Society

You can't say Prison

Say Guantanamo, and most people will think of human rights abuses and prisoners in orange clothes being mistreated, maltreated, denied basic human rights and denied legal representation. All this by a free democratic country. Karen Greenberg (Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and is the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and editor of The Torture Debate in America.) writes an interesting note on the blog TomDispatch about how Gunatanamo may be addressed by the media.

It is very difficult not to think Orwellian thoughts about the control of language being the control of society.

  1. Guantanamo is not a prison.
  2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only enemies.
  3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence — or, once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant.
  4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo.
  5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting on Guantanamo.
  6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable information — especially today.
  7. Guantanamo contains no individuals — inside the wire or out.
  8. Guantanamo’s deep respect for Islam is unappreciated.
  9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce.
  10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions.
  11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back.

Feeling all warm and fuzzy inside – knowing that these are the people claiming to be fighting for freedom and democracy worldwide…

(via Markmedia)

Posted on by mklang

Technology Ethics Report

UNESCO has recently published a report entitled “Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies” – The work was carried out by Mary Rundle and Chris Conley (Net Dialogue) at UNESCO’s request. Here is the text from the press release

In presenting results of this examination, the report first tells an introductory story of how the technologies covered relate to one another. Next, infoethics goals are presented. Then, for each technological trend surveyed, the report contains a short chapter drafted in lay terms to provide an overview of the relevant technology and to highlight ramifications and concerns. The report then summarizes this infoethics analysis and revisits the story of the emerging technologies. Finally, the report offers recommendations on ways to advance infoethics goals in anticipation of these oncoming technologies.

The ethical, legal and societal implications of ICTs are one of the three main priorities of UNESCOâ??s Information for All Programme and UNESCO was recently designated as the Facilitator for the implementation of Action Line C10 â??Ethical Dimensions of the Information Societyâ?? of the Geneva Action Plan adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society.

The full report is available here. At a first glance the 89 page report seems interesting and relevant. I am looking forward to  reading it.

(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

On not pulling my weight

Sometimes I really feel that I don’t have the energy to mobilize against the next stupid/dangerous/horrifying/hair-brained scheme proposed by some evil/half-witted/misguided (take your pick) parliament. So I relax and let others write and argue for causes that I also should be arguing. It’s complacency legitimized with sentiments such as “I have a lot to do right now” or “I don’t have time to understand this new threat” etc.

This has been the way in which it was with the new Swedish proposal on digital surveillance. Yes, yes I know that this is not going to be a good thing. Yes, yes I know that the politicians are either intentionally lying to the people or are too stupid to understand what they are actually doing (I often wonder which is worse?) – but look I really don’t have the time or energy right now. Lots of work, lots of personal shit, lots of everything. So I lean back and let others write. The more I read the more I realize that my words are unnecessary.

Then today I read Oscar Swartz blog on the topic (his blog is excellent – unfortunately, or naturally, in Swedish) and I realized something. It’s not a matter of whether or not my voice is needed. Of course it isn’t needed. Not mine, personally. But by leaning back and letting others do the work I am making others work a little bit harder. It’s like being on a tug-of-war team that may still win even if one team member isn’t pulling his/her weight. Damn! I knew I should have been active earlier. Guilt bores its way under my skin, my orginal annoyance at the suggestion has been fermenting for much too long.

So here it is.

The proposed FRA law in brief is that the National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets radioanstalt – FRA) shall be given the power to listen to all cable based communication (yes that means everything on the Internet) which crosses Sweden’s borders. The idea is that only international communication (i.e. communication exiting Sweden) will be monitored. Basically since even most national Internet communication passes over international borders the focus on international communication is only a way of pacifying the general population.

Basically the idea is to force all Internet and Telecom providers to copy all communications to state surveillance systems. This means telephones, email, chat, websites, comments on blogs – the works.

Naturally in the age of doublespeak the proposed mass violation of integrity is legitimized by the need to protect the democratic country. People will lose their rights and be viewed as criminals as a default. This will not protect the country. It may help catch people after they have done something but it will not (it cannot) prevent actions.

To make matters worse – oh yes it can be worse – the surveillance is not being carried out by the police. Why is this important?

Well the police have to follow due process. This means in practice that when the police want to bug someone they need to have probable cause to suspect a crime. This new system will make this unnecessary. Everyone will be under surveillance and the state may now order special surveillance on individuals or groups who are not suspected of crimes but who hold political views which are “wrong” – oops now we lost freedom of thought.

Sweden has a long tradition of presenting itself as a bastion of democracy. But this is old stuff. The last decade has seen Sweden shed these ideas and attempt to rush to the forefront of lowlife nations who feel the need to enact a surveillance regime which would have made big brother green with envy.

