Rick Falkvinge's Blog

Contemporary Politics is Much Better Understood Using Maslow Pyramid Than The Economic Left-to-Right Scale

Activism: In the ever-evolving landscape of politics, we often find ourselves confined to the traditional left-right spectrum. This binary view, with its emphasis on economic and social policies, sometimes obscures deeper motivations driving voter behavior and political trends. As a result, we might miss crucial insights that could enhance our understanding of why people vote the way they do, why political movements gain momentum, and why some ideas resonate while others falter. I have found an alternative framework to be far more helpful: the Maslow Pyramid.

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, typically illustrated as a pyramid, categorizes human needs into five levels: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. By examining political trends through this lens, we can gain a richer, more nuanced perspective on what drives societal shifts and voter preferences.

Physiological Needs and the Politics of Survival

At the base of Maslow’s pyramid are physiological needs: food, water, warmth, and rest — as well as immediate physical safety. In times of economic crisis, political discourse often gravitates towards these fundamental concerns. Populist movements frequently gain traction by promising to address the immediate needs of the people. For instance, during the Great Recession, there was a surge in support for policies focused on job creation, healthcare access, and basic economic security. Politicians who can convincingly address these basic needs often see significant support from constituencies facing hardship just getting from one day to the next without getting beaten, robbed, or starved. Fear of getting to this state (fear of getting robbed on your way to/from work, school, etc.) will also suffice to place oneself at this level.

However, if established parties fail to address these concerns, voters will inevitably turn to whoever offers a solution, even if it’s an atrocious one. It’s like choosing Comcast for your Internet connection when no other provider is available—you know the service is subpar, but having some connection is better than none. Similarly, in politics, when mainstream parties neglect the foundational needs of the populace, fringe or extremist parties can gain support by simply acknowledging and addressing these unmet needs — and that is regardless of how flawed their solutions to said problems may be.

Safety Needs and the Demand for Stability

Moving up the pyramid, safety needs encompass personal security, employment, and health. Political rhetoric around law and order, immigration control, and national security taps into these safety concerns. When people feel their safety is threatened, whether by crime, terrorism, or economic instability, they are more likely to support policies and leaders who promise to restore stability and protect them from perceived threats. The post-9/11 era (just after 2001), with its heightened focus on national security, is a prime example of how safety needs can dominate the political agenda.

Yet again, if traditional parties fail to provide a sense of security, voters may gravitate towards any party that promises to deliver it, even if their methods are draconian and/or frankly ridiculous.

Love and Belonging: The Politics of Identity

The middle tier of the pyramid addresses social needs: relationships, friendships, and a sense of belonging. Identity politics, which includes movements advocating for the rights of specific social groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and more, finds its roots here. Political movements that foster a sense of community and belonging can galvanize supporters by addressing these intrinsic needs. The LGBTQ+ rights movement, for instance, not only fights for legal rights but also seeks to create a supportive community for its members.

When mainstream parties overlook these social needs, people will seek out any group or party that offers them a sense of belonging, even if that party’s overall agenda is problematic. It’s a matter of seeking connection where it’s available.

Esteem: The Quest for Recognition

Esteem needs encompass respect, self-esteem, status, and recognition. Political leaders who can validate the contributions and worth of their supporters often build strong, loyal followings. This is evident in political campaigns that emphasize the dignity of work, the importance of patriotism, and the recognition of personal achievements. Policies aimed at rewarding hard work and providing opportunities for personal advancement resonate deeply with voters seeking validation and respect.

Self-Actualization: The Pursuit of Fulfillment

At the peak of the pyramid is self-actualization—the realization of one’s potential and the pursuit of personal growth and fulfillment. Politics at this level involves visionary thinking and appeals to higher ideals. Environmental movements with or without solutions based in reality, space exploration initiatives, and educational reforms often engage this need. Leaders who inspire through their vision of a better future, who challenge citizens to think beyond their immediate concerns and contribute to something greater than themselves, tap into this highest level of human motivation.

If mainstream political parties neglect to engage voters at this level, people will align with any party that inspires them, even if the broader agenda is not entirely sound.

A Holistic Approach to Political Analysis

By applying the Maslow Pyramid to our understanding of political trends, we gain a multi-dimensional view that goes beyond the simplicity of left versus right. This approach allows us to see how different policies and political messages resonate with various segments of the population based on their current needs and aspirations.

