Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 25

How To Bypass TSA / Airport Security

Activism – Travis McCrea: Security theatre is dangerous, not only to our civil liberties but also to our individual safety. I am going to outline some of the methods I know which could be used to bypass all TSA (and probably other national equivalents) security restrictions, that way you can realize just how silly they are. These are methods in which you can purposely circumvent security, fellow contributor Andrew Norton shows other circumstances where TSA fail and let people go through the exit because they are too busy reading a book or let a simulated bomb through… the scanners.

I refuse to put a disclaimer up about how you use this information, I will say this: These are just a few things that I had easily figured out how to bypass, and I have no desire to harm another person. If someone has deep seeded ideological reasons to want to harm others, they would have figured these and other things out.

Take your shoes off

Because of the shoe bomber, TSA asks us that everyone removes their shoes and have them scanned (thank goodness he wasn’t a pants bomber, eh?). This does not apply to children (12 or younger) or people over 75, which means that any person who was attempting to put a device inside a shoe just needs to use their child, or be an older person. Good thing there are no elderly terror suspects.

This is one of the security measures which is 100% to make people “feel better”, and I don’t believe TSA is naive enough to actually believe they are going to stop any person with this.

No liquids over x ounces

This one is so simple: You are allowed to exit the secured area, and then go through TSA screening as many times as you would like. This also means that each time you go through, you could bring more liquids (assuming they do not realize what you are doing and stop you, unlikely). Have two people, keep one on the other side with your bags and just go back through with more liquids.

No knives

I am not an advocate of TSA allowing knives on an airplane, mainly for the same reason I don’t think people should be able to own handguns: easy access to the weapon makes it more likely to be used. That being said: TSA’s anti-knife policy is extreme, no pocket knives? But don’t worry, those giant knitting needles are totally okay.

3D Printed Knives or Ceramic Knives would also be easy to get through security. Just tie them to your leg or something, and you would be set to go through.

… but I am so glad that we can’t bring our multi-tool.

Access to Cockpit

Long distance flights / Flights to Alaska have many times has service for the flight crew, they open the door while a second flight attendent watches the door. If you had a group of 5 first class passengers, as soon as they did this you could rush the cabin and have access to the cockpit.

Causing General “Terror”

If you want to strike fear in a people, then you don’t need to be successful. Perhaps unsuccessful “attacks” are even more effective because they are the attacks that force the government to make people give up even MORE civil liberties. Pop the emergency exit door mid flight (if you wanted to be extra sneaky, have a parachute and see if you could survive the fall).

Anything Else

In Alaska it’s super easy to just walk onto tarmacs which have flights bound back to the lower 48 or Anchorage. While it would be a much more risky method: You could walk on the tarmac while they are boarding a flight cross over into the line of people walking onto the plane and join them. Hopefully the seat isn’t taken (or the flight is full) and you would be golden. You could also put things in the cargo bays of the planes and it would be really hard to spot.

So what is the lesson here? You can do whatever you want, but someone who has enough anger or hate will always find a way. Instead of stripping people of their civil liberties, dehumanizing them, and creating more angry people… focus on empowering people, and adjusting foreign policy to not be abusive towards other countries. Stop trying to make the world fit your little plan and fix your own problems. That is the way to minimize your risk of attack.

If you guys never hear from me again, I have been V&’d

United States Government Shows The World It Doesn’t Understand The Internet, Claims “Ownership” Of Specific Files

Infopolicy: The United States Department of Defense has “claimed ownership” of CAD drawings of a plastic, printable pistol. In doing so, they apparently believe they can stop the files from existing. The result is obviously the complete opposite, which calls into strong question the judgment and ability of United States Government to set Internet policy at all.

When the public received the means of production through 3D printing, it was obvious that you could no longer regulate which objects were allowed to exist and which didn’t, just as you can no longer regulate distribution of information. Well, obvious to anybody but bureaucrats in governments who insist they cannot lose any control.

The think tank Defense Distributed has been developing 3D printer drawings for weapons parts for some time. First, they published drawings for vital parts for the AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the military Armalite M-16) which could be printed by anybody in their homes, and then moved on to creating an all-plastic weapon which could be printed by anybody without dependence on other manufacturers, the “Liberator” in 17 parts.

This was not a matter of breaking the law of weapons regulations – this was a matter of the law having become unenforceable and obsolete through advancements in technology.

Late yesterday, the United States’ Department of Defense contacted Defense Distributed and told them that the United States government were seizing the drawings and claimed ownership of the files. This move was utterly ridiculous, as the drawings had already been published. The immediate effect was that Defense Distributed complied, and everybody else started seeding the files like wildfire. This is cause for concern – not the fact that the files exist, but that the US Government can be so completely boneheaded to think they can prevent information from existing by saying so.

The pistol drawings exist in the form of a magnet link which picks the file from whoever has them, with no central repository. The other files from Defense Distributed have also been censored by the United States government, which contain vital (printable) parts for an AR-15 and similar things, but these files are similarly available through a simple link. Predictably, their distribution has gone absolutely stratospheric.

We have long seen how the US Government is completely boneheaded and unfit to set and shape Internet policy, due to their simply not understanding of what the Internet is and how it works. This episode underscores that conclusion strongly.

Part of the reason the US doesn’t understand the Internet is because of the country’s vastly substandard infrastructure, since they have allowed cable companies and telcos to dictate what the Internet should look like (and the US is therefore far, far behind countries like Romania and Lithuania – countries that were considered near-developing countries 20 years ago, a timeframe that policymakers in Washington are apparently stuck in. We’ll be returning to that in a separate article.)

In any case, this episode shows that the US government is simply unfit to even have an opinion on shaping the future Internet.

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Four.

Swarm Management: People’s friends are better marketers toward those people than you, for the simple reason that they are those people’s friends, and you are not.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month

1. Understanding The Swarm

2. Launching Your Swarm

3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats

4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message (this chapter)

5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily (Jun 1)

6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God (July 1)

7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (Aug 1)

8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)

9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)

10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)

The actual book is expected to be available by June 15, 2013.

In the last chapter, we talked a lot about formal structures of the swarm. We talked about keeping the working groups to seven people in size, and about splitting the informal groups that approach 150 people in size into two groups. This kind of advice will have come as a surprise to some, who would believe and maybe even insist that a swarm must be leaderless and fully organic.

I do not believe in leaderless organizations. We can observe around us that change happens whenever people are allowed to inspire each other to greatness. This is leadership. This is even leadership by its very definition.

In contrast, if you have a large assembly of people who are forced to agree on every movement before doing anything, including the mechanism for what constitutes such agreement, then you rarely achieve anything at all.

Therefore, as you build a swarm, it is imperative that everybody is empowered to act in the swarm just on the basis of what he or she believes will further its goals — but no one is allowed to empower himself or herself to restrict others, neither on his or her own nor through superior numbers.

This concept — that people are allowed, encouraged, and expected to assume speaking and acting power for themselves in the swarm’s name, but never the kind of power that limits others’ right to do the same thing — is a hard thing to grasp for many. We have been so consistently conditioned to regard power as power, regardless whether it is over our own actions or over those of others, that this crucial distinction must be actively explained: there is a difference between the ability to empower yourself to perform an action and the ability to restrict others from performing that action. In the swarm, people have the former ability, but not the latter. We will return to explore this mechanism in more detail in chapter 6, as we discuss how to create a sense of inclusion and lack of fear as we shape the general motivations and internal culture of the swarm.

