Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 17

NSA Fallout Hits American Business To The Tune Of Four Billion Dollars: Brazil Ditches Boeing, Buys Gripen

Privacy: Brazil ditches Boeing’s F/A-18 in favor of SAAB’s JAS 39 Gripen over the NSA’s rogue behavior. In a press conference tonight, Brazil’s defense department announces that Brazil will buy the Swedish fighter jet, according to multiple Brazilian sources. The direct reason for rejecting Boeing’s F/A-18 was the United States’ hostile and unacceptable spying behavior against Brazil and the rest of the world.

With the F/A-18 rejected, which had been Brazil’s favorite up until Snowden’s revelations started to unravel, Brazil will buy 12 JAS 39 Gripen-NG fighters initially at a cost of 4 billion USD, intending to buy a total of 36 aircraft.

President Dilma Rousseff personally rejected the F/A-18 in favor of the JAS 39 Gripen-NG, according to Brazilian sources. The only drawback is said to be that the -NG [Next Generation] version of the Gripen is not yet in serial production, but only at the prototype stage.

Ideas Can’t Be Property. Can Dirt?

Reflections – Zacqary Adam Green: So, we’re all in agreement that intellectual property is a bad thing that should not exist. What about plain old property? If no one has a right to monopolize the use of an idea, is there a justification to allow monopolies on the use of a little bit of the planet?

First of all, let’s make a distinction between possessions and property. Nobody is arguing that you don’t get to keep the shirt on your back, or your toothbrush, or your laptop. What I’m concerned with is the exclusive right to land, and to the structures built on that piece of land.

One problem with claiming a monopoly on an idea is almost the opposite problem of claiming a monopoly on land. Ideas are a non-rivalrous good, in that one person’s use of an idea won’t take it away from anyone else (actually, Nina Paley suggests they might be anti-rivalrous). However, ideas can often be attributed to a specific creator. Land, on the other hand, is definitely rivalrous, but nobody created it. It was always there, before any of us were born. So how can anyone justify claiming to “own” any land?

Some philosophies justify land ownership based on who works the land. If you work the soil to make a thriving farm, if you build a house, that labor belongs to you. But here’s where the similarities with intellectual monopolies start to appear. It’s wrong for a publisher to restrict distribution of a book long after they’ve stopped producing and selling it. So if you put in all this work into your land and then abandon it, do you still have the exclusive right to control the land?

This is what the game Monopoly is about. Originally called The Landlord’s Game, it was invented by Georgist game designer Elizabeth Magie as a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” The actions of players are meant to represent absentee landlords, who buy up properties not to use for themselves, but to charge other people to use them. The landlords make money by siphoning value off of anyone who needs to make use of the land, even when they’re not present or making use of the land themselves. Then Parker Brothers co-opts the game, slaps a trademark on it, and invents the concept of irony.

We’ve all played Monopoly, right? It’s not fun. It’s not a fun game at all. I have no idea why anyone ever plays it for enjoyment. But that was supposed to be the point: landlordism sucks.

It’s doubly ironic that Parker Brothers picked an even more Georgist name for the game than Magie did. Georgism’s chief position is that society should only charge one tax: a land use tax. Not property tax — use tax. It’s not a tax on owning the land, but on restricting the rest of the community from using it. This clearly frames the situation not as a property right, but as a monopoly right granted as part of a bargain with the public. You’re granted a monopoly in exchange for contributing money to the public. Just like the copyright monopoly is supposed to be: a limited-time monopoly on an idea in exchange for releasing it into the public domain afterward.

How different is it to claim land than to claim a monopoly on an idea? Is it right for one person — who lives in their own house, all by themselves — to extract money from people living in completely separate dwellings? Is it right for one person to claim acres and acres of land as their own just to walk around on, and not allow anyone else to build or develop anything on it?

Well, of course it’s not right to abuse one’s power like that. The real question is whether it’s preventable. Apologists for the copyright monopoly say that it’s a necessary evil to allow ideas to be locked away from the public – but we know how wrong they are. Social mores end up achieving much of what the copyright monopoly is supposed to be good for: discouraging plagiarism, getting (enough) people to compensate the artist, and encouraging new creativity. Are social mores enough to prevent someone from squatting in your house, even in the absence of property law?