For instance, a comprehensive healthcare reform policy can address physiological needs by ensuring access to medical care, safety needs by providing financial security, love and belonging by reducing social disparities, esteem by recognizing healthcare as a right, and self-actualization by promoting a healthier society capable of achieving its full potential.

It’s further important to realize that an individual voter would vote for completely different parties, even at opposite ends of the traditional spectrum, depending on where they feel the most urgency in their personal needs at the moment, and that this is not a contradiction or uncertainty on policies.

In conclusion, the Maslow Pyramid provides a valuable framework for understanding the complex and dynamic nature of political trends. It reminds us that politics is fundamentally about people and their needs. By considering these needs in our political analysis, we can develop more empathetic, effective, and inclusive strategies that resonate deeply with the human condition. And crucially, we must remember that when these needs are ignored, voters will turn to any party that promises to meet them, even if it means accepting a deeply flawed solution.

Why Political Organizations Always Drift Off Left: O’Sullivan’s Law, Experienced

Activism: As the Pirate Party slowly veered to the left in politics, I got to experience Sullivan’s Law, which states that organizations that don’t outright declare themselves otherwise will inevitably drift off to the political left. The law doesn’t explain this phenomenon, but I think I can.

The Pirate Party was unique in its composition of activists. Whereas most political organizations can plot the political attitudes of their activists to a bell curve on the political left-to-right scale, that is, the organization can identify a clear peak and center mass where they lie politically, the Pirate Party instead had a complete empty trough in the middle, with waves crashing into the left and right wall on the left-to-right spectrum plot.

We had the most fervent anarchocapitalists and the most fervent anarchocommunists. At the same time. Cooperating. That was probably something of a political first. It also allowed me to see differences between these two groups that weren’t clear from the outset, and which might explain why organizations drift left over time.

O’Sullivans Law states that any organization that is not expressly right-leaning in politics will change over time to become left-leaning. There are some hypotheses as to why, including the observation that right-wing people will tolerate and even welcome left-wing people in an otherwise unpolitical organization, but that left-wing people will generally not tolerate right-wing people. While this observation can be made, I believe it is not enough for an entire organization to shift politically.

The explanation is far simpler, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for everyone.

Left-wing people are collectivists. They believe that the greater good shall have precedence over the wishes and desires over the individual, and organize to achieve this. Conversely, they do not feel at home when somebody tells them to forward a cause as they think is best in their individual situation.

Right-wing people are individualists. They believe that the greater good, even for the worst-off people, is best achieved by giving individuals as free reign as possible so that innovation and creativity can take place. Conversely, they do not feel at home when somebody is trying to dictate to them what to do and not to do.

This is almost painfully clear when working with both groups at the same time in a political organization. Ah yes, that’s the magic word, right there. Organization. A Non-profit organization, specifically. Do you know how these are run?

Basically without exception, they are run as a general assembly, where people are elected to positions and decisions are taken with a majority vote.

…decisions are taken with a majority vote.

It became painfully clear to me, that the form of a neutral association — the form we have, or, had, accepted as neutral — is actually nothing of the sort. It turns out, that an organization that takes collective decisions promotes people who like collective decision-making, and turns away people who prefer individual initiatives.

The association with its board, its general assembly, and its majority votes isn’t neutral. It is pushing its membership left, through its very nature, by selecting for those who enjoy collective decision-making and procedural trickery, and marginalizing those who prefer individual initiatives.

This is why, if I were to found a new political organization today, I would never use the traditional Non-profit Association format, for it is not neutral and it will ruin whatever original vision you had.

For this same reason, I have come to be sceptical of center-right political parties who are run by this majority vote. They’ll never be as powerful as they can be, had they instead organized by individual initiatives — because they are competing against left-wing political parties who feel right at home in this form of organization, which they usually mandated to be the norm for everyone.

Health Circumstances Demand a Longer, Deeper Timeout

Personal: I ran headfirst into a bit of a classic burnout two years ago. I’m still recovering from it. I’ve been trying to maintain a presence and not make this condition show too much, but I need to scale down the rest of my presence too for a while in order to reset and recharge.

I’ve been starting and re-starting writing this post way too many times now. I’ve decided to just post it as a stream of consciousness, readable or not as it may be, rather than my usual bar of having some sort of clear red thread with step-by-step logical coherence.