As a result of this far-reaching mandate, somebody who believes the swarm should take a certain action to further its goals need only start doing it. If others agree that the action is beneficial, then they will join in on that course of action.

The key reasons the swarm should not be leaderless are two. You will notice that I refer to “its goals.” Those come from you, the swarm’s founder. If the swarm were allowed to start discussing its purpose in life, then it would immediately lose its power to attract new people — who, after all, feel attracted to the swarm in order to accomplish a specific goal, and not out of some general kind of sense of social cohesion. If the goal is vague or even under discussion, the swarm will not attract people — because they wouldn’t see the swarm as a credible or effective vehicle for realizing their goal. After all, the goal of the swarm is uncertain and unclear if it is under discussion, so what goal would we be talking about in the first place?

The second reason the swarm should not be leaderless is these very mechanisms, the swarm’s culture of allowing people to act. These values will be key to the swarm’s success, and those values are set and established by you as its founder. If the swarm starts discussing its methods of conflict resolution, putting the swarm in a state where there is no longer any means to even agree whether people have arrived at an agreement, then the necessary activism for the end goal will screech to a halt.

Therefore, I believe that leaderless swarms are not capable of delivering a tangible change in the world at the end of the day. The scaffolding, the culture, and the goals of the swarm need to emanate from a founder. In a corporate setting, we would call this “mission and values.”

That said, I also believe in competition between many overlapping swarms, so that activists can float in and out of organizations, networks, and swarms that best match the change they want to see in the world. One swarm fighting for a goal does not preclude more swarms doing the same, but perhaps with a slightly different set of parameters from a different founder. This is fundamentally good for the end cause.

So the sum of this little introspective reflection at the start of the chapter is that the vision of the swarm’s end goal comes, and must come, from you — its founder. However, as we shall see, this doesn’t mean that you can control the message being told to every single being, or that you should even try to do so. Rather, you should encourage the opposite.

YOU DO THE VISION, THE SWARM DOES THE TALKING

Traditional marketing says that a message needs to stay constant to penetrate. My experience says that’s not very effective when compared to swarm techniques.

It may certainly be true that you can influence routine buying patterns or even routine voting patterns with simpleton messages of the one-size-fits-all type. But if you want energized activists, people who walk an extra mile to make a difference, then it’s a different ballgame entirely.

You don’t want a routine pattern when you’re looking for activists. You want people who are passionate, who feel like kings or queens of the world, and who can’t wait to make a difference with their bare hands.

Try to do that with centrally designed TV ads. You can’t. No matter how many millions you spend on an ad, it cannot be done. (This disregards the fact that swarms form in cash-strapped environments in the first place.)

“A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

Our language is a social marker. Our choice of words matters, as do minute details in their pronunciation and timing. Our language is a marker of group inclusion, and, more importantly, of group exclusion.

If somebody comes up to you and tells you a factual statement in a language that you identify as that of a group you dislike, you are very likely to discard that message as false, no matter whether it’s true or not when analyzed rationally. In the same vein, if somebody that dresses, speaks, and acts in a manner consistent with your social standards tells you a factual statement, then you are likely to accept it as plausible and maybe examine it on its own merits later.

The recipe is ridiculously straightforward: communicate your vision to everybody, and let the thousands of activists translate your vision into words that fit their specific social context. Don’t make a one-size-fits-all message that everybody has to learn. It will be one-size-fits-none.

This sounds obvious in hindsight. It has been used in some legacy product marketing, like that of Tupperware’s plastic containers, but never on an Internet scale and time. Some political campaigns try to tailor their messages to demographics, but have to abide by general demographic guesses rather than actual social presence.

Let me give a tangible example. When I speak about the opportunities associated with the obsolescence of the copyright industry, I can do so in many different languages. If I were to speak about this before a liberal entrepreneur crowd, I would say something like this:

“There is tremendous opportunity in the cutting of this link from the value chain. The copyright industry intermediaries no longer add value to the end product or service, and so, in a functioning market, they are going to die by themselves. There is a problem here, as their statutory monopoly prevents that. Therefore, we must assist in this cutoff, as removal of their overhead allows for growth of the overall market, future opportunities for the artist entrepreneurs, and for new jobs that take the place of the obsolete ones.”

However, speaking to dark-red communist groups that celebrate the Red Army Faction as heroes, I would choose a different language:

“I think it is glorious that the cultural workers have finally assumed control over their means of production, and that we finally have the ability to throw off the middlemen parasite capitalists who have been profiting for decades off of the workers’ hard labor. We should help our brothers and sisters to make this transition happen, and help them turn the captured middlemen profits into new jobs for our culture.”

Factually, these two statements are completely identical. I am saying the exact same thing. But one wording would not work for the other group; you would get thrown out of the room, and any curiosity about your swarm would be discarded for good.

Granted, these two settings are extreme contrasts to make a point. But even a subtle sign of not belonging can be enough to get your idea and vision discarded in a conversation.

This is why you need the activists — thousands of them — to translate your vision into as many different social contexts as you have activists. Only then will you be able to electrify their friends with your vision, as that vision is clad in the language of their respective social contexts.

Don’t think you can do this yourself for every setting. You can’t master every nuance of language and social code. Nobody can. I may be able to switch languages rudimentarily from years of training in different settings, but I can’t easily change appearance. If I arrive in a suit at a location where I am to give a presentation, and the people there turn out to be laid-back hippie types, then that’s it. No word I say after that can change their perception of me.

It is also important, and imperative, that your activists not only are encouraged to translate your vision, but also to interpret and apply it to specific scenarios. In a political swarm, for example, that means they need to be able to translate general principles into specific policy on the fly, and express it in appropriate language for the context — always without asking permission. The previously mentioned three-activist rule can apply here, or you can empower everybody individually straight off the bat. When this starts to happen without any central planning and control, the swarm starts to really fly.

There will be people in the swarm who object to others’ interpretations of the vision and general principles, of course. This brings us back to the distinction between empowerment of the activist self versus the power to crack down on the work of others. The golden rule of the net springs to life: “If you see something you don’t like, contribute with something you do like.”

This rule is absolutely paramount, and it is you who must enforce it.

One of the worst things that can happen to the swarm is the emergence of a backseat driver culture, where those who take initiatives and risks are punished for it — and it is your responsibility to make sure that people who do things are rewarded, even when you think they weren’t exactly on the money. It is especially crucial that peers in the swarm don’t fear other people being angry with the swarm, and punish the risk-taker as a result. After all, people getting angry with you is a symptom that you’re starting to cause change, that you’re starting to succeed in your mission. This is expected and should not be feared.

This is so important — the swarm lives or dies with this — that it deserves repetition:

When people in the swarm get criticized by the public and by influential people, that is a sign you’re on the right track. This is not something to fear, this is something to celebrate, and everybody in the swarm must know this. People must be rewarded by their peers for taking risks, and you must make sure that other people in the swarm reward other people for taking risks, even when things go bad (or just don’t produce the expected results). If people see something they don’t like, the rule must be that their response is to contribute themselves with something they do like.