So why are these questions even relevant? Why rock the boat on who gets to control land? Two reasons.

First, the present issue of homelessness and inadequate housing. In the United States, there are 24 empty homes for every homeless person as of 2012. These homes are owned by real estate speculators and banks, going unused because the property holder finds it more profitable to lock them up than to let anyone live there. China has its famous ghost cities, built for no reason other than to hit GDP targets. Vast, empty apartment complexes that analysts say would be perfect to house China’s 250 million rural poor, but none of them can afford to move in. Countries all over the world have empty developments, perfectly good homes there for the taking, if only it weren’t illegal to just break and enter. There’s no “lack of demand” keeping these homes empty; more like a lack of supply of money held by the people who need them.

This is another great reason why we argue for a universal basic income, but that brings us to the second reason why land ownership is a pressing question. So the government gives everyone enough money for “a rental one-bedroom apartment in the medium-far suburbs of a relevant city” — who collects that rent? If we still have private landlords, doesn’t that mean the rentier class will unfairly benefit from basic income, and that the government is effectively subsidizing them? But if the government owns all of the apartments, isn’t that a Soviet scenario that’s open to corruption and all of the problems with central planning? There has to be another option besides feudalism or Leninism.

There isn’t an easy way to answer this question, but it may be one of the most important of this century. With densely-populated cities becoming the only viable way of life, it’s going to be harder and harder to find an uncontested place to live, to set up shop, or to assemble. We know that we can trust neither central governments nor corporations and aristocrats to act in the public interest where the Internet and culture are concerned, so how can we trust either one with the power to throw us out of our own homes? But at the same time, don’t we need protection from other people invading our homes and private spaces? Or can we learn to share?

Swedish Man Sentenced to Half-Million Euro In Damages For Sharing ONE Movie

Copyright Monopoly: A Swedish man has been sentenced to the highest damages ever in Sweden, and possibly in the entire world, for sharing culture: 4.3 million SEK (€475,000) for sharing ONE movie. The movie Beck – Buried Alive, a typical Swedish taxpayer-subsidized B-movie, was uploaded to the culture-sharing hub Swebits. This represents a heavy escalation in the war over sharing knowledge and culture.

The mind-boggling verdict was announced today in the district court of Västerås, a Swedish municipality close to the capital Stockholm. The verdict is said to be based on something worse than the usual “lost-sale” fantasy calculations; it was reportedly based on the list price for buying the full monopoly distribution rights to the movie.

Apart from the utterly and unspeakably insane level of damages, it is remarkable how the taxpayers can pay for a movie and yet not have any rights to it in countries like Sweden. The copyright industry lobby organization, the Rights Alliance, is gloating openly in a press release:

“The high level of damages shows how creators and rightsholders are hurt by illegal file-sharing of a movie”, says Henrik Pontén, lawyer with the Rights Alliance. “We have a number of lawsuits lined up ahead where we will demand damages for one or more movies.”

To counter this lobby propaganda, the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party, the Ung Pirat (Young Pirate), is also quoted in Swedish media today:

“Such a harsh punishment for doing something that millions of other Swedish people are doing shows how outdated the legislation is”, says Gustav Nipe, chairman of Young Pirate. “The only road ahead is a radical reform of the copyright mess [Swedish wordplay: Upphovsgröten] to fully allow the sharing of culture.”

At the time of writing, it is unknown if the verdict will be appealed. In the meantime, the risk of being convicted for culture-sharing like this remains considerably less than being hit by lightning, mathematically speaking, despite the copyright industry lobby’s persistent attempts to give a false impression of the actual risk.

Madnesses like these are probably the best election campaign Pirate Parties around the world could possibly get. It’s sad beyond words for the victims of law it takes to wake the public opinion to what’s going on, though, and I’d much rather see the copyright industry killed before it ruins any further lives like today’s verdict.