Two years ago, while moving from Stockholm to Berlin, I hit the infamous brick wall. I became incapable of most work that required any form of vehicular travel — I was literally limited to walking distance. Yes, it felt as ridiculous as it sounds, but it was just a matter of accepting the lay of the land and working with it. At the time, I was able to maintain some illusion of normality while starting to wind down and recover behind the scenes, thanks to being able to work remotely. I’ve since stopped working altogether — or so I thought, at least — and focusing on recharging.

When you drive a solar-powered rover too aggressively in Kerbal Space Program and the sun goes down, the batteries deplete quickly. You can’t start driving the rover again when the sun goes up from its state of depleted batteries, not even at its rated speed; you have to wait until the batteries have recharged, even if the circumstances (i.e. shining sun) should otherwise make you able to operate nominally. This is a little bit the state I’m in: I should nominally be fine, with most of the everyday load reduced significantly, but my batteries are still not recharging at the rate I had expected them to. (Yes, I’m impatient, which is admittedly part of the problem in the first place.)

So to all people who have written to me over this past time that I haven’t responded to: Please accept my apologies. It’s not out of malice or disinterest I haven’t responded, I’m simply getting done in a month what I used to get done in a day, and even that is a marked improvement. The “need to respond” queue is silly long by now, and includes conference invites and whatnot, that I would normally have responded to within minutes. It includes pings from near friends, that I had hoped to spend a lot more time with here in Berlin, as well as distant friends.

A close friend of mine pointed at a recent study about stress, a study looking at burnout symptoms in places with very good work-to-life balance, and the study concluded that the body doesn’t make a difference between obligations for work or obligations that are felt outside of work for any other reason than money. And she’s right: I’ve been feeling a pressure to shoot video, to code open-source projects, to participate in the community. I need to, bluntly speaking, drop all of these expectations for the foreseeable future. “Go off-grid” is a little too harsh, but I’ll need to turn off the expectation heartbeat on literally everything. I’ll do random things from time to time when I have the energy and desire for it, which unfortunately won’t be most of the time.

These recoveries basically take whatever damn time they please. I could have recharged batteries in six months, in a year, in ten years. I have honestly no idea and therefore I’m not setting any expectations, in either direction.

[image error]Time for a deeper and longer break.

I’d like to say “I’ll be back”, but I don’t think the person on the other side of this recovery is going to be the same person I am today. I am sure I will still want to change the world for the better, somehow. I just can’t tell today how I’ll be wanting to change the world tomorrow. So even though I’ll very likely be back doing something, it’ll very likely not be the exact same things I’ve done up until this point.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Bitcoin, the Bitcoin Cash roadmap, and the Law of Two Feet

Bitcoin: As the dust settles after the November 15 bitcoin upgrade, the roadmaps have been updated with the new state of the protocol and people are starting to looking ahead to the next set of features. I thought I’d take the opportunity to give my view on it.

The new set of features ahead has been published on bitcoincash.org, which is for the most part spearheaded by the Bitcoin ABC implementation, but where Bitcoin Unlimited also deserves significant credit for research and development.

Clarification: “Bitcoin” refers to Bitcoin-BCH, or Bitcoin Cash

In this post, I’m talking about the “bitcoin roadmap”. As there’s more than one bitcoin, I should clarify that I’m referring to Bitcoin-BCH, or the “Cash” version of Bitcoin, as opposed to Bitcoin-BTC, the “Blockstream” fork of bitcoin. For those familiar with the subject, this would be obvious, as the Bitcoin-BTC version doesn’t have a roadmap to scale, such as I’m describing here.

This is the current “you are here” map as of end-2018:

[image error]The Bitcoin Cash roadmap as of end-2018, as published at bitcoincash.org.

I like this roadmap for two reasons. Or rather, for two levels of reasons.

The first is that I see bitcoin as the path to a world currency. In order to be so, it will need to carry an insanely heavier load, and because of the typical velocity of money, each bitcoin must be valued far higher than it is today — to a point where single satoshis are no longer a small unit, but represent maybe a few cents. That quanta (smallest possible discrete value) is not small enough to provide frictionless automated microtrade, which is why I’m looking forward to — and have been discreetly applauding — the fractional satoshis on the roadmap. The bigger footprint a network gets, the more inertia it takes to change something, so getting these two items in with reasonable speed is something I regard as key.

