Rick Falkvinge's Blog, page 8

How to talk to your non-tech friends about Net Neutrality

Corruption: Net Neutrality is being discussed again, and it’s important that your friends understand why this concept is crucial. Instead of explaining it in typical technical terms, it’s usually better to draw parallels to if we hadn’t had infrastructure neutrality in other fields. Roads are frequently mentioned; I find electricity to be a much better example to get the point across.

Imagine if all your kitchen appliances only worked with one power company. The electricity they provided was somehow coded so that only their fridge, their freezer, their stove, and their washing machine could be used when their power is in your outlets.

Imagine the cost of switching to a better power company. Cheaper, more reliable, less smug. You’d have to replace all your home appliances. Every single one. Pretty much like moving from the US to Europe or vice versa, to double or half the voltage in the power outlets. The cost of replacing everything, everything, would be prohibitive. Therefore, the power company could pretty much charge you anything they wanted that was less prohibitive than buying new appliances for your entire household.

And of course, that power company would be the only company selling the appliances that are compatible with their particular power. Forget about choice. No Miele, no Samsung, not even any Ikea. Why would they care about choice? You need to use their power, anyway, so it’s not like you can walk away from the table if you don’t like it. They don’t need to get a quality manufacturer in China, or India, or Vietnam. Some startup in Burma or Laos will do fine.

This is infrastructure neutrality as applied to electricity. This is why we need infrastructure neutrality as applied to the Internet.

For once one power company has started doing this and gets away with it – a so-called “vertical bundling” that they claim is “free market practice”, which basically tells their customers that their satisfaction is worth less than what you scrape off from the underside of your shoe – all the others will follow, if there’s a small number of providers like there typically is with infrastructure. The customer lock-in effect is so enormous, the executives will be salivating over how much they can overcharge.

Now, compare this to your cable companies. We’re so used to Game of Thrones just appearing on HBO, some other show just appearing on just another place, and another on some other, et cetera, that we don’t reflect on it.

But the scenario without electricity neutrality is not imaginary. It used to be exactly like that, with power companies requiring only their particular electrical equipment to be connected.

We’re just used today to some industries getting away with this (entertainment) and some not (roads and electricity), and expect that today’s particular situation is somehow natural. But this was not always so. In electricity’s infancy, the described scenario with incompatible power companies was exactly how it was, with different energy companies delivering different types of power that were utterly incompatible with each other. Most notably, this was a technology fight between Edison and Tesla (and Tesla’s power solution won worldwide).

This is why we need net neutrality, this is why we need infrastructure neutrality in every kind of infrastructure.

Last but not least, don’t forget John Oliver’s take on net neutrality, who was (is) instead suggesting it should be called “preventing cable company fuckery” to paint a more illustrative picture of it:

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This article has previously appeared at Private Internet Access.

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

How the copyright industry works methodically to erode your civil liberties and human rights

Copyright Monopoly: In a previous column, I outlined how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally, irreparably incompatible with privacy at the conceptual level. While the copyright industry may appear behind the times — even outright dumb — it is a mistake to believe they’re unaware of this incompatibility. To the contrary, their persistent and consistent actions show they’re trying to erode privacy at every level and every turn in order to tip the balance toward preserving their distribution monopoly at the expense of civil liberties and human rights.

To talk of human rights and civil liberties are at risk when you’re doing something that’s technically illegal – such talk can easily come across as exaggerated and hyperbolic, even objectively false. In this case, there would be no shortage of people who dismissed people who share knowledge and culture — file-sharers and streamers – as mere criminals trying to excuse something illegal. It’s a little reminiscent of people who yell “that’s against the Constitution” at every corner when they see something they either don’t like or insist they have a right to do.

However, in the particular case of people sharing movies, music, and TV series, there’s an authority on the matter that is hard to dispute – the European Court of Human Rights, the foremost international human rights court that supersedes even the constitutions of 47 developed countries. This court has ruled super clear that interference with people’s right — yes, right — to share and partake of culture and knowledge freely is indeed a violation of human rights:

For the first time in a judgment on the merits, the European Court of Human Rights has clarified that a conviction based on copyright law for illegally reproducing or publicly communicating copyright protected material can be regarded as an interference with the right of freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention. Such interference must be in accordance with the three conditions enshrined in the second paragraph of Article 10 of the Convention. This means that a conviction or any other judicial decision based on copyright law, restricting a person’s or an organisation’s freedom of expression, must be pertinently motivated as being necessary in a democratic society, apart from being prescribed by law and pursuing a legitimate aim. It is, in other words, no longer sufficient to justify a sanction or any other judicial order restricting one’s artistic or journalistic freedom of expression on the basis that a copyright law provision has been infringed. Neither is it sufficient to consider that the unauthorised use, reproduction or public communication of a work cannot rely on one of the narrowly interpreted exceptions in the copyright law itself, including the application of the so-called three-step test […]

Note how the Human Rights Court specifically states that undisputably breaking copyright law is insufficient for a conviction thereof – a prescribed law of code is just one of the three criteria that must be fulfilled to justify breaking the human rights charter. This, just by itself, is a legal bombshell. (It doesn’t stop people from getting convicted, but raises the bar a lot.)