Today’s Technology Shift Has Parallels To When Universities Were Threatened By… Textbooks

Infopolicy – Henrik Brändén: Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.

In the most recent issue of Respons, Peter Josephson writes about the university crisis right after the turn of the century in 1800. Developments in information technology had kept an enormous pace: the printing costs had fallen, and an increasing amount of teaching material was available in books. This had created a crisis for teachers at universities. As far as anybody could remember, they had held lectures where they had read aloud from some book or manuscript of their own, where students had had to pay a small admissions fee to the lectures. But apparently, disrespectful students had started to skip those lectures – they would sit down in libraries to read instead.

What to do about it?

Naturally, the university teachers tried to convince the students that they would learn much better by going to the teachers’ readings-aloud, than by reading a textbook from the most pedagogic teacher on their own. The success in this approach was not remarkable.

Apparently, force was needed against this misconduct. The philologist Johann David Michaeles, of Göttingen, demanded that students would be allowed to spend a maximum of two hours daily in the library.

Older teachers were warning their younger colleagues from issuing books in their fields. They would never be able to make money teaching, if they gave their students books to study instead.

But reason prevailed.

The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte explained to colleagues and authorities that the arrival of the book made the old read-aloud lectures unnecessary. Get rid of them. Instead, introduce classes about knowledge as such and its basis, that is, how we can know what’s in the books. Introduce seminars where students and teachers discuss the books together. Introduce researching teachers, who can tell students about new findings, that haven’t yet made it into the books.

Fichte’s ideas were taken up by Wilhelm von Humboldt, linguist and department manager at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, in founding the first university where all teachers were assumed to be researching in parallel with teaching. It took a couple of decades, but the read-aloud sessions disappeared from universities, and were replaced with activities that made teaching more effective, all while raising the intellectual bar.

Let’s hope that the current ongoing technology shift will, in time enough, be managed just as well.

Rick Falkvinge’s 2013 List Of Stone Dead Industries

Infopolicy: There is a number of industries today that are already obsolete, kept alive by sheer inertia or by political subsidies. Many politicians, in an attempt to “save jobs”, are foolishly taking resources from new, viable industries and giving to these obsolete ones. “Saving jobs” in this context means that politicians are rejecting ways of producing the same level of output with a much more competitive and cost-efficient method, and is not to be applauded at all.

The first and most obvious victim industry of the internet was the postal industry, the kind that delivered physical letters. When people want to communicate today, they don’t put ink to paper. Out of sheer inertia, bills and governmental correspondence is still being delivered using this method, but everybody else has moved on. Parcel couriers that ship physical objects live on for the time being, but are threatened by 3D printing.

A stone dead industry is the telecom industry, specifically including cellphone subscriptions, despite still employing hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t think I have to motivate why landline phones are dead, dead, dead as a doornail, but cellphones that operate on telecom industry standards are equally on the fast track to extinction. How can we know this? It’s trivial to observe: in Africa, cities are being blanketed with wi-fi (only wi-fi, not mobile cellphone coverage) today at the approximate cost of a bag of candy and two shoestrings, whereas rolling out 3G or 4G would cost an arm and a leg. New phones in that area of the planet don’t need the telecom industry chips any longer – they use wi-fi and Viber, Skype, WhatsApp, and similar free communications. The entire telecom industry has been sidelined and obsoleted as soon as there wasn’t legacy to consider. (This is not to say that residential broadband is dead – but the national telecom near-monopolies bought the early ISPs basically to prevent residential broadband from reaching its potential, seeing how it is this described threat to the legacy telecom industry; do not conflate residential broadband, which is the Internet, with the telecom industry technology, which is something different and obsolete.)

Another stone dead industry is cable and broadcast television. When my parents tell me they are going to watch the “nine o’clock news”, because they “want to know what happened today”, I am just dumbstruck. The entire idea of adapting to somebody else’s schedule to be force-fed passive entertainment is gone, gone, gone.