In contrast, if, out of fear for being criticized by the public, people start cracking down on one another when they take initiatives, a backseat driver culture will emerge that punishes the activists who take risks and do things they believe in. If a backseat driver culture emerges, risk taking and initiatives don’t happen, because activists become shell-shocked from constant peer criticism whenever they try something. If this pattern develops, the swarm dies.

You need to celebrate every time somebody does something you feel goes in the right direction and that initiative is criticized by somebody influential outside the swarm. “Well done,” you need to say visibly. “These influential people say we’re morons. You’re doing something right.” Lead by example and teach others to celebrate when this happens.

We’ll talk more about that in chapter 9: if you’re not making anybody outside the swarm angry at all, you’re probably doing things the wrong way, and before people outside the swarm get angry, they will always try ridiculing those activists in the swarm who threaten their influence. If somebody says you’re all morons and clowns, that’s a sign you’re on the right track. If they get angry with you, that’s even better.

This doesn’t mean you can’t listen to feedback and learn from it. But it should never, ever, be feared. This is paramount.

HELP THE SWARM REMIX THE MESSAGE

The previous chapter discussed the vertical communication in the swarm. The horizontal communication is even more important to the swarm’s success.

Activists must have the ability to inspire and learn from one another without you as a bottleneck in between them. They need to be in control of the message, as translated from your vision.

What you need to provide for the swarm is some kind of work area where the activists can share work files with one another: posters, flyers, blog layouts, catchy slogans, campaign themes, anything related to spreading your ideas and vision. Also, they must have the ability to comment on and discuss these work files between them.

When you do, you will be amazed at the sheer brilliance many will show in translating your vision into words and images. Not all the posters and flyers will be great, of course, but those that are will be used in a lot more places and situations than the one they were originally made for. All without you interfering.

What’s more, the swarm will remix its own posters and flyers all by itself — it will keep evolving them into something better. Some attempts will fall flat on their face. Those that the swarm recognizes as great will live on and be used in new situations, and be remixed yet again.

The ability for the swarm to work horizontally like this, across all boundaries and all scales, is crucial for success. Speaking of flyers and posters, by the way, we arrive at the next vital part:

TAKE TO THE STREETS

Going back to the social mechanisms of accepting ideas, it is not really enough that people hear the swarm’s message from their friends, in particular their friends and acquaintances online.

We come back to the importance of inclusion and exclusion, and how vital it is for people to meet somebody they can identify with who carries the ideas visibly. Group psychology is everything here. When this happens, the ideas can carry over to the new individual.

The keys here are two: “meet” and “identify with.” People need to see the swarm in the streets on their way to work or school, and in random places in their daily life. They need to understand that this is something that takes place online and offline, in other places than just in their circle of friends.

This is not as impossible as it may sound.

Let’s take a look at how a competing political party experienced the events leading up to the success of the Swedish Pirate Party in the European elections of 2009:

“Our election workers all paint the same image: the Pirate Party was on practically every square in the entire country, talking to passersby, handing out flyers, and flying their bright colors.” — election analysis from the Social Democrats, 2009

Now, knowing the actual level of activity in the European election campaign that the above quote refers to, I know that “on practically every square” is a stark exaggeration of the actual events that took place. However, the above quote is the subjective impression of reality from a competing political party who had tons of resources and people everywhere. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to say that this represents the actual public impression.

Thus, you should know that it is perfectly possible to give the above impression without any resources, money, or fame — just using swarm techniques.

We’ll return to leadership styles that help accomplish this in the next chapter. For now, it’s enough to note that there are four classical ways to take to the streets — handing out flyers, putting up posters, having tables or similar in squares, and staging rallies.

Each of these carries its own techniques and experiences. Let’s look at them one by one.

Most people who hand out flyers have little or no training in doing so. You’ll all too often see people tasked with handing out flyers for various causes, but who look just lost, standing on their own in a corner of the street, huddling in the shadows, holding out a piece of paper to passersby who have no interest in their existence whatsoever. This is a waste of money, brains, and time. Over six years, we have learned a couple of simple techniques that make flyer handouts work in practice. It is your duty to teach this initially, and teach others to teach it in turn. (Of course, you need not follow this experience to the letter. Copy and remix to your needs and desires.) This technique takes about five minutes to demonstrate ahead of every flyer handout activity, and should be demonstrated ahead of every flyer handout.

Let’s start with the flyer design. It needs to look professional, but need not be perfect nor packed with information: the key thing when handing out flyers is that people see the swarm’s symbol and colors and an easily absorbable message, with a link where they can get more information.

In the same vein, the people handing out flyers should be wearing clean and nice-looking clothes with the swarm’s symbol and colors. Polo shirts are better than T-shirts here. For the same reason, in cold climates, handing out flyers in summer and spring is much preferable to doing so in winter.

Ideally, a handout lasts about ninety minutes over a weekday lunch, or over a couple of hours shopping midday on Saturday or Sunday, and has about ten people participating.

The people handing out flyers walk slowly in patrols of two, side by side, some three to five meters (ten to twenty feet) apart, up and down a designated part of a street or mall. Three to five meters is close enough to look organized to people they meet, but not close enough to cause individuals on the street to feel threatened in a two-against-one situation. Nobody hands out flyers alone, ever: this will look like an “end of the world, end of the world, end of the world, somebody please take my flyer and read about the end of the world” crazy who people will want to just cross the street to avoid.

The individual hander-out uses three phrases in a specific order when he or she meets people walking slowly down the street or mall: “Hello” to get eye contact; “Here you are, sir/ma’am” with a smile as he or she hands over a folder or flyer faced so the person may read it at a glance before deciding whether to take it or not; and then “thank you” whether they take it or not. This is simple, effective, and works in all parts of Sweden.

(Perceptions vary somewhat. In the slower-paced northern parts of the country, like Lapland, people may think you’re a bit impolite for not at least staying for coffee after having addressed them. In the higher-paced capital of Stockholm, people may think you’re a bit impolite for addressing them at all. But the technique works.)

If they don’t accept the flyer, the hander-out puts it at the bottom of the stack and offers a fresh flyer to the next person. Nobody will accept a flyer that he or she saw being rejected by the person right in front of him or her.

Ideally, the handers-out carry two stacks of items to hand out: one flyer, which is the main event of the day, and one folder with more information about the swarm to give to people who ask for more information. Some will.

One person needs to stay with the stockpile of flyers and other equipment so that handers-out can refill their stacks periodically. Another person needs to organize the event and be formally responsible in case there’s trouble, someone whom the handers-out can point at to deal with any complaints. This person also designates the locations of the patrols of two people each in a pattern which causes most people who are out that day to pass at least two patrols: somebody who sees the same flyers being handed out by two different groups of people will get a positive impression of a well-organized activity.

It is quite common for people accepting flyers to start asking questions to the activists handing them out. In this case, make sure that the activists are comfortable responding to the most common questions about the swarm. Having that folder with more information as a backup for the flyer helps in this scenario, too.

As for planning of print runs, a general guideline is that just over a thousand flyers per hour are handed out when working in a group like this.