So what can be done? What did Oscar do to get me going? He just reminded me that the most important feature in a society is the ability of its members to remain active against opposition. To talk, to write and to maintain a voice of dissent – especially when the odds are stacked against us.

Posted on by mklang

Last Lines

The opening lines to any work are obviously of great importance. Many writers spend a lot of time and effort to get the line just right. One of my favourite opening lines is from Camus “The Stranger”. The confusion and sadness in the opening lines both sets the stage and sums up the confusion of the character.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I donâ??t know. I had a telegram from home: â??mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.â?? That doesnâ??t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.

Closing lines rarely recieve the same amount of attention – which is strange. The importance of opening and closing is not limited to fictional works. Academic works also attempt lift their work with opening and closing lines. Here are a few examples:

Democracy and its critics (Dahl 1989): Yet the vision of people governing themselves as political equals, and possessing all the resources and institutions necessary to do so, will I believe remain a compelling if always demanding guide in the search for a society in which people may live together in peace, respect each other’s intristic equality, and jointly seek the best possible life”

Water Wars (Shiva 2002): The struggle over the kumbh, between gods and demons, between those who protect and those who destroy, between those who nurture and those who exploit, is ongoing. Each of us has a role in shaping the creation of the future. Each of us is responsible for the kumbh – the sacred water pot.

A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971): Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

Free Speech: A philosophical enquiry (Schauer 1982): There will always remain some hard cases, but many of them are not as hard as they may at first sight appear.

My own last line: Discarding the technology entails a limited, regulated use but will fail to recognise the full potential of disruptive technologies as an agent of change within the participatory democracy.

Some last lines attempt to sum up the whole work, some attempt to sum up the last chapter, others simply finish of the final chapter. Obviously there must be a last line in a book and this line need not have any particular function in itself – but it seems a bit of an anti-climax when the last line of a good book has no other desire than to end the book.

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons v3

A bit late to blog about the obvious but at the same time it feels wrong not to blog about such a central event in the Creative Commons project. Anyway the news is (if you haven’t heard about it already) that CC now has released its latest versions of the license. Welcome to version 3.0.

The latest version of the Creative Commons licenses â?? Version 3.0 â?? are now available. To briefly recap what is different in this version of the licenses:

Separating the â??genericâ?? from the US license

As part of Version 3.0, we have spun off the â??genericâ?? license to be the CC US license and created a new generic license, now known as the â??unportedâ?? license. For more information about this change, see this more detailed explanation.

Harmonizing the treatment of moral rights & collecting society royalties

In Version 3.0, we are ensuring that all CC jurisdiction licenses and the CC unported license have consistent, express treatment of the issues of moral rights and collecting society royalties (subject to national differences). For more information about these changes, see this explanation of the moral rights harmonization and this explanation of the collecting society harmonization.

No Endorsement Language

That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that â?? as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies â?? there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

BY-SA â?? Compatibility Structure Now Included

The CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses will now include the ability for derivatives to be relicensed under a â??Creative Commons Compatible License,â?? which will be listed here. This structure realizes CCâ??s long-held objective of ensuring that there are no legal barriers to people being able to remix creativity in the way that flexible licenses are intended to enable. More information about this is provided here.

Clarifications Negotiated With Debian & MIT

Finally, Version 3.0 of the licenses include minor clarifications to the language of the licenses to take account of the concerns of Debian (more details here) and MIT (more details here).

As part of discussions with Debian, it was proposed to allow the release of CC-licensed works under DRM by licensees on certain conditions â?? what was known as the â??parallel distribution languageâ?? but this has not been included as part of Version 3.0 of the CC licenses.

Below is a list of CC blog posts about Version 3.0:

Getting to Version 3.0
Version 3.0 â?? Public Discussion Launched
Version 3.0 â?? Revised License Drafts
Version 3.0 â?? Itâ??s Happening & With BY-SA Compatibility Language Too

Posted on by mklang

Sweden wants cluster bombs

Todayâ??s op-ed piece in the local newspaper Göteborgs Posten is written by Frida Blom the chairperson for Svenska Freds- och Skiljedomsföreningen which is Swedenâ??s largest organization for piece peace. The reason for her article is the Norwegian conference beginning today aimed at bringing about a reduction in the use of cluster bombs.

Apparently Sweden is going to back away from earlier promises to lead and call for reductions in the use of cluster bombs. In December 2006 the Swedish Minister of Defence replied to questions in parliament stating that the governments was going to play an active role in international work against cluster bombs including working for an international ban and actively participated in the coming Norwegian conference on banning cluster bombs. The minister also stated that he was going to do away with Swedenâ??s supply of a (all?) cluster bombs (bombkapsel 90), create a Swedish ban on cluster bombs, and stop the production of bombkapsel 90 for the Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fighter.

