forward, we need to make an additional step in every other direction just to make sure we aren't walking the plank.
He wants to make something that everyone can use. Freenet isn't there yet. (This doesn't meen that the FreedomBox software couldn't be built on top of Freenet or ship with Freenet, however.)
After he claimed that Apple is sponsoring LLVM/clang solely to undermine freedom, and said “The human race has a susceptibility to harm, but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record. He has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age", I have a hard time taking Moglen seriously.
Neither of these claims were made in the linked video btw. I would definitely recommend the linked video.
I am not sure when or how he made the LLVM claim, but I would understand Zuckerberg claim. Eben considers the right of anonymity a very important right and facebook has made the biggest assault on anonymity on the net ever. It is actually erie how they have managed to remove anonymity from a huge swats of the net without the users complaining at all.
Hidden, uncertain, common costs just aren't accounted for.
The loss of freedom is easily invisible, and the actual cost very hard to measure. Plus, it's a common. More individual freedom for others often mean more for yourself. (Case in point: anonymity: more other nodes means you're harder to find.) With those three effects, it's no wonder "no one cares" about freedom.
Facebook feels gratis, and even free, because (1) you don't pay money, and (2) you have an easy way to talk with other people. The advertisement you can live with, and the spying you don't even see. Few people could actually link Facebook's spying to changes in their present lives. (I'm not sure those that can are at liberty to speak their mind right now.)
He may be making extreme claims, but his accomplishments are truly amazing. This video is about one of his future plans; ignore the claims if you want, but listen what he is working on and why.
"Ok, that's the next 15 years of your life and mine. You're going to try to end anonymity on earth and I'm going to try to keep it. Because without anonymity the human race will not be human anymore."
"They [governments, business] are not going to be left to their devices... They are going to be left to our devices. And our devices are going to be about Freedom!"