Finally, some people will inevitably crumple up the flyer or tear it to pieces and throw it with contempt in the street. Make sure that everybody in the activity picks up such litter and throws it in proper trash cans — otherwise, people will register the swarm’s colors and symbol as trash in the street, and associate negatively from there.

Putting up posters is somewhat less elaborate, but needs to be done with respect for the person who will be tearing down the posters. Never superglue posters to façades unless your swarm needs to be associated with vandalism, for instance.

In general, our experience says that posters should be put up by patrols of three activists. The first activist holds the poster to the wall, the second affixes it there using masking tape, and the third explains what the poster and the swarm is about to the passersby who will invariably stop in curiosity.

A good guideline is that a one-hundred-poster campaign is a large and quite visible campaign for a suburb or the center of a small city, but it will not last for long: a few days at the most, maybe just a few hours. So choose the timing well. It is better to have rotating teams in a town putting up one hundred posters between them once a week, rather than spending a whole day putting up five hundred posters once that are all gone the next day.

When it comes to hosting book tables or other semifixed installations in streets or open-air trade shows, it is less of a science. Have plenty of materials to give out, make sure that there are always people to man the station, and have the swarm’s symbol and colors flying everywhere. You will probably not be able to afford umbrellas and similar elaborate merchandise at this stage, but a couple of flags for display come cheaply at print-on-demand stores.

A tip is to hand out helium-filled balloons with the swarm’s colors and symbol to parents who pass by with kids. The kids love it, the parents will tie the balloon to the stroller, and they become a walking billboard for your swarm. People on all sides of your table will start noticing balloons several hundred meters away. (Teenagers, on the other hand, love the balloons for running around the corner with them to inhale the helium, laugh at their funny voices for a breath or two, then come running back for more. There’s a fine line in choosing who to give balloons to.)

Finally, rallies and street protests. Arrange a speaker list with six to ten speakers, and make sure that the rally as a whole doesn’t last longer than an hour. Police permits may be required for PA equipment (and you do need that). You may be able to gain a wider audience by inviting speakers from neighboring swarms or other organizations sympathetic to your cause.

Your choice of venue matters. You want to fill a square with people to make effective media imagery. If you pick a large square and get 500 people to attend, they will look like a speck in the middle of an empty square. In contrast, in a small square, that same crowd will look almost like an angry, unstoppable mob. It is hard to estimate how many will attend your swarm’s rally before even having announced it, but you must do so before choosing where to hold it.

Rallies can be very effective when people are really angry about something that has just happened, compared to staging rallies as a “just because” activity. When people are angry, they will tend to want to share, show, and vent that in groups. This also gives the speakers at the rally a relatively easy task; they basically just have to describe how angry they are at what has just happened, in the most colorful and provocative of terms, to draw thunderous applause at the rally.

This requires quick reactions and turnarounds. A rally the day after or the weekend after an unjust high-profile verdict could be a very effective example. As verdicts are generally predictable in time (but not in content), you and the swarm are able to plan for the possibility of needing such a rally and get the necessary police permits weeks in advance. You may not use those plans, but they should be ready at hand.

When you’ve made the go decision for a rally, make sure that the media know about the rally in advance (send press releases the previous day or the day before) and put the speakers you want to be seen in media as faces for your swarm in the first and second speaker slots. Media will arrive at the rally, get their pictures and footage, and leave; they do not stay for the full duration.

Make sure to get your own footage and photos from the rally as well. Later down the road, TV stations and newspapers will ask you for cutaway footage and activity images to go with their stories about you. If you can’t provide that, they will make a story about somebody else, so this is quite important. For video footage, use a tripod and an HD camera. You can’t get broadcast-quality images when using a camera handheld. If you don’t have somebody with professional experience in filming, don’t try to get moving and panning scenes; it takes a lot of experience to get such scenes usable for broadcast. Instead, just get good footage showing a large crowd from several angles, footage where the camera doesn’t move in the scene itself.

As the rally disperses, do close with telling the people of a gathering spot afterward for those who want to get to know one another and just hang out. This helps reinforce friendships in the swarm, and therefore the organization as a whole. Also, new activists are frequently recruited when this happens. In summertime, you may want to bring blankets, picnic baskets with bread, cheese, salami, grapes, and such, and a couple of bottles of wine, to head for a grass spot in a nearby park. That makes for a very friendly hangout after the rally.

Again, in cold climates, avoid rallies in winter altogether. Odds are you’ll just get a couple of dozen huddling, freezing people that look terrible on the evening news. (There are exceptions. Don’t count on being one of them.)

In any case, limit any winter rally to about thirty minutes.

SCALE OUT, OUT, OUT

A key concept of the swarm is “scaling out.” This refers to the process of moving every activity as far out toward the edges of the swarm as possible, involving as many people as possible — and, while we’re doing so, scaling out the swarm’s operating costs along with the activity.

Scaling out is an IT term. When something grows in size, in the language of the IT industry, you can scale up or out your server park. Scaling up means that you replace the servers currently doing the work with more expensive servers. Scaling out means that you keep the low-cost servers currently doing the job, and add more such low-cost servers. We’re adding more activists. Many more activists. We’re scaling out our work.

If all operating costs of the swarm were to be paid centrally, they might come together to a substantial sum. If done by an activist at the edge of the swarm, just covering his or her portion of the activity, the cost might be so small that the activist may not even think of it in terms of a cost. This is a positively huge benefit of scaling out.

One example could be the flyers we just discussed. If you have an activist swarm with reasonable geographical coverage on the ground, and were to distribute flyers to households, the traditional way of doing so would be to purchase the printing and mailing of the flyers. But with a swarm, you don’t need to do that.

Rather, think in terms of making an A5-size or half-letter-size PDF for the flyer and asking your activists to print two hundred copies each and distribute them to their neighbors. It’s not only OK to do so, it’s even quite expected. Sure, you might not get 100 percent coverage on the ground compared to paying for printing and distribution, but let’s do the math here, just for fun.

Assume we have ten thousand activists and that 5 percent of them take us up on this particular request, which is a fair guesstimate for such a request. That means we get one hundred thousand flyers distributed to households near where our current activists live (also suggesting that those places are demographically the right locations to recruit more activists to our swarm).

The total cost to you for achieving this reach is three to four hours of work designing the PDF in question and an energizing, encouraging mail to your activists to print and distribute it. The cost is even less if you have good designers in the swarm who like making flyers, or if you’re picking one of the existing remixes of your vision in flyer format.

The total cost in a traditional nonswarm organization, on the other hand, is on the order of forty thousand euros to achieve the same result with paying for address lists, printing, packing, and postage — and quite probably with more work hours spent, too, in just the administrative work in placing the necessary orders.

It’s not hard to see the very tangible benefits of scaling out.

You can easily apply this principle to printing flyers, too, especially at the early stages of the swarm (the first year or couple of years, before there is a predictable and significant income). Encourage your activists to pick their favorite flavor or flavors of flyer among all the activist remixes of your vision, print some five hundred copies in their printer, and just head out in town and hand them out. All without asking anybody’s permission.