On a similar note, the entire copyright industry is not going to exist in a few decades. This industry has significant inertia and lobbying power, and have managed to essentially legislate their place in the market, but the idea that a distribution monopoly is required to get any culture and knowledge produced has been proven laughably incorrect with the advent of the Internet. The entire industry is ridiculously obsolete.

A different tune is the credit card industry, killed in one swoop by bitcoin. Ask a merchant, any merchant, if they’d like to get their money right the second of the transaction instead of having to wait for 30-90 days, and not pay any 3-5% in credit card fees, and they’ll respond with a “where the f*ck do I sign up!?”. These savings will initially be a competitive advantage for merchants who use bitcoin, able to pass some of the savings on to lower prices, and this will soon outcompete merchants who accept credit cards. The entire credit card concept is dead, dead, dead. It won’t exist in ten years – credit cards will be just as obsolete as landline phones.

Same thing with the banking industry, which has miraculously been able to charge us $50-$100 for the mere service of keeping an account balance in a database for us and managing a few transactions a day at most. Thanks, but we can do that ourselves now. Banks are obsolete. (Compare the complexity of this service with, say, Google: searching through all documents published anywhere in the world by all of humanity, in an instant, for free. That puts things in perspective.)

Last but not least, the newspaper industry is ridiculously obsolete. Authentic conversation a few years ago: “What is this?” – “It’s a printout of a news site. Apparently, they print the entire site once a day in several thousand copies.” – “Oh. Why do they do that?” – “I have no idea, really.”

An Author’s Perspective: Copyright Maximalists Harm Authors

Copyright Monopoly – David Collier-Brown: Copyright maximalists want all sorts of new laws to “help authors get paid”. Well, I’m a published author, and all their efforts to “help” cost me money. Even if we strictly limit the argument to printed books, copyright maximalists still only succeed in harming authors and publishers. This is how.

The History of “Using Samba”

This book was first published both as a traditional book and as an e-book suitable for reading and printing from personal computers. Andy Oram, my editor, negotiated a deal where every copy of the Samba program included a copy of Using Samba, so if you wanted a copy, you could get one as part of the normal free download.

There were no limitations on distribution or personal printing, and the license reserved only commercial printing rights to the publisher. Only commercial printers have equipment capable of printing and binding on sufficiently thin paper to make a manageable book. If printed on conventional photocopier paper, the book is over three inches thick. Printing small sections for reference on photocopier paper is perfectly practical, but large-scale printing is not.

The net result is that the book was widely used as a reference on Samba.

What surprised us at the time is that the on-line readers bought the physical book in great numbers. We went from the third-selling book on the subject to the first in a matter of weeks, and the book was one of O’Reilly’s best sellers for the year.

Readers buy books. To be precise, on-line readers buy printed books. They value their convenient form, they make notes in the margins and they lend them to friends. They preferentially buy books that are available on-line, partly because they know they’re not buying a “pig in a poke”, and additionally because the on-line copies are searchable, and in effect serve as a superior index into the printed ones.

This sold a lot of copies of Using Samba, and O’Reilly subsequently found ways to provide a search service for their books as well as free samples, all as part of their on-line offering, Safari. Other publishers noticed that, and have found variations that work for both fiction and non-fiction.

The Response from the Unwise

Some other publishers have not noticed.

Along with the publishers of movies and music, they have convinced themselves that what we saw didn’t happen.

In their world, readers don’t use both on-line and printed books: their readers buy a book once on some device or other, read it and throw it away. Their readers don’t have bookshelves in their houses or offices. In their world, public libraries are a business risk. A public library might allow a reader to read a book, and ever thereafter not be a prospective purchaser of that same book. An e-book is worse: someone might give away many copies, or even bundle a copy with every copy of a popular program.

At the request of these unwise publishers, the United States has for some years been carrying out a risky experiment in law, permitting the publishers to put arbitrary restrictions on books or other media in electronic form. Their “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” prohibits the lawful use of the book if the use is not explicitly permitted by the publisher. This permits publishers to impose any restriction they chose, sometimes flying in the face of established law. Now this is to be imposed by treaty on other countries, in part via the “Trans-Pacific Partnership”. Canada has already succumbed.