The third key item is extensibility — the ability to extend the protocol without asking permission, akin to how early browsers started supporting random new HTML markup tags left and right. This drove the standards forward and allowed for rapid feedback cycles with the user community, and something similar will be needed for permissionless innovation on top of bitcoin to really take off.

These three taken together happen to represent the final phase of the three tracks that the roadmap lists. I have some understanding that each of them have necessary prerequisites that are being filled in some sort of logical order.

This brings me to the Law of Two Feet.

You see, it doesn’t really matter what I think of a feature, whether I like it or not. I am a diehard proponent of the Law of Two Feet: It simply means that if you don’t like something, then it is your responsibility — both toward yourself and the community you don’t like — to walk to a place you do like.

(Just to be clear, the Law of Two Feet is inclusive. It also applies to people who don’t have two actual feet.)

This is what I worded as the Freedom of Initiative and the Freedom to Follow, and it is absolutely key for permissionless innovation. You don’t get that the moment somebody is trying to give somebody else permission on what road they may choose.

Each of us have the freedom to take any initiative we want.

Each of us also have the freedom to follow any initiative we like.

But no one of us may tell another what they must or may not do.

I happen to very much approve of the above roadmap from where I’m sitting. But even if I didn’t, the freedom of initiative and freedom to follow are far more important than my opinion on this particular initiative.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Pirate Party enters parliament in Luxembourg, gets 17% in Prague

Pirate Parties: This past weekend, elections were held in Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. The Pirate Party of Luxembourg tripled their support and entered the Luxembourg Parliament with two MPs, and in the Czech Republic, the Pirate Party increased their support further – now receiving a full 17% in Prague.

With 6.45% of the votes of the final tally, the Luxembourg Pirate Party is entering its national Parliament, being the fifth Pirate Party to enter a national or supranational legislature (after Sweden, Germany, Iceland, and the Czech Republic). This may not seem like much, but it is a very big deal, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later. A big congratulations to Sven Clement and Marc Goergen, new Members of Parliament for Luxembourg!

Further, the Czech Republic has had municipal elections, and the Czech Pirate Party showed a full 17.1% support in Prague, the Czech capital, making the Pirates the second biggest party with a very narrow gap to the first place (at 17.9%). This may or may not translate to votes for the Czech national legislature, but is nevertheless the highest score recorded so far for a Pirate Party election day. I understand the Czech Pirates have as many as 275 (two hundred and seventy-five!) newly-elected members of city councils, up from 21 (twenty-one). Well done, well done indeed!

For people in a winner-takes-all system, like the UK or United States, this may sound like a mediocre result. In those countries, there are usually only two parties, and the loser with 49% of the vote gets nothing. However, most of Europe have so-called proportional systems, where 5% of the nationwide votes gives you 5% of the national legislation seats. In these systems, the parties elected to Parliament negotiate between themselves to find a ruling majority coalition of 51%+ of the seats, trying to negotiate common positions between parties that are reasonably close to each other in policy. This usually requires a few weeks of intense negotiations between the elections and the presentation of a successfully negotiated majority coalition.

Further, it could reasonable be asked what kind of difference the Czech Republic or Luxembourg could possibly make on their own in the global information repression. The answer is, a whole lot. The key here is realizing that one country is sufficient to break the global repression of information; the repression is completely dependent on every single country keeping watertight doors. If one single country decides to allow the free movement of culture and knowledge, then all such distribution will immediately be based there. The copyright industry lobby in other countries will protest, quite loudly, but there’s not really anything they can do about it.

And since the problem from a policymaking standpoint has been that the industry-age era politicians consider the Internet-related policy areas completely peripheral in the first place, conceding those policy areas will be seen as very cheap price to bind those votes to a majority coalition.

“One country is sufficient to break the global repression of information.”

A relevant comparison is how Canada has now legalized cannabis at the country level, following many state-level initiatives here and there in the world, and at once, the floodgates are open. Not just for the illegal distribution networks, but more importantly, for legalization everywhere else. As a German politician dryly said today, “what’s possible in Canada is also possible in Germany”, proposing that cannabis should be legalized outright in Germany. I would imagine the tone is similar in most places — or, importantly, many enough places.

The Luxembourg and Prague coalition talks have just started, with an outcome typically expected in a few weeks.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Analog Equivalent Rights (21/21): Conclusion, privacy has been all but eliminated from the digital environment

Privacy: In a series of posts on this blog, we have shown how practically everything our parents took for granted with regards to privacy has been completely eliminated for our children, just because they use digital tools instead of analog, and the people interpreting the laws are saying that privacy only applies to the old, analog environment of our parents.