Posters are somewhat harder to scale out due to their nonstandard large size, but a surprisingly large number of activists have access to A3-style printing gear somewhere in their daily routines. It doesn’t take large print runs when it comes to posters. As already mentioned, a one-hundred-poster campaign is considered a large one in a suburb or small city.

If it goes well, encourage activists to take photos and share when they do activism in the streets. That encourages more people to do the same kind of activism and breeds a friendly competition. We can also use such photos for internal competitions with fun and silly prizes. This helps motivate the swarm as a whole, and also serves to show other people that the swarm is active — potential recruits and adversaries alike.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a deeper look at self-organization and making things happen.

 

This is the fourth chapter of Swarmwise, a book arriving this summer. Did you like it? It’s going to be free to share (it, like this excerpt, is CC-BY-NC), but you can also buy it hardcover.

 

EXCERPT FROM UPCOMING BOOK

This is a part of the upcoming book Swarmwise, due in the summer of 2013. It is an instruction manual for recruiting and leading tens of thousands of activists on a mission to change the world for the better, without having access to money, resources, or fame. The book is based on Falkvinge’s experiences in leading the Swedish Pirate Party into the European Parliament, starting from nothing, and covers all aspects of leading a swarm of activists into mainstream success.

Icelandic Pirate Party WINS, Enters Parliament

Pirate Parties: The Icelandic Pirate Party has entered Parliament. This is clear as about one-tenth of the votes have been counted, with the Pirate Party projected at 6.3% as final result, well above the five-percent barrier to entry.

UPDATE AT 0014 UTC

As more votes are being counted, some projections are now saying that the Icelandic Pirate Party is not getting in at all, which was a far cry from the first projections. We’ll know in the morning. Until then, the conclusion that the Píratar made it to Parliament is too early to call.

The Icelandic election campaign for the Alþing, the Icelandic parliament (pictured), had been bulging back and forth in support for the major parties. One thing that looked consistent was that the nascent Icelandic Pirate Party kept growing, polling between 6.5% and 9.0% in recent polls.

As the first MP was announced for the Pirate Party from the Iceland Southwest constituency, where the party won a full 8.3% of the votes, the roof lifted at the Pirate victory dinner celebrations in a posh seafood restaurant in the center of Reykjavik.

The Icelanders are something of a phenomenon, even within the quickly-growing Pirate Party movement. The Icelandic Pirates were founded a mere nine months ago, and got seats in the Alþing today – four seats, as per current projections. That is a speed record by any measure.

This makes the Icelandic Pirate Party the first in the movement to enter a national parliament! Heartfelt congratulations. Achievement unlocked. After this victory, there are no further governmental levels where the movement is not represented.

The Icelandic Pirate Party didn’t start from nothing, though. They were lucky enough to have very seasoned activists bootstrap the party – such as Birgitta Jónsdottír (of Wikileaks and of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, et al) and Smári McCarthy (similarly involved in IMMI and other projects). We don’t know yet which pirates get the actual seats in the Alþing – that will depend on vote distribution among constituencies and such.

Regardless, there will no doubt be a lot of work to do in the Alþing – even though Iceland has been very progressive with its ideas, fewer of those ideas have been implemented in law. Having legislators in Iceland may facilitate that; there’s a lot of work up ahead.

But not tonight.

Tonight, we party and salute our glasses of rum to our Icelandic brothers and sisters in the movement. Well done!

Corrupt Banks, Corrupt Copyright Industry: Why Do They Get To Externalize Business Problems?

Corruption: We are in a trend where politicians believe that some business failures are everybody’s problem, but when the same businesses succeed, they get to keep all the profits. This is a ridiculous and counterproductive way to build a functioning economy, and it also threatens fundamental civil liberties. The banking industry and the copyright industry stand out as the most parasitic malcreants in this area.

The perverse arrangement where banks get bailed out by tax money every time they would otherwise go bankrupt has been accentuated by recent events – and how absurd it is that the banks get to keep profits for themselves, and get any losses covered by tax money.

In economy lingo, this is called externalizing – that you move certain aspects of your business outside of your organization, so that you don’t have to deal with them. Industry pollution, for instance, is a typical case of externalizing a problem: if you have toxic sludge as a byproduct of a manufacturing process, and can dump it in a nearby river, that’s externalizing, because you don’t need to pay for the cleanup. The taxpayers (and the killed river) does.

The fact that banks get to externalize losses creates horribly skewed incentive mechanisms where extreme risk-taking is rewarded, because there’s never any loss. There’s only the potential of huge profits. It’s a bit like if you were immortal and couldn’t hurt yourself – imagine what crazy stunts you would do that didn’t follow normal behavior of mortality? That’s the corporate situation that banks are in.

So is the copyright industry. They have a distribution monopoly on some pieces on knowledge and culture (which can, and should, be debated in itself). But unlike other monopolies, where the monopoly holder has to sue in a court of law, the copyright industry has managed to externalize the business problem of enforcing their monopoly – for it is a business problem – and gotten society’s police force to enforce their business rules on their behalf, by extending this business monopoly – the copyright monopoly – into criminal law.

In other words, non-support of a business model has been put on the same legal footing as harming a fellow human being – and this has been done by politicians who are dangerously clueless. They have allowed the copyright industry to externalize their business problems to let the taxpayers take the bill of enforcing an already-immoral monopoly.

That is obscene. That needs to end.

Terrorists Tried To Terrorize Boston. They Succeeded.

Civil Liberties – Zacqary Adam Green: Last night, the city of Boston, Massachusetts and some surrounding suburbs shut down. The only people on the streets were heavily armed police and military. Most businesses closed, many hospitals closed, and people were ordered to stay in their homes. Why? Because a 19-year-old terror suspect was running from police, and maybe had guns or bombs with him.

I saw an incredible lack of concern about this, both from locals and from people watching elsewhere in the US. Sure, declaring martial law in a city is inconvenient, and does horrible damage to civil liberties, but there’s a terrorist out there! He killed people, and he could kill more people! Staying in our homes keeps us safe.

Well, no. No it doesn’t. Hiding in our homes from the dangerous terrorists doesn’t keep us safe, and it doesn’t help the police apprehend them. I know this because I’m completely making it up, just like everyone who disagrees with me.

The truth is, we can’t prove one way or the other if any lives were saved by locking down the Boston area, or by deploying an absurd amount of militarized police. If we had a time machine, we could go back in time, make the decision not to lock down Boston, and then see if the number of people murdered that day increases. But we can’t.

We can point out that the suspect was only arrested after the lockdown ended, and wasn’t even found by police. But we still can’t predict how things could have gone differently if one thing or another didn’t happen.

So, the only thing that we can definitively prove either way is that a terrorist terrorized Boston. We can say, without question, that terrorism — which aims to scare people into shutting down and disrupting society — is absolutely effective. Congratulations, Boston. The terrorists won.

Now that the dust is settled, the suspect has been captured, and people can leave their homes again, we need to never, ever let this happen again. As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, I beg the people of Boston to ask why this was necessary. Why, for one teenager, were the streets filled with SWAT teams, armored vehicles, and soldiers? Why declare martial law throughout an entire city to find one kid? Even an armed and dangerous kid?