Protecting me from Success

The unwise publishers and their friends in government are doing their very best to make sure I don’t give my work away to prospective customers. They know I don’t want to do that, and will use any means within the law and some means which aren’t, to make that impossible.

The effort to prevent copying has led to some explicitly criminal acts: one of Sony’s DRM systems was in fact a root-kit, and at that time breached the criminal codes of Canada and the U.S. Under the DMCA it’s now arguably legal.

In the case of library books, that have successfully forced all e-books to have DRM and region codes. I can’t distribute my e-books via the public library because the monopoly supplier is DRM-only, and imposes lending limits on the libraries. If I publish a book without DRM, they won’t touch it, and thereby won’t let the libraries have it.

If a publisher has any channels which require DRM, their contracts will require all copies have DRM, and wherever possible, region codes to prevent a “Canadian” e-book from being readable in the Caribbean.

They wish a mere claim of downloading to be sufficient to cut a customer off from the ‘net, and to prohibit particular programs, notably bittorrent, and they already have overturned the laws that prohibit them from excluding the blind. This makes prospective customers afraid to download anything that is under copyright.

Three-strike schemes and prohibitions on programs do much the same thing: they cast a chill on all downloading, whether a book or a program that happens to come with a book.

We already have a problem with traditional channels to book sales becoming less effective: trying to cut off my ability to give away free samples cuts off a legal, proven effective, channel that benefits from widespread copying.

They’re wrong

I really do want to bundle a copy of my current book about a program with every single copy of the program. That sells printed books.

Prohibiting me from giving out free samples takes those sales away from me. And from my publisher. And from them, which they would know if they weren’t holding their eyes tight shut.

Six Months Until European Elections; Pirate Party Scorecard All One Could Hope For

Pirate Parties: Six months from today, on May 25, the Pirate Party movement has its first re-election as the Swedish Pirate Party defends its two seats in the European Parliament. Getting re-elected is a different ballgame than getting elected as a challenger; defending the title means you need to show results. The Pirate Party’s scorecard for re-election is not just acceptable; it is downright impressive.

In the summer of 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got elected to the European Parliament with first one, then two seats, after having become Sweden’s largest party in the important sub-30 demographic. This was the breakthrough success of the Pirate Party movement that has since been replicated in many other countries out of the 70 where the party has been founded so far.

But getting elected on a platform of change and progress is something different than getting re-elected on having delivered. So what does the Pirate Party scorecard look like as the first term comes to an end? With six months to go until the election, and the election campaign more or less getting into gear today, let’s look at why the Swedish Pirate Party deserves re-election: let’s look at what has been delivered in terms of making Europe a better place – and all this with just two out of 750+ Members of European Parliament.

The Pirate Party prevented three strikes in Europe. The very first thing that happened during the term was the final negotiation of the so-called Telecoms Package, where the copyright industry had been lobbying very heavily for the introduction of three strikes in Europe – wanting to shut people off the net on mere accusation of breaking the copyright monopoly, denying them the most basic of citizens’ rights for inconveniencing an obsolete business interest. But through a combination of skill, luck, and hard work, a Pirate Party representative (Christian Engström) ended up in the final negotiations group from the European Parliament, and there was no way the Pirate Party would accept Parliament getting steamrolled by obsolete business interests. Three strikes was successfully prevented, and made illegal in all of Europe, singlehandedly thanks to important footwork from the Swedish Pirate Party.

The Pirate Party stopped the ACTA anti-liberty trade agreement. Through hard, disciplined and tenacious work, the Pirate Party was able to galvanize the Parliament-internal prong of the two-prong approach to stop this beast that was, at best, shameless mail-order legislation from the copyright industry. While many activist groups worked hard to achieve this result, and the credit lies with all of them, the Pirate Party was the only one on the inside of Parliament doors to give the Members of European Parliament a accurate picture, a different picture from the one painted by corporate shills. Therefore, having the Pirate Party in the European Parliament was not sufficient to win, but having the Pirate Party on the inside was a necessary component for victory – from Amelia Andersdotter’s footwork in the Industry committee to Christian Engström’s in the Legal Affairs committee. We successfully aided the pressure externally too, from reporting on events, to helping organize and galvanize the external resistance, to successfully suggesting flowers to be sent after the vote to representatives that chose to represent the people rather than corporates, in an unprecedented move that the European Parliament could impossibly ignore. Our combination of inside insight, never-ceasing explaining, and external activism was a key enabler for this work. And as ACTA was killed in Europe, it died worldwide.

