Thoughts on Technology and Liberty

Technology, Theory and Ideas

I was chatting with Robert about technology. As I mentioned on my own blog, I got a couple of cool geek toys for Christmas.

One is kind of passive, but awesome for audio/video geekery; a DVD recorder. Not only does it play DVD’s (and music and picture CD’s) very well, but it records just about any sort of DVD you might want, including DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW and DVD+R DL. And it does it from my satellite receiver, TiVo, iLink from our DV video camera and an extra input on the front to allow adding just about any other device you might want to add. The front input includes S-Video, so I could probably hook up my laptop and record from there if I wanted to. Of course, this doesn’t really have a lot to do with liberty, except that it certainly makes things easier for accumulating entertainment without being quite so beholden to media monopolies. Of course, since it’s a Sony DVD recorder, they prevent you from recording movies with “copy protection”, even though you should be able to under fair use. Not a really big deal to me, but it is typical of the media industry that they want to prevent you from reasonable and legal activities because you might do something illegal. They might have it consulting services (in this case, cybersecurity) in place which could prevent you from recording their movies! The shenanigans I tell you!

The other geek toy I got, though, is what had Robert and I talking and got us onto the topic of technology and liberty. I got a Palm Treo 650 for Christmas from my wife. Now, for a computer tech geek, this is one of the ultimate in geek toys, in my opinion. Especially if you are into continous communication, network and data access. Aside from the normal, and very cool, PDA functions you can get in a Palm, the Treo is also a cell phone compatible with GSM/GPRS/EDGE cell networks (i.e. 3G and 5G cell networks). Aside from the fact that a lot of people still might not trust technology fully and wonder is 5G harmful or bad for the society, no one could really debate its benefits. With a data connect plan from your cell provider, you can access the internet at somewhere around high-end modem speeds. It can help make every activity across most devices faster and highly efficient. Then, with the addition of GoodLink, VersaMail or XpressMail (depending on your situation), you can get access to your personal and corporate email. On top of that, I discovered KMaps, a completely free open source geo-mapping tool for PDA’s using Google Maps. And much, much more, including instant messaging, calendard, universal address book capabilities, bluetooth connectivity, MP3 player ……. okay, I guess that gets the point across.

Anyhow, the driving force in technology is really to accomplish a vision of access to any data that you need, at any time, from anywhere. Businesses are one of the things benefitting most by this new technology serge, whether they are big or small. There are now more companies than ever offering IT support (such as the IT Support Melbourne small business companies benefit from), that help businesses use the newest forms of technology and equipment they’re able to. This therefore helps businesses to be constantly growing and expanding with the times. We humans have been working towards that goal since the first set of grunts used for communication between our ancestors a million years ago. Once we have the data, we can turn it into knowledge. And that is what has allowed us to reach the point we are at today, on the verge of leaving our planet with enough humans to assure the survival of the race even if our planet were to die. Not that we will accomplish that in the next year, or even the next decade, but it isn’t that far off. The point of data and knowledge is survival, of course. But the survival we are talking about has changed significantly. For tens of thousands of years it was survival of the individual, the family, the local group. About 200 years ago that began to change dramatically. To the point where, today, the typical individual in an industrial nation doesn’t need to be concerned with individual survival, as a general rule. We have reached the point today where the focus of our data and knowledge is a whole different level of survival. And our drive for access to data has led us to the point where we are getting very close to the realization of any data, any time, any where. My Treo is one of those major steps towards it, as is the Internet, worldwide cell networks that carry data and so forth.

The question is, from a perspective of individual liberty, is this good, or bad? There are a lot of truly negative things, things that governments, unscrupulous individuals, monopolistic companies, etc. can take advantage of and gain much more control over individuals. Databases that allow querying of information about individuals. Cell phones can be tracked within the cell network, which is why a cellular tower lease buyout is so lucrative for the seller; they are in high demand. Spy satellites can take pictures of individual humans. And on and on the list goes. It seems that every new technology enables new ways to control and monitor us.