Now it seems that the Minister has discovered that Sweden needs cluster bombs to defend Sweden. So he unfortunately cannot keep his word.

The latter position is either ignorance or bullshit on a higher level. Cluster bombs are not useful defensive tools. They are small bombs which spread over a large area. Many do not detonate, which has the effect of making re-building society after a war a costly and painfully slow process.

Dr. Strangelove

So why would the minister change his mind? Cash is king. No point in trying to sell the fighter planes if you also cannot sell the messy stuff.

Aaa â?? Swedish neutrality. Hypocrisy on a higher level.

Posted on by mklang

Sweden to criminalise DoS attacks

It does not come as a surprise to read (in Swedish here) that Sweden is on it’s way to criminalise denial of service attacks. This is unsurprising since it is simply another step in the obvious direction of EU harmonisation following the framework decision on attacks against information systems. The latter framework decision is part of a general scheme to fight against terrorism and organised crime within the information society.

The problem is that criminalising DoS attacks in this way makes all DoS attacks illegal. Even if an attack is carried out in the form of political protest, in other words, not terrorism, not organised crime. For example, in a case settled in 2006 where the Frankfurt Appelate Court found the groups â??Libertadâ?? and â??Kein Mensch ist illegalâ?? (No Human is Illegal) had carried out a legitimate form of political protest when they organised 13000 people in an online blockade (With a script- client- based distributed denial of service attack) of the airline Lufthansa. The protest was against the companies part in the deportation of asylum seekers (for more see links below).

When states now criminalise the act of DoS they also make sure that this tool cannot be used as a form of political protest. Therefore the regulators go far beyond their intention and scope of preventing terrorism and organised crime.

A more paranoid person may suspect that the regulator is using the label of terrorism to create rules which limit our ability to use technology in political communications… Read more about the “unintended” negative consequences for democracy, which occur when regulators attempt to control technology in my thesis: Disruptive Technology.

—

Decision by the Frankfurt Appellate Court (in German only, 22.05.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/service/downloads/pdf/olg220506.pdf

Statement by Libertad on the ruling (in German only, 1.06.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/inhalt/projekte/depclass/verfahren/libpe010606.shtml

In German (1.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/73755
In English (2.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/73827

Posted on by mklang

Open Access Petition

Have you signed the “Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results”? No? Well there is still time. The purpose of the petition is to register support for free and open access to European research and for the recommendations proposed in the EU’s ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe‘.

Read more about the petition and sign it here. Over 18000 have already signed but there is always room for more.

Posted on by mklang

Free and open access to European research results

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics, lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition, including CERN, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rector’s Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts & Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition’s sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC, the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe.  Published in early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles.  In particular, the first recommendation called for ‘Guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication’.

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to convey the overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC study.

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: ‘Maximising public investment in European research and making more widely available its outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance the global standing of European research and compete in a global market. JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals and which has already attracted such widespread support.’

One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: “Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don’t know where the cutting edge is?”

The petition is available at: www.ec-petition.eu

The EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe is available here.

The petition is sponsored by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Posted on by mklang

Cultural Relativism and Resistance

Itâ??s difficult to identify and define resistance but one basic feature (which is overlooked) is the fact that resistance can very rarely be unconscious. Resistance is a conscious act carried out for the purpose of resistance. This is usually not a problem since it is reasonably easy to see that those who resist have made a conscious decision to do so. The issue with conscious choice is usually discussed in situations where the courts believe that the act is criminal rather than activism.

But there is another side of the coin. Should resistance studies also advocate a normative approach? In other words should those studying resistance also advocate resistance? This question of the normative approach is actually not so unique. It stems from the discussion of cultural relativity. This discussion (simplified) is engaged in the argument whether a culture has the right to condemn or condone acts it finds abhorrent when these occur within another culture?

These thoughts are sparked off by a trip to India. Mumbai is an energetic city filled with young educated people looking for good, well-paid jobs â?? preferably with a multinational corporation. This in itself is not a problem. But within this modern culture they also manage to incorporate traditional values. In a discussion on marriage and relationships the young and educated all felt comfortable with traditional family life. This included, naturally, the role of the women as subservient to the man, the wife subservient to the mother-in-law etc.

India is a complex fascinating society. But it also challenges many of my values. In particular the family values and gender roles â?? but it also places demands on me. Should the Indians resist their traditional family roles? Or is my approach to family and frustration at the lack of resistance among them simply a western approach on steroids?

Should the resistance scholar advocate resistance? Is this a question of academic detachment or method?

Posted on by mklang