One of the most important factors in changing laws and confronting oppressive forces is to create strong popular awareness and support for those opposing them. Among other things, this makes them far more risky and formidible as targets of opportunity for oppressors.
In this sense I hope very much that the cyberrights movement is maturing to recognise that technical means of fighting such oppression are, whilst necessary, not sufficient. EFF are showing an increased awareness of this (and to be fair, have been aware of this for a long time).
The explicit recognition of Alexandra Elbakyan, a personal hero to me, is not only richly deserved by a functionally useful step in fighting copyright overreach and publishing monopolies.
I think history will remember Alexandra Elbakyan as one of the most important figures of this century. She's very low-profile, but the work she's doing is of fundamental importance to humanity. Locking (usually publicly-funded) scientific knowledge behind obscenely-expensive paywalls is repugnant and should be criminal.
Earlier this week it was a Wired hit piece telling us Signal is full of alt-right boogymen and naziquadroons. Now they're the champions of digital freedom.
I would be dubious of privacy-focused services that are not full of nazis, criminals, and other unsavory individuals.
Journalists, whistleblowers, protesters and other "freedom fighter" needs are the same as criminals, in fact they may be criminals according to their local laws. You can't have one without the other.
Are you talking about the Wired piece linked by smartbit ?
If so this seems like an unfair summary given the piece is very long, the first half sings technical praise, the second half laments the challenges faced, and there's one single small paragraph (that I saw) that mentions some Signal users as possible boogymen:
The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize.
which seems more of a cautionary note rather than a hit piece.
No awards for Mozilla? EFF should really award Mozilla for keeping up with web standards using their own browser engine instead of just being Chromium copycat.
> Library Freedom Project is radically rethinking the library professional organization by creating a network of values-driven librarian-activists taking action together to build information democracy. LFP offers trainings, resources, and community building for librarians on issues of privacy, surveillance, intellectual freedom, labor rights, power, technology, and more—helping create safer, more private spaces for library patrons to feed their minds and express themselves. Their work is informed by a social justice, feminist, anti-racist approach, and they believe in the combined power of long-term collective organizing and short-term, immediate harm reduction.
I'm really struggling to see evidence of any of this on their website.
All I see, from an org that started in 2015, is:
* A handful of cartoonish, mile-high-overview posters and booklets, most of them formatted for printing, not viewing...none of which have been updated in four years. It's like flipping open your car manual to the section on "driver controls" and seeing: "you should use your vehicle's wipers if it is raining" and nothing more on the matter.
* A huge amount of effort put into listing all their many members and their specialties, dwarfing all their other forms of content - but yet, virtually nobody including the founder seems to have the slightest education, work background, published (or otherwise) papers, presentations given at conferences, projects...nothing... in related fields. Correction: Alison has a wikipedia page which explains more, but that's an awfully thin resume for someone heading a digital privacy project these days
* Two courses, which ran once, for which there is little to no information, no materials for others to run the courses, etc?
* No "immediate harm reduction" resources anywhere in sight; no invitation to contact them for help or to volunteer, except for paid engagements for the executive director
* An executive director who hasn't been on social media in two years?
This really looks like a typical "professional organization" that is little more than a resume stuffer. For an org with a hundred plus members their work product is basically nill.
This is a perfect example of how not to be taken even remotely seriously by anyone, with a cartoonishly exaggerated logo, no citations or references or even the most rudimentary details...not to the mention the accessibility issues from the font:
This "vendor scorecard" is useless paper-pushing that doesn't in any way, shape, or form help someone interpret their vendor's privacy policies and data sharing policies, which are written intentionally to obfuscate: https://libraryfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/LFP-Ve...
Alexandra Elbakyan is a real life hero. She's done more for the democratization of science than just about any person alive at the moment, and at great personal expense.
Maybe it doesn't sell all your data, but Signal's threat model is surveillance capitalism alone:
>The application uses a centralized computing architecture
>Registration for desktop use requires an iOS or Android device
>Signal uses mobile telephone numbers as an identifier for users.