This is the way a police state would react to a mass murder, not a free society. What happened in Boston was completely uncalled for. But what’s scariest to me is that nobody seems to be upset about it. If we become desensitized to this sort of thing, it can only get worse. For one day, Boston was a police state. If we accept one day, then next time they’ll give us one week. If we accept one week, they’ll give us one month. This is exactly what the people who bombed the Boston Marathon want. Don’t give it to them.

Let’s Reform Copyright. With A Sledgehammer. Into Smithereens.

Copyright Monopoly – Zacqary Adam Green: There are many ways we could reform the copyright monopoly to solve some of its problems. This is politically doable. But long-term, we really just need to abolish this thing altogether.

One of the better attempts at solving the problems with the copyright monopoly has been Creative Commons. Creative Commons does great work in encouraging creative people to think differently about the copyright monopoly, and about what other people are allowed to do with their work. Unfortunately, there’s one big problem. Here’s an infographic to sum it up:

This is the problem with any law based on the copyright monopoly: it only protects people who can afford to file a lawsuit. If you have the money, if you have the time, and if you have the will to go through a process that often takes years of stress and silliness, then you get to enjoy the benefits of the monopoly. Otherwise, it’s a joke.

For all the wonderful conversations that Creative Commons has started, I remain convinced that the only license they’ve put out that’s actually useful is CC0: the one that releases your entire work into the public domain. I love CC0, actually. I’ve found it to be a very effective anti-piracy technique; it literally makes it physically impossible for people to do anything illegal with my work.

But unless you’re a big corporation (or a very wealthy individual), your experience with a copyright-based license won’t be any different than just putting your work into the public domain. You will be completely at the mercy of other people, choosing whether or not to be a dick to you. If your work is in the public domain, then a person who downloads your work, enjoys the hell out of it, and doesn’t donate a cent to you despite being able to afford it…that person is a dick. Knowingly using your public domain song in a hit TV show, and not offering to share any of its massive profits? Dick move. Reselling your work without crediting you? Dick dick dick dick dickety dick.

Being a dick does not have to be illegal. In fact, most attempts to make dickishness illegal cause so much collateral damage to civil liberties that it’s not even worth it.

But couldn’t we extend the benefits of the copyright monopoly to even the starvingest of the starving artist by reforming the legal system? What if filing a lawsuit weren’t so expensive, so time-consuming, and so inaccessible?

Well, first of all, I’d ask you how in the hell you planned to do that. But maybe we shouldn’t be democratizing the ability to sue each other. Maybe it’s a good thing that filing and going through with a lawsuit is such a stupid, bureaucratic, soul-sucking process: because filing a lawsuit is a pretty stupid way of resolving disputes. This slow, arduous legal system makes it so much more attractive for us to attempt to talk to each other, instead of crying to the state to bring down its hammer on people we don’t like. Settling lawsuits out of court is supposed to be attractive.

And that about sums up why we ought to do away with the copyright monopoly entirely. It encourages us not to talk to each other. Why not just let the etiquette of accessing and re-using works of art emerge naturally from human beings interacting? Why create legal weapons to threaten each other with, instead of just acting like adults and talking?

We never talk anymore, humanity. You never return my calls.

Creators Of Public-Domain Bible Threatened With Lawsuit By Other Bible’s Copyright Monopoly Holders

Copyright Monopoly: Religion is big business. The Christian Bible, like any other book, is under copyright monopoly – or, to be precise, any translation of it younger than 100 years or so is under copyright monopoly, and people quoting extensively from the Christian Bible bring in big licensing money to the copyright monopoly holders. Activists decided this was not in tune with the religion and decided to create a free alternative, only to be met with a threat of lawsuit.

A couple of free culture/knowledge activists in Sweden decided to retranslate the Christian Bible into modern-day language, using old out-of-copyright-monopoly sources, and send their final work right into the public domain. The name of the project was “Free Bible” (fribibel).

A laudable goal, for sure, regardless of whether you agree with religion as such. The project had been repeatedly torpedoed by the monopoly holders of the predominant bible translation, using statements saying how the project “wasn’t necessary” as everybody was able to quote from their bible.

Well, yes, but only because the law specifically says the monopoly holders are not allowed to prevent that. Also, somebody saying “we give you permission to do X today, so you don’t need to create a free alternative” gives me a very bitter aftertaste. A project like this is about removing the mere ability for somebody else to grant or deny such permission in the first place, and not about getting permission for a day.

The license terms for quoting from the copyright-monopoly bibles changed pretty much overnight as project Free Bible was announced – from having extensive license fees for every reprinting beyond a very short amount, no matter the context, to requiring license fees for commercial use only. (Not that it changes the rationale for a public domain version, but it highlights the power of breaking monopolies.)

It gets considerably worse, though. Last week, the copyright monopoly holders sent a legal nastygram threatening a lawsuit to the translators of the Free Bible if they didn’t update a blog page (!) to reflect the new licensing terms of the current monopoly holders (!!). The blog page in question was the rationale for the project Free Bible, and described why a public-domain version was necessary by highlighting the license requirements for usage of the book today.

To add insult to injury, this nastygram had pretty much no legal weight whatsoever. The page was accurate when written, and in Sweden, you can’t slander or libel an organization – only an individual – so the nastygram is doubly inaccurate, and underscores the need for a public domain version of the work in question.

Some Christians definitely don’t do unto others as they expect others to do unto them. In this aspect, the perennial entitlement of copyright monopoly holders, no matter where they are found, seems to be the defining factor.

What We Learn From This Bitcoin Correction

Swarm Economy: Bitcoin is correcting sharply, as expected. From this episode, we learn (again) that bitcoin is not magic and is not a get-rich-quick scheme, and that the bitcoin financial ecosystem is still terribly insufficient to meet demand.

As I walked off a flight yesterday, the correction was already in progress. Worse, all the trading tools (bitcoinity, bitcoincharts, mtgox) were offline and/or unreachable while the correction kept being in progress. That is not just unacceptable; that is a joke for something that makes the claim to be a billion dollar market.

In my last article about how bitcoin weren’t there yet, I highlighted the dependence on the largest exchange, MtGox, as an example of faults with the ecosystem. This correction certainly highlighted how that was true beyond my suggestions – an exchange that has a ten-minute lag in trading orders at best, and is completely unreachable at worst, can barely be taken seriously as a hobby project – and certainly not as the main hub of a next-generation billion-dollar trading system. MtGox shutting down trading mid-correction was just the icing on the cake that confirmed this.

The crux of it is that MtGox’s dominant status isn’t good for the bitcoin ecosystem, and therefore paradoxically, not for them, either. You’d rather have a 20% market share on a trillion-dollar market than an 80% share on a billion-dollar market. I would argue it’s in MtGox’s interest to foster a competition between itself and other exchanges, in order to grow the overall market. Ideally, we’d see a cross-exchange protocol develop that would make exchanging resilient as well as increase overall trade, like when mobile carriers enabled inter-carrier text messaging and increased traffic dramatically.

We can observe that bitcoin had gone absolutely bonkers in the past month, following an already-strong value appreciation (red trend), roughly doubling every month. In the last sharp correction in 2011, bitcoin quadrupled in two weeks before that correction. Therefore, as bitcoin hit overdrive and went into doubling-every-week mode, as it had done in 2011, I expected a correction was imminent. I had set a sell target a few days out, based on that pattern from 2011, but the correction hit before the sell target. That can obviously happen and is part of the game.