The Pirate Party has won mainstream support for radical but necessary copyright monopoly reform. Going from a proposal to getting mainstream support is hard, but one of the major party groups in the European Parliament – the Green Group – has thrown all their weight behind the Pirate Party’s proposal for copyright monopoly reform, including cutting the baseline commercial monopoly to five years from publication, always allowing noncommercial sharing, a criminalization of any form of DRM, free sampling and remixing, and more. While the Green Group alone isn’t a majority, this is a huge step toward one of the end goals.

Overall, the first term can be described as a series of brilliant and successful political moves, a drawing of the infamous line in the sand, and a turning the tide of the war on civil liberties by the obsolete copyright industry. The copyright industry’s offensive has been successfully halted, through hard and tenacious work. But the momentum needs to continue in order to push the battle lines of civil liberties forward.

Here’s a sample of things that we already know will be handled during the next term, where the Pirate Party needs to be present:

Copyright monopoly reform. We don’t know when this item arrives, nor what the initial proposal will look like. But we know that we will be necessary to dissect and counter the worst parts that will initially come from so-called “stakeholders”, meaning the worst industries. Actually, we’re quite optimistic that with the natural rejuvenation of Parliament, we will be able to drag the copyright industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The goal, of course, is to fully legalize at least the noncommercial sharing of knowledge and culture – something that should never have had to wait this long. This is within the realm of possible outcomes, something it wasn’t before the Pirate Party’s first term.

Civil liberties online. The European Parliament has already started a series of hearings following Snowden’s revelations of widespread abuse of power by the American, British, and Swedish security services. This will continue well into the next term.

Net neutrality. This crucial battle for the future of the Internet (and, I may add, against rent-seeking by an obsolete telecom industry) is only starting, and the first stake in the ground shows that there is much work to be done. Net neutrality or not? That question will probably be determined during the next term.

Another trade agreement. Today, much focus lies on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, but an equally insidious agreement named TTIP is in the works – all in secret, as usual – between the US and the EU. We may need to scuttle that one as we did ACTA, if the initial reports of downright outrageous content holds true.

The Swedish Pirate Party aims to defend its two seats and is gunning for a third, out of Sweden’s twenty. That’s an ambitious goal, but within the realm of the realistic. Whether that goal succeeds will largely depend on you, you who are reading this. You are probably following this blog and these articles, and a lot of the future success depends on people just talking about the Pirate Party between now and six months out, causing many people to hear the name, over and over again.

Talk about the Pirate Party with your friends and colleagues. Mention the party by name, and mention that it needs to get re-elected. The swarm way of tens of thousands of people who do something small is what enabled the victory in the first place, and it can work just as brilliantly again. You can be a part of this.

NSA Mass Surveillance Has Already Been Used For Ordinary Police Work

Corruption: The NSA has used its ubiquitous wiretapping for ordinary police work. It used mass surveillance to prevent the murder of an eccentric artist, according to the New York Times. This means that the final line has been crossed; once mass surveillance of ordinary people is used for everyday police work, we are past the event horizon to a surveillance dystopia.

In an article outlining the vast capabilities of the NSA, the New York Times drops this tidbit:

The spy agency’s station in Texas intercepted 478 emails while helping to foil a jihadist plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Muhammad.

However, the New York Times fails to elaborate on the immense importance of this fact. This means that the NSA went far, far beyond its mandate of “national security”, and used its mass surveillance – ubiquitous wiretapping, really – for ordinary police work.