Once you agree with the observation that privacy seems to simply not apply for our children, merely for living in a digitally-powered environment instead of our parents’ analog-powered one, surprise turns to shock turns to anger, and it’s easy to want to assign blame to someone for essentially erasing five generations’ fight for civil liberties while people were looking the other way.

So whose fault is it, then?

It’s more than one actor at work here, but part of the blame must be assigned to the illusion that that nothing has changed, just because our digital children can use old-fashioned and obsolete technology to obtain the rights they should always have by law and constitution, regardless of which method they use to talk to friends and exercise their privacy rights.

We’ve all heard these excuses.

“You still have privacy of correspondence, just use the old analog letter”. As if the Internet generation would. You might as well tell our analog parents that they would need to send a wired telegram to enjoy some basic rights.

“You can still use a library freely.” Well, only an analog one, not a digital one like The Pirate Bay, which differs from an analog library only in efficiency, and not in anything else.

“You can still discuss anything you like.” Yes, but only in the analog streets and squares, not in the digital streets and squares.

“You can still date someone without the government knowing your dating preferences.” Only if I prefer to date like our parents did, in the unsafe analog world, as opposed to the safe digital environment where predators vanish at the click of a “block” button, an option our analog parents didn’t have in shady bars.

The laws aren’t different for the analog and the digital. The law doesn’t make a difference between analog and digital. But no law is above the people who interpret it in the courts, and the way people interpret those laws means the privacy rights always apply to the analog world, but never to the digital world.

It’s not rocket science to demand the same laws to apply offline and online. This includes copyright law, as well as the fact that privacy of correspondence takes precedence over copyright law (in other words, you’re not allowed to open and examine private correspondence for infringements in the analog world, not without prior and individual warrants — our law books are full of these checks and balances; they should apply in the digital too, but don’t today).

Going back to blame, that’s one actor right there: the copyright industry. They have successfully argued that their monopoly laws should apply online just as it does offline, and in doing so, has completely ignored all the checks and balances that apply to the copyright monopoly laws in the analog world. And since copying movies and music has now moved into the same communications channels as we use for private correspondence, the copyright monopoly as such has become fundamentally incompatible with private correspondence at the conceptual level.

The copyright industry has been aware of this conflict and has been continuously pushing for eroded and eliminated privacy to prop up their crumbling and obsolete monopolies, such as pushing for the hated (and now court-axed) Data Retention Directive in Europe. They would use this federal law (or European equivalent thereof) to literally get more powers than the Police themselves in pursuing individual people who were simply sharing music and movies, sharing in the way everybody does.

There are two other major factors at work. The second factor is marketing. The reason we’re tracked at the sub-footstep level in airports and other busy commercial centers is simply to sell us more crap we don’t need. This comes at the expense of privacy that our analog parents took for granted. Don’t even get started on Facebook and Google.

Last but not least are the surveillance hawks — the politicians who want to look “Tough on Crime”, or “Tough on Terrorism”, or whatever the word of choice is this week. These were the ones who pushed the Data Retention Directive into law. The copyright industry were the ones who basically wrote it for them.

These three factors have working together, and they’ve been very busy.

It’s going to be a long uphill battle to win back the liberties that were slowly won by our ancestors over about six generations, and which have been all but abolished in a decade.

It’s not rocket science that our children should have at least the same set of civil liberties in their digital environment, as our parents had in their analog environment. And yet, this is not happening.

Our children are right to demand Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights — the civil liberties our parents not just enjoyed, but took for granted.

I fear the failure to pass on the civil liberties from our parents to our children is going to be seen as the greatest failure of this particular current generation, regardless of all the good we also accomplish. Surveillance societies can be erected in just ten years, but can take centuries to roll back.

Privacy remains your own responsibility today. We all need to take it back merely by exercising our privacy rights, with whatever tools are at our disposal.

Image from the movie “Nineteen-Eighty Four”; used under fair use for political commentary.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Analog Equivalent Rights (20/21): Your analog boss couldn’t read your mail, ever

Europe: Slack has updated its Terms of Service to let your manager read your private conversations in private channels. Our analog parents would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea that their bosses would open packages and read personal messages that were addressed to them. For our digital children, it’s another shrugworthy part of everyday life.