>OWS had received a subpoena requiring them to provide information associated with two phone numbers for a federal grand jury investigation in the first half of 2016. Only one of the two phone numbers was registered on Signal, and because of how the service is designed, OWS was only able to provide "the time the user's account had been created and the last time it had connected to the service".
Which are big regressions compared to predecessors pgp and otr.
This is a cute but IMHO misinformed take. This is not left wing and you cannot do just privacy. Also, private sectors havr to follow the rules of the state they are operating in - the state can make uo whatever rules. So the state is the main problem.
I'm not sure Elbakyan receiving this award is particularly appropriate, considering she is strongly pro-Putin and is a big fan of Joseph Stalin (she regularly quotes him on VK).
It's not relevant at all. What is, is that she has been founding and leading figure behind the largest e-library and probably the biggest contributor to the anti-copyright movement by that alone.
Support of Putin and Stalin are among a slim majority in Russia, too. You cannot denigrate somebody's achievements because you disagree with what they have to say outside of them. If you want to do that, you may as well deny James Watson's contributions to DNA science.
You mean she is a Russian. Being a Russian implies that if you want to stay alive as a highly visible Russian that you are pro-Putin, regardless of how you really feel. If you don't then there is a good chance that you will be declared a foreign agent and end up in jail or dead. The realities of living in present day Russia should not be underestimated.
Have a look at Zemfira, another Russian who did speak out against Putin. And Zemfira is a lot more popular than Elbakyan is in Russia. That said I have no evidence one way or another what Elbakyans real position is on any of this but I'd be careful to judge, especially for someone who is in the crosshairs of many powerful and wealthy organizations.
As for Stalin: there are no excuses for Stalins wrongs. And yet, you'd be surprised how many Russians to this date revere him. This along the lines of 'he was a bastard, but at least he was our bastard'. He kept Hitler at bay on the Eastern front (at massive cost in lives) and that alone makes him a hero in the eyes of many in Russia. In that sense he has some of the same feelings associated with his person that for instance Churchill in the UK has or Roosevelt and Truman in the United States. From a Western point of view any appreciation for Stalin is likely moderated by what happened during the cold war but from a Russian POV, especially with the massive propaganda machine there you have to contend with a severely distorted image.
This is very complex and Russians (also those in exile) are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that this time around they are the bad guys. It's obvious to me and to you but patriotism is a weird force that can cause all kinds of cognitive dissonance to be suppressed and for people to stop seeing clearly. Germans are still struggling with this today (to some extent, but hopefully less every year) and I suspect that Russians will have similar problems for many decades to come. Ukraine will be rebuilt but Russia will be a pariah state without a chance of parole and you can expect people inside Russia to be living in a state of denial and confusion for long after this is over.
Um. Interesting. I knew about Elbakyan's Sci-Hub work, but until now I never knew she believes Joseph Stalin is a god: https://sci-hub.se/why-stalin-is-god
>Hence even if nobody considered Stalin to be a God, he was a real God - in the truest sense of the word, as we can see from the high level of love people had towards him. Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin...
>Hence Stalin was not just an ancient pagan god - but he was that God christians believe in. In a critical moment for the country and for the whole humanity he came down to Earth, wearing a cool mustache avatar, and restored the order: he revived economics and created the powerful science. He created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG. He won the war against the evil forces of Hitler, and even restored Israel, as he promised to do long time ago.
There are plenty of very weird viewpoints commonly promoted in Russia. But then again, the same goes for many other places on Earth, I don't think there are many populations that are 100% sane and rational in all of their beliefs.
A lot of American "Libertarian" techbros are extremely pro-Russia and pro-Putin. It's not surprising that they have given Elbakyan this award.
Privacy and espionage is not the only reason we Europeans should detach from Silicon Valley as fast as possible. Using services owned by libertarian VC people like David Sachs is akin to willingly handing data out to Putin.
In this sense I hope very much that the cyberrights movement is maturing to recognise that technical means of fighting such oppression are, whilst necessary, not sufficient. EFF are showing an increased awareness of this (and to be fair, have been aware of this for a long time).
The explicit recognition of Alexandra Elbakyan, a personal hero to me, is not only richly deserved by a functionally useful step in fighting copyright overreach and publishing monopolies.