The Swedish artist in question is Lars Vilks, known for making outlandish art statements like putting images of the prophet Muhammed on crude dog sculptures in everyday traffic roundabouts. (It’s particularly unclear how the islamic prophet’s likeness was created, as he is traditionally imaged faceless.)

While preventing the murder of a highly eccentric artist may be admirable in its own right, it does not nearly qualify for national security concerns, nor for preventing terrorism.

So why is this important?

It’s important because it crosses the line we were promised would never, ever, be crossed – that the ubiquitous wiretapping would only be used for national security, and never for ordinary police work against citizens. Once that line is crossed, the wiretapping is used against the country’s own citizens.

For once you have prevented a murder, it’s easy to justify that you should be able to use the ubiquitous wiretapping to also prevent, say, rape and aggravated assault. No policymaker will protest that.

Once you are preventing serious violent crimes, it’s easy to justify that the NSA and the Police should use the ubiquitous wiretapping to prevent all violent crimes. People who protest that in the name of civil liberties will be shot down; “it’s a fundamental civil liberty to not be a victim of a violent crime”. And so, surveillance will be Newspeaked into civil liberties in televised debates by Big Brother hawks.

Once the wiretapping is preventing all violent crime, it will be repurposed to prevent all prison-time crime (described as “serious crime”), and from there, to prevent all crime. And those who speak up against this will be accused of “siding with criminals”.

I have seen each of these steps happen in the past decade in various stages of policymaking. Yes, I’m presenting a slippery slope argument, but these steps are typically just 3-4 years apart, and I’m speaking from first-hand experience with this development.

Then, once you have the ability to enforce all laws, out come the moral laws – typically first banning all kinds of sex that aren’t intended for reproduction, then everyday drugs, life-saving pharmaceuticals, and anything else that the regime du jour considers immoral for whatever reason.

The crucial line to never be crossed is that wiretapping of private communications must never be used for ordinary police work against people who aren’t under formal, individual, and prior suspicion of an identified and already-committed crime. And that line has now been crossed.

This means that we can unfortunately predict that the United States will take a very dark turn toward purebred fascism for a couple of decades, until it collapses under its own weight. We are now past the event horizon for that development.

The focus must now lie on isolating this development to the United States to prevent contagion to the rest of the world.

Louis Michel Affair: Lobbies Switch From Influencing To Directly Writing European Laws

Corruption – Lionel Dricot: Belgian Member of European Parliament Louis Michel was recently ranked the second worst regarding Data Privacy issues by the LobbyPlag.eu website for submitting 158 amendments that damage online privacy. But Louis Michel had never heard of those amendments. He didn’t even know he submitted them.

In Belgium, Louis Michel is a very famous politician who has been a mayor, a minister, and a respected liberal leader. His son is the current leader of the Belgian French-speaking liberal party (MR, Mouvement Réformateur). Hugely popular, Louis Michel easily became a Member of European Parliament (MEP) in 2009.

But recently, it has been revealed by the website LobbyPlag.eu that Louis Michel has proposed 158 amendments against Data Privacy which looks heavily influenced by industrial lobbies. This makes him the second worst MEP regarding Data Privacy, after the German Axel Voss.

When asked about his position, Louis Michel first replied that he didn’t know what it was all about, that he was a “radical advocate of privacy (sic)”. Upon closer investigation, he replied that he has “never seen, never known, never physically signed any of those amendments (sic)”. When those amendments were proposed, he was travelling in Mali.

During the day, it was discovered that those amendments have been proposed by his main assistant, Luc Paque (who has been a Belgian senator). Luc Paque openly admitted that he received suggestions from several people and industrial organisations, including FEB and Agoria (both are Belgian industrial associations). Because Louis Michel was not reachable and there was a deadline, he decided to rush the amendments without the consent of his boss, using his boss’ name.

Luc Paque has officially resigned and Louis Michel seems to consider the case as closed.

What this story teaches us is terrifying to multiple degrees.

We have now the proof that the European laws are directly written by the industry. It is not about lobbies any more, the industry itself is writing the European law. That’s it. They do whatever they want.