The analog plain old telephone system, sometimes abbreviated POTS, is a good template for how things should be even in the digital world. This is something that lawmakers got mostly right in the old analog world.

When somebody is on a phonecall — an old-fashioned, analog phonecall — we know that the conversation is private by default. It doesn’t matter who owns the phone. It is the person using the phone, right this very minute, that has all the rights to its communication capabilities, right this very minute.

The user has all the usage rights. The owner has no right to intercept or interfere with the communications usage, just based on the property right alone.

Put another way: just because you own a piece of communications equipment, that doesn’t give you any kind of automatic right to listen to private conversations that happen to come across this equipment.

Regrettably, this only applies to the telephone network. Moreover, only the analog part of the telephone network. If anything is even remotely digital, the owner can basically intercept anything they like, for any reason they like.

This particularly extends to the workplace. It can be argued that you have no expectation of privacy for what you do on your employer’s equipment; this is precisely forgetting that such privacy was paramount for the POTS, less than two decades ago, regardless of who owned the equipment.

Some employers even install wildcard digital certificates on their workplace computers with the specific purpose of negating any end-to-end security between the employee’s computer and the outside world, effectively performing a so-called “man-in-the-middle attack”. In a whitewashed term, this practice is called HTTPS Interception instead of “man-in-the-middle attack” when it’s performed by your employer instead of another adversary.

Since we’re looking at difference between analog and digital, and how privacy rights have vanished in the transition to digital, it’s worth looking at the code of law for the oldest of analog correspondences: the analog letter, and whether your boss could open and read it just because it was addressed to you at your workplace.

Analog law differs somewhat between different countries on this issue, but in general, even if your manager or workplace were allowed to open your mail (which is the case in the United States but not in Britain), they are typically never allowed to read it (even in the United States).

In contrast, with electronic mail, your managers don’t just read your entire e-mail, but typically has hired an entire department to read it for them. In Europe, this went as far as the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that it’s totally fine for an employer to read the most private of correspondence, as long as the employer informs of this fact (thereby negating the default expectation of privacy).

Of course, this principle about somewhat-old-fashioned e-mail applies to any and all electronic communications now, such as Slack.

So for our digital children, the concept of “mail is private and yours, no matter if you receive it at the workplace” appears to have been irrevocably lost. This was a concept our analog parents took so for granted, they didn’t see any need to fight for it.

Today, privacy remains your own responsibility.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Analog Equivalent Rights (19/21): Telescreens in our Living Rooms

Privacy: The dystopic stories of the 1950s said the government would install cameras in our homes, with the government listening in and watching us at all times. Those stories were all wrong, for we installed the cameras ourselves.

In the analog world of our parents, it was taken for completely granted that the government would not be watching us in our own homes. It’s so important an idea, it’s written into the very constitutions of states pretty much all around the world.

And yet, for our digital children, this rule, this bedrock, this principle is simply… ignored. Just because they their technology is digital, and not the analog technology of our parents.

There are many examples of how this has taken place, despite being utterly verboten. Perhaps the most high-profile one is the OPTIC NERVE program of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, which wiretapped video chats without the people concerned knowing about it.

Yes, this means the government was indeed looking into people’s living rooms remotely. Yes, this means they sometimes saw people in the nude. Quite a lot of “sometimes”, even.

According to summaries in The Guardian, over ten percent of the viewed conversations may have been sexually explicit, and 7.1% contained undesirable nudity.

Taste that term. Speak it out loud, to hear for yourself just how oppressive it really is. “Undesirable nudity”. The way you are described by the government, in a file about you, when looking into your private home without your permission.

When the government writes you down as having “undesirable nudity” in your own home.

There are many other examples, such as the state schools that activate school-issued webcams, or even the US government outright admitting it’ll all your home devices against you.

It’s too hard not to think of the 1984 quote here:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. — From Nineteen Eighty-Four

And of course, this has already happened. The so-called “Smart TVs” from LG, Vizio, Samsung, Sony, and surely others have been found to do just this — spy on its owners. It’s arguable that the data collected only was collected by the TV manufacturer. It’s equally arguable by the police officers knocking on that manufacturer’s door that they don’t have the right to keep such data to themselves, but that the government wants in on the action, too.