This is consistent with my previous column where I describe how and why enforcement of the copyright monopoly online is utterly incompatible with privacy as we know it – for infringements take place in private communications that may both be used for super-protected communications like leaking evidence of abuse of governmental power to the press under protection-of-source laws, and for sharing music and movies, and if you’re going to make the latter discoverable, you’re also negating the legal protection of the former.

The copyright industry not just agrees with this analysis, but understands it deeply and has integrated it into their strategy.

To the copyright industry, the conflict between human rights and the exclusive distribution monopoly is crystal clear, and to them, nothing can get in the way of the exclusive distribution rights we know as copyright — nothing must be allowed to. Therefore, when it is recognized that the judiciary must prevent convictions based on the exclusive rights alone, and that privacy rights (as guaranteed by the law and government) get in the way of enforcement of the copyright monopoly, the copyright industry opted for a two-pronged approach:

First, the copyright industry strived to circumvent the judiciary altogether, aspiring for the right to go full Dredd and become judge, jury, and executioner.

It did so on multiple fronts. The most famous attempt would probably be the introduction of a Three Strikes scheme, where the copyright industry would be given the right to shut off a household’s internet access — that’s an entire household’s access — on the basis of three accusations of sharing in violation of the monopoly. (And as we all know, the copyright industry never makes mistakes.) The legal fight in the European Parliament was very telling, with one single word making all the difference: prior. The fight was over whether people subject to such exile from modernity should have access to prior legal due process — as in, the copyright industry wanted to shut people off first, and then, while shut off, only then could they seek legal redress. In effect, they wanted a right to circumvent the judiciary and shut hundreds of thousands of people off the net as a big-hammer collective punishment, scaring people into submission from the prospect of losing all contact with modern life.

Of course, such a scheme would require the copyright industry to have some jurisdiction over what Internet Service Providers could and could not do. We’ll be returning to that shortly.

France was first out with a three strikes scheme, creating a new authority – the Hadopi – which was tasked to shut down the Internet for misbehaving households (or households the copyright industry accused of misbehaving, anyway). The European Parliament saw through this attempt of the copyright industry’s, with the help of a lot of activists, and made the practice blatantly illegal in all of Europe. The relevant legislation even sported something called “the Hadopi test” – meaning that if the law code didn’t outright ban Hadopi, three strikes, and everything smelling remotely like it, the law wasn’t properly written yet. The European law passed a wording passing this test, and with that, three strikes was completely illegal in all of Europe – no state was at liberty to send people into exile from modern society by shutting off their household’s Internet access on mere accusations from an offended obsolete industry.

The end result was that the copyright industry couldn’t shut people off en masse as was planned, but had to resort to talking in “education efforts” in their PR material with regards to forcing Internet Service Providers to do their bidding. It was an enormous win for civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere.

However, the copyright industry has also tried suing ISPs directly to get a judicial order forcing them to censor the Internet on their behalf. While not technically circumventing the judiciary, it’s still avoiding dealing with the human rights issue as such on the prerequisite case-by-case basis. Perhaps most infamously, IFPI – the international record industry association founded in Mussolini’s Italy – sued Eircom, the largest Irish ISP, for the right to install “filtering” (censoring) equipment directly into their network. Yes, you read that right: a private industry demanded the right to silence any conversation it didn’t like, just because it felt (feels) entitled to do so.

Second, in order to erode and curtail privacy rights, the copyright industry sought a forced conscription of the Internet Service Providers to act as police on their behalf. In this way, the copyright industry would be able to introduce both proactive non-governmental censorship and mete out extrajudicial punishments, circumventing and curtailing the human rights “problem”.

In order to mete out these extrajudicial punishments – typically threats of a lawsuit, “pay up or else”, also known as copyright trolling, the more neutral speculative invoicing, the Hollywoodesque “an offer they can’t refuse”: in order to do this, the copyright industry obviously needed to know who’s operating behind an IP address. (This isn’t technically identifying user data, as ruled by courts, but the industry wasn’t deterred.)

In order to do this, it needed two separate legal mechanisms:

First, it needed the legal right to coerce an ISP to give out identifying information behind an IP address, something even the Police didn’t have the right to demand for mere everyday infringements of copyright.

Second, it needed a mandatory retention time for ISPs for such data, enabling retroactive surveillance or the everybody’s a suspect principle, so ISPs wouldn’t be able to protect the interests (and civil liberties) of their customers and delete the data immediately, thereby preventing the copyright industry from demanding it a week or so later.

The first mechanism was achieved by the IPRED federal law in Europe, which I described in a previous column, the law which was spearheaded in the European Parliament by the spouse of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, one of the big four record companies. This law is still in effect, and for a time, the copyright industry did indeed have more far-reaching powers to invade people’s privacy than even the Police. (The Police have rightfully argued that this is bad, but instead of reverting the private industry’s private policing rights, the governmental police instead argued they should have the same authority. They mostly do, today.)