They don’t even have to corrupt elected politicians. The system works so well for them that, if we take Louis Michel’s allegations for granted, politicians write laws without even knowing a single word of the content. If it was not for the work of transparency activists like LobbyPlag.eu, nobody would have known the amendments proposed by Louis Michel, including Louis Michel himself!

It is well known in Belgian circles, that Louis Michel has never been inclined to new technologies and that he is not comfortable with computers. Given the technicality of the amendments, it is well possible that Louis Michel is not even able to understand most of them. And it would be very interesting to ask Luc Paque if he understands them and can explain, for each of them, why he thinks it was a good idea.

What is even more downright terrifying is that an MEP and experienced politician like Louis Michel doesn’t see any problem here. He places the blame on one of his subordinates without taking any responsibility himself. We now have people who are trusted by thousands of voters, who are paid really good salaries and, when a problem happens, publicly put the blame on their own employees, thinking it is not their responsibility to know what the assistant they employ is doing in their own name.

But for one story like this, how many others are still waiting to be discovered? This is a definite proof that you can’t trust the system, that total transparency is needed and that transparency activists are badly needed.

Of course, there’s still the possibility that Louis Michel is lying, that he was corrupted. Even though it would not be acceptable, it would, at least, be understandable. It would put the fault on corruption, not on the system itself.

I expect a lot of “anti-European” comments to put the blame on the European institutions. Don’t worry, it’s probably exactly the same in your own country. But we may have not enough activists like LobbyPlag.eu in each country. This illustrates why we need Europe and to fight together for transparency.

Maybe it would have been preferable for everyone to hear that Louis Michel was simply corrupt.

Which tells a lot about the state of our political system. Our politicians are not even competent enough to be corrupt.

Picture by European Commission DG ECHO.

Swedish Regime To Give Police, Customs, Tax Authorities Realtime Access to Citizens’ Phone, Mail, More

Privacy: The Swedish citizens will get all their phone calls and e-mail traffic wiretapped in real time not just by the Swedish NSA branch, but also by police, customs, the tax authority, and others. These plans were revealed today by the Ny Teknik magazine, sending shockwaves among civil rights activists. This follows a previous law change that gave the Swedish NSA branch, the FRA, realtime access to all Internet traffic that crossed the country borders – effectively wiretapping everybody warrantlessly all the time.

Circumventing the entire legislative process and every democratic shred of oversight, the Swedish Police are demanding voluntary agreements from telecom operators to give the Police and other Swedish authorities direct and real-time access to phone call data, mail traffic, and much more. This is not just the slippery slope into an Orwellian society that civil rights activists have warned about: this is a slippery precipice.

We’re now officially past the point where “national security” (and the the ever-present disgusting child porn/terrorism argument) is used to justify bulk warrantless wiretapping of everybody, all the time. We’ve arrived at the point where the Police justify the complete elimination of entire classes of civil liberties with nothing more than “because it can be done, and we want it”.

The authorities that would get direct real-time access to most communications aren’t just the Police, but also the Customs Office, the Security Police, and the Tax Authority (!!).

A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don’t get everything they point at. While the border between the two is arguably a lot of gray area, and subject to a lot of polemic, it can no longer be reasonably stated that police powers are under checks and balances.

According to the Ny Teknik article, followed up by many others in Swedish oldmedia, it’s not just real-time data on phone calls and mail that the Police are demanding. A sample of other things included in the proposed mass surveillance package:

How telecom bills are paid – cash, credit, direct deposit. If credit card, which one, and if direct deposit, from which bank account.
The subscriber’s PUK code, enabling a police authority to activate the cellphone’s SIM card without the subscriber’s PIN code.

There are hints in the article that many other items may be covered by the realtime wiretapping, referring to a wiretapping standard called ITS27.

The only telecom operator to say a blank never, this is completely unthinkable to the Police demands is the Swedish Tele 2.

The fact that the Swedish regime isn’t immediately firing everybody in the Police demanding this wholesale abolition of civil rights is practically an endorsement of the plans – and one that goes hand in hand with the much-criticized Swedish FRA Law that legalized warrantless bulk wiretapping in the first place.