There’s absolutely no reason our digital children shouldn’t enjoy the Analog Equivalent Rights of having their own home to their very selves, a right our analog parents took for granted.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Analog Equivalent Rights (18/21): Our analog parents had private conversations, both in public and at home

Privacy: Our parents, at least in the Western world, had a right to hold private conversations face-to-face, whether out in public or in the sanctity of their home. This is all but gone for our digital children.

Not long ago, it was the thing of horror books and movies that there would actually be widespread surveillance of what you said inside your own home. Our analog parents literally had this as scary stories worthy of Halloween, mixing the horror with the utter disbelief.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being surveilled at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual device was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they listened to everybody all the time. But at any rate they could listen to you whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” — from Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the West, we prided ourselves on not being the East — the Communist East, specifically — who regarded their own citizens as suspects: suspects who needed to be cleansed of bad thoughts and bad conversations, to the degree that ordinary homes were wiretapped for ordinary conversations.

There were microphones under every café table and in every residence. And even if there weren’t in the literal sense, just there and then, they could still be anywhere, so you had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.

“Please speak loudly and clearly into the flower pot.” — a common not-joke about the Communist societies during the Cold War

Disregard phonecalls and other remote conversations for now, since we already know them to be wiretapped across most common platforms. Let’s look at conversations in a private home.

We now have Google Echo and Amazon Alexa. And while they might have intended to keep your conversations to themselves, out of the reach of authorities, Amazon has already handed over living room recordings to authorities. In this case, permission became a moot point because the suspect gave permission. In the next case, permission might not be there, and it might happen anyway.

Mobile phones are already listening, all the time. We know because when we say “Ok Google” to an Android phone, it wakes up and listens more intensely. This, at a very minimum, means it’s always listening for the words “Ok Google”. IPhones have a similar mechanism listening for “Hey Siri”. While nominally possible to turn off, it’s one of those things you can never be sure of. And we carry these governmental surveillance microphones with us everywhere we go.

If the Snowden documents showed us anything in the general sense, it was that if a certain form of surveillance is technically possible, it is already happening.

And even if Google and Apple aren’t already listening, the German police got the green light to break into phones and plant Bundestrojaner, the flower-pot equivalent of hidden microphones, anyway. You would think that Germany of all countries has in recent memory what a bad idea this is. It could — maybe even should — be assumed that the police forces of other countries have and are already using similar tools.

For our analog parents, the concept of a private conversations was as self-evident as oxygen in the air. Our digital children may never know what one feels like.

And so we live today — from what started as a habit that has already become instinct — in the assumption that every sound we make is overheard by authorities.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)

Analog Equivalent Rights (17/21): The Previous Inviolability of Diaries

Privacy: For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren’t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.

In most jurisdictions, there is a constitutional right to privacy. Law enforcement in such countries can’t just walk in and read somebody’s mail, wiretap their phonecalls, or track their IP addresses. They need a prior court order to do so, which in turn is based on a concrete suspicion of a serious crime: the general case is that you have a right to privacy, and violations of this rule are the exception, not the norm.

However, there’s usually a layer of protection over and above this: even if and when law enforcement gets permission from a judge to violate somebody’s privacy in the form of a search warrant of their home, there are certain things that may not be touched unless specific and additional permissions are granted by the same type of judge. This class of items includes the most private of the personal: private letters, diaries, and so on.

Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn’t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.

Because the modern diary is kept on a computer. If not on a desktop computer, then certainly on a mobile handheld one — what we’d call a “phone” for historical reasons, but what’s really a handheld computer.

And a computer is a work tool in the analog world of our parents. There are loads of precedent cases that establish any form of electronic device as a work tool, dating back well into the analog world, and law enforcement is falling back on all of them with vigor, even now that our digital devices are holding our diaries, personal letters, and other items far more private than an analog diary was ever capable of.

That’s right: whereas your parents’ diaries were extremely protected under the law of the land, your children’s diaries — no less private to them, than those of your parents were to your parents — are as protected from search and seizure as an ordinary steel wrench in a random workshop.

So the question is how we got from point A to point B here? Why are the Police, who know that they can’t touch an analog diary during a house search, instantly grabbing mobile phones which serve the same purpose for our children?

“Because they can”, is the short answer. “Also because nobody put their foot down” for advanced points on the civics course. It’s because some people saw short term political points in being “tough on crime” and completely erasing hard-won rights in the process.

Encrypt everything.

(This is a post from Falkvinge on Liberty, obtained via RSS at this feed.)