Still, my position in bitcoin is and remains long term (decades).

Recent value trends in bitcoin (chart shows last three months).

This chart shows the past three months of bitcoin, just prior to the correction. Around new year’s, it went from being flat to appreciating slowly but steadily as the FinCEN guideline was published that confirmed bitcoin as a legitimate trading instrument. Then, as Cyprus hit, bitcoin’s value accelerated into Trend 2 on the chart. The past week has gone crazy with media waking up, creating yet another breakout into Trend 3. That trend had the same rate as the rate just before the 2011 correction and trend reversal.

I was worried when the exchange rate seemed to stabilize around $180 right after the correction, as that would mean the correction was only down from Trend 3 and down to Trend 2. That would mean the major correction hadn’t yet arrived and was still to come, at least as I read the chart.

I expect a continued fall of the exchange rate to at least the dominant trend, meaning a value of around $60-$65. [UPDATE: And so it did, right on cue.] Where it goes from there is anyone’s guess. This could be a trend reversal, or it could be a sharp correction with a continued uptrend. (Do note that I’m often wrong, and tend to sell low, buy high, and miss targets when I’m trying to catch short-term swings: see above.)

When I outlined bitcoin’s four hurdles as they looked in 2011, “Exchanges” was one of them. This concern remains, and has intensified as a clear obstacle to bitcoin’s credibility and – perhaps most importantly – trustability.

In the time between the last peak and now, we have gone from GPU mining to ASIC mining (via FPGA mining). ASICs were in the blueprint stage by the last peak, and so, resilience of the network itself has increased a lot. My point is that a lot of seed capital is going into bitcoin companies by now as business angels have fixed their eyes on bitcoin. Hopefully, by the next peak, the initiatives that started this spring will be operational enough to stabilize the ecosystem.

In the meantime, this was not the second peak, but something like the fourth or fifth similar event. We can be certain it is not the last.

Most importantly, failure or success of short-term speculation is irrelevant to bitcoin’s eventual success as a decentralized, resilient currency.

There is no need to repair the exchange rate or think in such terms. The reason I’m mentioning the exchange rate at all in this article is that the bitcoin trading, when it goes intense such as in this correction, puts a merciless spotlight on the inadequacies of the current bitcoin ecosystem.

The good news, as said, is that we may expect a lot of them to be fixed by the next time this happens. Maybe in the spring of 2015, maybe sooner, maybe later.

DISCLOSURE

The author (still) has a significant position in bitcoin.

EU President, IT Staff Don’t Understand Democracy, Maths, Truth

Activism – Andrew "K`Tetch" Norton: Last month there were revelations about the EU Parliament IT system, and the arbitrary way in which email blocks on legitimate topics can be implemented with lighting speed. Yesterday, Christian Engstrom MEP, has received a response to his complaint from EU President Martin Schulz. It states, in short, that Mr Schulz can’t do maths, and doesn’t understand technology, or the importance of being able to contact elected representatives.

The letter, dated March 28th but delivered April 8th, indicates that the President was aware, and approves of the means used. In short “we got a few hundred thousand emails on this topic, felt it might take down the system and so blocked it all. Plus it was all from less than a thousand email addresses.”

It’s not actually the case though, there’s a lot wrong with the contents of the letter. Firstly, he doesn’t get technology, but also have a big problem with maths, and participatory democracy.

But let’s break down the letter, eh?

Dear Mr Engstrom

Thank you for your e-mail and fax of 12 March in relation to blocking e-mails from citizens concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”.

The IT department of the European Parliament noticed on 7 March an excessive number of emails towards EP e-mail boxes coming from external senders.

So here’s the first thing. The IT department gets to decide what an ‘excessive amount’ is. That amount is irrespective of major issues, but seems to be ‘big spike, kill it’. Giving some IT wonk control over whether an issue is ‘important enough’ to be able to contact your elected representatives is not a good thing.

An analysis by the IT department in relation to these external e-mails has shown the following

- The e-mails sent were in relation to the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”;

No, really? A filter that blocked emails sent to elected representatives on an issue was in response to emails on that issue. Never would have thought that!

- 708,683 messages were sent to the European Parliament (of which 457,325 were blocked after installing a filter and 251,358 delivered;

So, 708k emails (let’s say 709k and leave it at that round number) were sent, which is a ‘big deal’. There are 754 MEP’s. So, how does that break down? 940 emails per member. It’s not that big a flood (and it’s even smaller than that, as we’ll get to shortly). It’s a month’s worth of email for my primary account, but I also don’t hold an elected position, or have a staff to deal with it.

Also, note the cavalier attitude to blocking 64% of email sent to MEPs by constituents. As if it doesn’t really matter.

- the e-mails were received from 850 different addresses; on average this is more than 800 e-mails per address;

Well, as we’ve already noted, there’s 754 MEPs, so any email sent to all, would go to over 750. Unfortunately, the ‘average’ part is kind of ruined by the very next point.

- One single e-mail address was responsible for sending 106,771 e-mails to the European Parliament;

So, what’s 106,771 divided by the 754 MEPs? 141. 141 people used Rick’s emailer. It’s a good job it wasn’t a huge number of people then, eh?

Now, let’s take that one address out, how does the ‘over 800 average’ last then? Well, 601,912 divided by the 849 address left gives an average of… 709. Not even one to every MEP, and a good chunk from the average he made sound so important.

By the way, anyone have any guesses what that one email address was? Could the answer be found on, say, the much publicised page where the issue was brought up? Why yes it could.

In other words, it is therefore time to mail the European Parliament with our opinions.

You may remember how we did that in the anti-ACTA campaign. I have set up a mail alias that resolves to every Member of European Parliament (all some 750 of them); the mail alias is europarl-all-mar2013@falkvinge.net. Mail them right now, regardless of whether you are an EU citizen or not.

Or it could be the successor address after the blocking issue came up.

Further, you may want to use an alternative mail alias, europarl@piratenpartij.nl.

I think I’ve found the emails…

But, back to President Schulz, and his letter.

- The number of messages per minute shows that there are several levels of continuous sending of e-mails (500 e-mails per minute, 450 e-mails per minute, 400 e-mails per minute etc) which indicates an organised action using automatic means for sending mass e-mails to the European Parliament.

Yes. You are right. There was an organised action. That’s often how citizen pressure works, especially in tight timeframes. We tend to call it ‘activism’ or perhaps ‘campaigning’. You might have heard of it.

Also, all e-mail is sent using ‘automatic means’, you’re hardly logging directly in to the EP server, and typing it out directly on the server. ‘Automated means’ is also a pretty good way to describe multi-recipient emails. You don’t have to send emails out one-by-one, copying the body and putting a new recipient each time.

That’s also why you get blocks of 500, or 400 – mass mail tends to work in batches, it’s not exactly high priority traffic. If it takes 30 extra seconds to get to its destination, no-one cares. It’s not like a video stream, or a website.