And yet, if it weren’t for these technologies and the knowledge they give us access to, we as humans would be mired in the life of a peasant in the middle ages. As, indeed, many humans on this planet still are. Without the printing press we could not have spread knowledge far and wide so that the Anglo-Saxon traditions of individual freedom, constitutionally limited government and rule of law was considered the norm in much of the world today. Liberal ideas about the value of individuals and the role of the market would not have been possible. The American Revolution was almost completely enabled by technology that provided easy access to knowledge. Indeed, the printing press was a two edged sword, giving government bureaucracies enormously more data, easily accessible, for the constable and the tax collector to use. Two hundred years later the Czech’s used fax machines to communicate rapidly and securely and create the Velvet Revolution that led to the downfall of communism in Czechoslovakia. And today the Internet enables the rapid spread of information that every government would much prefer is not even spread slowly.

The truth is, technology is, itself, neutral. The question is what we humans will do with the power the technology confers upon us. We are quick to see the negatives, the NSA eavesdropping on conversations, police forces maintaining databases on all citizens, networked camera systems tracking people’s movements, and so much more. But what we miss is that this technology empowers the sovereign individual. Loosely coupled networks of humans are inherently becoming uncontrollable. We have seen it time and again, in the Soviet Union, China, our own country, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and many other places. We have seen the failure of first IBM and now Microsoft to stop the rise of loosely coupled developer and user networks bringing better, more usable, freer technologies to the table. The truth is that ignorance is the weapon of the oppressor and knowledge is the weapon of the free individual.

I wouldn’t be scared of things like always on connections to the network. The police can never keep up with all of us. I wouldn’t be scared of things like massive databases available to government bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies cannot make decisions as fast as the same number of peer to peer networked individuals can. I don’t worry that Microsoft and Chevron and GM will forever dominate what choices we have as consumers. Open Source methods are already proving to innovate faster and more effectively, while proving to be more resilient than the big guys ever imagined. Open Source is so effective that the methods, perhaps not called that, are popping up all over the place. Like blogs, for example. And look how fast a blog swarm happens, and how effective it can be (e.g. Rathergate). Decentralization, loose coupling of networks (whether computers, people, or businesses), and rapid dissemination of knowledge are the tools that the oppressors fear. They try to make them work for them, but we see, time and again, where that fails and we “little folk” win out.

Don’t fear technology and what it brings. Embrace it, use it, enjoy it.

I’m Alive!

General

I think the insanity is finally coming to an end. I have had a major project at work that was going on right through the holiday, but we seem to finally be in the homestretch. As a couple of people know, I’ve been working 15+ hours a day since about the Dec. 12th, give or take. I didn’t work Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but spent those with my family, of course. This week the workload hasn’t been as bad, but I seriously needed a break, so I left the blog, etc. alone.

Now that I’m back, I’ll catch up on email, see what’s happened in the world and get back into the swing of things. This project will keep taking up more time than normal, so my blogging levels will probably be lower than they have been in the past. And I do need to make my focus family and work first, blogging and online stuff second.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas, I know I did.

Massachusetts Attempts to Ban All Firearms

Constitution, Individual Rights, Keep and Bear Arms

ALERT TO MASSACHUSETTS READERS: Move, Now, before they ban breathing and eating without a license.

Seriously, this is quite possibly the worst piece of legislation I’ve ever read in my entire life:

http://www.mass.gov/legis/bills/house/ht02/ht02125.htm

Yes, they want complete registration of ALL firearms, and compulsory liability insurance for all firearms, with a $250,000 minimum liability limit, failure to comply punishible by mandatory five years in prison!

Additionally, all handgun licenses will be reviewed by a 9 member board before issuance, and this is the great part, look at how they want to construct the board:

“The board shall consist of nine individuals, one of whom shall be a member of the gun owners action league, one of whom shall be a member of stop handgun violence, one of whom shall be a police chief selected from a list of four selected by the police chiefs association, one of whom shall be a district attorney selected from a list of three selected by the district attorney’s association, and one of whom shall be the director of the firearms records bureau within the criminal history systems board.”

I see… so suddenly a representative from an anti-gun political action organization is qualified to judge the competency and safety of applicants?

Who wrote this, Sarah Brady (well… that’s entirely possible).

Lets see reading further on, a one firearm a month hard limit (it’s a practical limit now since you need a permit to purchase each individual firearm unless you have an unrestricted license which they almost never give out).