I think someone in your IT department has set you up to look like an idiot, Mr Schulz (that’s BOFH’s for you)

- when analysing the servers from which the e-mails were sent, two main servers have been identified which are responsible for sending the vast majority of the e-mails to the European Parliament;

Yeah, we already mentioned them. Did you? No, because if you revealed that it was a Dutch political party, and a well-known political activist who is the founder of an entire political movement with elected members of the EP, then the perceived rational goes from ‘spam blocking’ to ‘political muzzling’.

Considering that the European Parliament receives on average 250,000 e-mails from external senders per day and that in addition 230,000 e-mails concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes” were received, this is a strong indication that the European Parliament is being targeted by mass e-mail.

First of all, the European Parliament collectively receive less than 250,000/day? That’s not a good sign. When you add in lobbying, automated lists and that there are thousands of email addresses in the EP (not just one per MEP, but all their staff etc) that’s a REALLY low number. Say 3 staff, plus the MEP, that’s 3000 email addresses, and 250k doesn’t sound a lot now. In fact the European parliament itself says there’s over 6600 people working at the European Parliament, so it works out to 37/day. I’ve had 42 emails between midnight at 2pm, and it’s been a quiet day.

Second, yes, we know it was targeted by mass email. That’s what a mass email protest looks like, when something a lot of people feel strongly about is revealed. 30 years ago, they would have written, and because of the way the postal services works, it would have been spread out over days as word took time to spread, and then people write, and the postal services delivers. Now the word can spread globally in minutes, and responses hit your inbox quicker than a pizza can be delivered. It’s the modern world, and if you can’t understand that, then you have no business being President.

In order to guarantee the functionality of the European Parliament’s e-mail system (which is one of the essential services offered to the European Parliament) it was decided to install a filter at 9:30 to reduce the number of external emails in relation to the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes”

OOPS! Someone’s been caught out in a lie. See, we have this tweet from the European Parliament which says something a bit different.

Automatic filters were triggered on 7 March because of an enormous influx of mails sent to MEPs – nothing to do with content #mepblock

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) March 8, 2013

Except as we now know, it wasn’t automatic. It was deliberately put in place because of people contacting MEPs, according to Mr Schulz

Seriously, don’t say it’s an automatic filter when it’s actually a response to a campaign against a topic. That’s NOT GOOD. Secondly, the European Parliament is filtering based on responses to a certain topic, RELEVENT to pending legislation. That’s COMPLETELY different from “nothing to do with content”

And sure an email storm is going to affect email servers, if they’re badly set up. The reasoning is that there’s a certain level of e-mails and beyond that is too much’. Again, doesn’t really work that way. Any properly set up email system should have no problem with this volume of mail, which can’t be said for the MEPs. This is ably demonstrated by British MEP Charles Tannock who replied to the Eu Parliament tweet saying

.@europarl_en Appreciated as MEPs overwelmed with lobbying email on farming & internet freedom-price of free & instant acces to elected reps

— Charles Tannock (@CharlesTannock) March 8, 2013

That’s not a great thing for the ECR Foreign Affairs and Human Rights Coordinator to say. Perhaps if those emailing had taken him to dinner, like a PROPER lobbyist, he’d have been more receptive. Plus it flies in the face of the Article 8 of the European Declaration of Human Rights

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Clearly there is no respect for correspondence from the President or the IT department, and there has been interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right. Indeed, blocking out communications with elected representatives on a single topic is a clear and flagrant violation of Article 8.

After the filter was installed, the European Parliament received 250,000 additional e0mails by 16:00 of the same day. At noon on 8 March there were 500,000 e-mails and on 9 March 708,683 e-mails in total were received from external sources all in relation to the report on “Eliminating Gender stereotypes.

Again, undermining your position a bit here, Martin. Rick’s original piece was published 21:30 on March 6. After 12 hours, you had 250,000 emails in on the topic, which were let through before you installed a block. So until the block (roughly 10am March 7) was installed, you had 251,358 emails.

Next you say that after the filter, you had another 250,000 emails by 16:00 that day (the 7th), for a total of 501,000 emails.

Your next line says that by noon on the 8th, you had 500,000 emails. I’m assuming that’s blocked, because you were already over that, total, 20 hours earlier. So that’s 751,000 emails. Then you close by saying by the 9th, you’d had a total of 708,683 emails.

The problem is, you’ve already accounted for more than that at noon on the 8th.

The numbers DO NOT ADD UP as presented. The only way they would, is if those that were delivered circumvented the filter, and there were very few emails sent before the filter was implemented.

That and now you’ve explained the number wasn’t 709k emails in 24 hours, but really spread out between March 6 and March 9 (3 days) it seems even less of a threat, with less than the quantity of email you admit to finding ‘average’. Hardly a tsunami of email.

Out of the 708,683 e-mails, 457,325 were blocked (after installing a filter) and 251,358 were delivered. No e-mails have been deleted or cancelled, and all e-mails which have been blocked are in the “quarantine” part of the infrastructure.

Hmm, that’s nice. Not deleted or cancelled, but just held in indefinite storage, in a folder no-one can access. If you move emails to the ‘trash’ folder, or files to the Recycle bin’, you’ve not deleted them either, but just ‘put them in quarantine’.

Sure you’ve not actually deleted them, they still exist, but as far as the recipients are concerned, they have been de-facto deleted. I asked Christian Engstrom MEP about these emails, and if he’d been sent any that had passed ‘quarantine’ His reply?

No, they have not been delivered to MEPs .The IT department may have them somewhere, but since MEPs cannot access them directly, and are probably not even aware of their existence in most cases, that is no help. For all practical purposes, the emails were discarded without any notice given either the citizen sender or the MEP recipient

Yet another lie, effectively, from President Schulz.

In conclusion, considering the high number of e-mails received in a very short period of time the limited number of different email accounts (850) used to send the e-mails, the usage of automated means for producing the e-mails and the usage of mainly two servers to send the e-mails , the IT department considered that the European Parliement was the subject of an abnormal massive e-mail flow and that the intervention of the technical services is justified to install a filter to reduce the number of messages from external sources concerning the report on “Eliminating gender stereotypes” in ordre to ensure the functioning of the European Parliament e-mail service.

There are two possible translations for this paragraph.

Translation 1:

The IT department is poorly trained and has implemented an email service that is barely capable of handling the normal everyday load, since there are too many people skimming from the budget and going to pet-vendors. As such, any influx casued by an issue of concern to may will overwhelm the creaky mess unless CYA mode is engaged and filters implemented.

Translation 2:

I am a strong supporter of the issue many people were protesting about. I support the block, because I want the legislation to pass, and with the help of people in the IT department have devised an excuse that we feel will justify blocking correspondence between the citizens of the EU and the Members of the European Parliament. If only we’d have thought of this in time to save ACTA.

Neither one is very appealing, or bodes well for democracy, or the view many have for the EU’s legislative body.

Either way though, the message this letter gives is that you shouldn’t contact MEP’s if there’s a serious issue, but if you absolutely must, don’t use email. EU citizens contacting MEP’s about issues that are important for them is not what the e-mail system is for. Use two cups and a bit of string instead, it’ll work just as well.

What are your thoughts? Translation 1, 2 or is there a 3rd?

Letter from EU President to Christian Engstrom MEP