Ahhhh, but here’s the kicker:

“All weapons as defined in section 121 including, but not limited to, firearms, large capacity weapons, rifles and shotguns sold within the commonwealth without a safety device designed to prevent the discharge of such weapon by unauthorized users and approved by the colonel of the state police including, but no limited to, mechanical locks or devices designed to recognize and authorize, or otherwise allow the firearm to be discharged by its owner or authorized user, by solenoid use-limitation devices, key activated or combination trigger or handle locks, radio frequency tags, automated fingerprint identification systems or voice recognition, provided, that such device is commercially available, shall be defective and the sale of such weapons shall constitute a breach of warranty under section 2-314 of chapter 106 and an unfair and deceptive trade act or practice under section 2 of chapter 93A.”

Ahh yes, all weapons not smart guns are hereby declared defective and unsafe and are now banned; oh and anyone who’s ever manufactured and sold one can now be sued.

Yes folks, it’s an effective ban on all firearms within the commonpoverty of taxachusetts.

Oh and for a final kick, anyone not a licensed FFL selling or otherwise transmore than two firearms in a 12 month period – no matter who they are sold to, lawfully or not – is mandatorily sentenced to a minimum of 10 years in prison without parole.

Honestly, I am not capable of editorializing this in an adequately derisory way without resorting to excessive vulgarity, therefore I will leave the spluttering and descending red curtains of blood to my gentle readers.

Crossposted from : The AnarchAngel

Public and Private Information

Constitution, General, Individual Rights, Privacy

Fuz posits the following:

“What if two vehicles are hustling along a rural road, doing low-80s in a 75-limit zone, and a Highway Patrol vehicle comes from the opposite direction, suddenly pulls over, reverses direction, and catches up?

The patrol car hovers behind the rear of the two vehicles for about 4 minutes, then passes, hovers behind the front-runner for a few minutes, then lights up and pulls the front-runner over?

Mama-san, passenger with me in the rear vehicle, asks “Why didn’t he just pull the guy over instead of waiting so long?”

I, driver of the rear vehicle, replied “He ran the plates.”

“Wouldn’t he do that after pulling him over?”

“No, he wants to make sure he’s not pulling over some psycho who’ll try to shoot him. He wants to know whether this will be a one-unit stop, or a two- or three-unit. A bench warrant, multiple traffic violations, expired registration, Al Qaeda, you name it. Run the plates first, know what you’re getting into.”

Then the wheels were turning. He surely ran our plates too. Hmmmm, the patrolman was probably thinking, serviceman and his wife and kiddies. Nothing interesting here . . . The guy in the front tripped the radar. What about him?

Which makes me wonder: how many times have my plates been run, either by obviously marked patrol vehicles or air units or by unmarked just weaving through busy traffic? What about when optical-character recognition technology is mated with radar camera units and fast, fast realtime connection to the databases, allowing hundreds of plates to be “run” per minute? The potential there for loss of privacy would be staggering. The anonymity of the herd would be gone if it isn’t already. The consequences of minor errors, either in the tag records themselves or in the data pipeline between the camera and the DMV, would be enormous.

Johnny Law will assert that he has the power to use government-owned information and commercially-available technology to enhance the apprehension of lawbreakers. How can one object, unless one is caught redhanded and wriggling to escape? The syllogism: the innocent have nothing to fear, therefore the fearful are not innocent.

So how should the civil libertarian respond to this development?“

As unfortunate as this is, there is no rational libertarian argument against the actions of the officer as laws currently stand.

License plates are the property of the state. By affixing them to your vehicle, and operating it on the public roads, you are implicitly giving the state the authority to view these plates and to access the public records associated with them. You are a walking, or driving, public record background check. An open book.

Now as to whether this data can be collected and indefinitely retained for criminal investigation, surveillance, or profiling purposes, that’s another question entirely. When it comes to handling individuals who have committed crimes, it is important that officers or employers are properly checking criminal records, as this could make a difference in getting the right convictions.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that there are times when people need to gather deep levels of intelligence regarding a person or a business. Should this need arise, a private investigator can help you with a covert surveillance investigation. Surveillance programs can provide both audio and visual data to show what somebody has been doing throughout their day, or what activities a company has been up to.

To elaborate, if you have suspicions about who might be involved with regular criminal activity that is having an impact on you or your business, then hiring the best Private Investigator Surrey BC has to offer can help you to reach a more definitive conclusion. Whenever these kinds of doubts arise, and you need evidence to back up your instincts, then surveillance is a powerful option available to you.

Numerous times, in many courts, the argument has been presented that an officer could not arrest someone, because they had no probable cause to run the plates which resulted in a warrant hit and subsequent traffic stop. In all cases these arguments have been dismissed because the plate number is indeed public information; as is your vehicle registration, and any number of other records that many individuals assume to be private.

I had a similar incident happen just the other day. I was driving home just above the speed limit, when a super trooper got up close enough to me to read my plate, then backed off for about 2 minutes, then accelerated and passed me by. My fiancee seated next to me wondered about his behavior and I said “He was running the plate”, to which she responded, “Well, it’s not like we’ve got anything to worry about”.

That reminded me of something that happened to me a few years back. I was driving just at the limit when a local cop pulled in behind me for about five minutes, ran my plates, and then pulled me over. Unbeknownst to me, I had a bench warrant for an unpaid ticket. When I asked the officer why he ran my plate, he answered with refreshing honesty “Because I had nothing better to do”.

This is a basic principle of law, in that public information can be used for any purpose not specifically prohibited by law; and that includes vehicle registration, driving records, birth, death, and marriage records, certain tax and travel records… I could go on.

So what they are doing is in no way illegal, or unconstitutional. The question is, SHOULD IT BE specifically prohibited by law?

Honestly, with the current regulatory regime we live under in our society, this is a perfectly justifiable and correct use of information.

But there is no question that it makes us less free; and that, by it’s nature is evil.

The only way to rationally address this is to make these records non-public information. Either through the elimination of the records entirely (an unlikely, and in some ways unwise thing), or by the re-classification of many public records, as private.

I see no reason why my driving records, vehicle registrations, accident record, or any number of other records as I describe above SHOULD be public records; except as an instrument of governmental control. What’s even crazier is that, through sites such as BackgroundChecks.org, you can get background checks on anybody in particular and view some of their public records. Perhaps all of these, and any other record the government (or anyone else) keeps on us, whatever few those can be reduced to in a practical society (and that’s another issue altogether), should be treated as is our PHI/PCI (Private Healthcare Information/ Private and Confidential Information) wherein the use of the records must at all times require either a court order, or the consent of the subject or legal custodian of those records.

It would of course complicate matters greatly as regards law enforcement, but in the presence of a pervasive computing environment (which is not far off), it could certainly be technically possible.

It would be an easy re-write of the laws, and a massive policy and infrastructure undertaking; but no more so than the HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements that have been recently promulgated on business.

I think that this is the most likely, and most reasonable compromise position; Al-Quaeda or no.

H/T: Jed at Freedomsight

Reposted from The Anarchangel

Lessons of Russia’s Gas Attacks

Economics, General, Theory and Ideas

Today in St. Petersburg, Russia attacks using gas IEDs were launched against several hardware stores. Fox News is reporting that the Russians suspect that a rival hardware chain store may have launched the attack as part of a dispute the two businesses were having.

The lesson is that capitalism and the free market cannot exist without a rule of law that applied equally to all. The laws and the judicial system provide a means for entities and individuals to solve disputes peacefully. In Russia, according to the World Bank, Russia has high levels of corruption, respect for the rule of law is low, Russians have a difficult time expressing their opinions and having influence on their government, and the Russian government is unstable among less than ideal conditions for capitalism to thrive. Without the protections of the rule of law and a government whose sole role is to protect life, liberty, and property; anarchy prevails and anarchy, despite what many anarcho-capitalists would like to you to believe, usually leads to the rule of the gun where property rights are non-existant (ie. Somalia). The rule of the gun leads to tyranny as people cry for someone to restore some resemblance of order, such as the Russian people demanded Vladimir Putin restore order after the near-anarcharic rule of Boris Yeltsin. I think we can safely call Putin a dictator.

What Russia must do is combat political corruption and restore the rule of law, not the rule of a tyrant and the mafia in order to combat incidents like today’s gas attack. It also wouldn’t hurt for the Russians to develop a truly free and democratic system of government. Freedom makes people wealthier where as tyranny and anarchy keep people poorer.

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