The second mechanism, forcing ISPs to retain data so it could be demanded later, has been one of the most controversial things to happen to Europe (and elsewhere). The directive – the federal law – was passed in the European Parliament on December 14, 2004, and was called the Data Retention Directive. It basically required ISPs to store all identifying subscriber data for some period of time, at least six months, turning this privacy violation from “absolutely forbidden beyond direct billing needs” to “mandatory”. The European Supreme Court (the ECJ) struck it down as utterly unconstitutional in April of 2014, almost a decade later: the Court didn’t just nullify it onward, rather, the law was ruled so grotesque a violation of human rights it was retroactively ruled to never have existed.

It’s trivial to find massive copyright industry support for both of these mechanisms, not just in public consultations to law proposals, but pretty much at every trade show and political gathering at the time the laws were discussed.

In summary, the copyright industry understands full well that its distribution monopoly is incompatible with human rights, and is working consistently to remove those human rights in order to maintain enforcement of its commercial distribution monopoly at any cost.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

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This article was previously published at Private Internet Access.

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

In an EU without Britain and France, weaker and sensible copyright policy would emerge

Copyright Monopoly: Britain and France have been the primary copyright hawks in the EU, pushing for stronger distribution monopolies and harsher penalties at every turn. With Brexit in the cards, and a possible Frexit following this spring’s French elections, a hypothetical future EU copyright law looks much more sensible. Let’s review the dynamics at play.

Britain has already voted to exit the European Union, and with the possiblility of Marine le Pen winning the presidency in France, along with a campaign promise to leave the eurozone and/or the entire EU if she wins, there’s a possibility France will also be preparing an exit soon. In order to understand what impact these developments may have on future copyright legislation, let’s take a look at the dynamics at play over the last decade and how France and Britain have used their influence on the Union.

When the EU massively expanded eastward on May 1, 2004, the copyright industry realized the expansion would mean a permanent shift against evermore-policies of evermore-copyright: Eastern Europe isn’t fond of this rich-man’s-protectionism scheme at all. Therefore, the copyright industry tried their damndest to get everything they could crammed through the door before the expansion date, the date Eastern Europe would get their voting rights in the Union, in the so-called IPRED federal law (“directive”) – the IPR Enforcement Directive. This legislative package gave the copyright industry more far-reaching powers than the Police in many European states. Yes, you read that right: it gave the private copyright industry the right to break anonymity and privacy in many cases where the Police weren’t allowed to.

The idea was to cram much more into the directive, including four-year prison sentences for sharing music, but time was running out toward the EU expansion date, and so everything contested was cut out in order to pass what had been agreed on (IPRED), with the four-year-prison parts and more pushed out to a later successor package, IPRED2. This successor directive failed and was withdrawn in 2010, since power had indeed shifted permanently. The intended IPRED2 directive also had the side effect of criminalizing a lot of open-source software development, as it also criminalized patent infringements – something that has always been a purely civil issue – and that contributed to scuttling it as a Generally Very Bad Idea.

So how does this relate to France? That federal law which gave the copyright industry more powers than the Police, the original IPRED, was spearheaded in the European Parliament by a French Member of European Parliament (MEP) named Jannelly Fourtou. Jannelly is married to Jean-Réné Fourtou, who was the Chairman and CEO of Vivendi Universal during this time. Yes, this means that Vivendi – one of the big record labels – was essentially writing draconian European copyright law in 2002-2004.

France continues to be draconian in this area. One of the MEPs infamous for harsher industrial protectionism was the French Marielle Gallo, who was one of the people fighting hardest for the passage of ACTA, even in the face of massive protests across Europe. (“I know better what these people need than they do”, is an authentic quote from her in Parliament on the matter.) Gallo was defeated in the matter and no longer works in the European Parliament, having been replaced by people who hopefully understand the Internet just a little bit better.

So much for France. So what about Britain? Well, Britain is currently preparing laws that enable ten years in prison for sharing music and TV. Does that sound sensible to you – that sharing music with a stranger is worse than, say, aggravated sexual assault? Britain with its record industry (that’s record industry, as in making small silly round pieces of plastic, as opposed to music industry) has been a major powerhouse in the EU.

In other words, without these two draconian powerhouses, the much more sensible powerhouses like Poland will instead set the tone for industrial protectionism in Europe, leading to completely different policy moving forward – one where the old record labels don’t get to dictate policy. While there are a few other draconian countries, like Denmark, they’re of small influence compared to the big players.

This reasoning, of course, ignores the much bigger picture that a potential European Union without Britain and France is not the European Union as we know it today but something entirely different. But as this post has shown, that can also be a good thing, at least from some aspects.

As a final sidetrack here, it’s interesting to note that Britain and France are the only two countries in Europe with the kind of two-party system that the United States has, and which was constructed to resist temporary fads of populism at the cost of having a high inertia to actual change. Therefore, when real change happens (like with the Internet arriving 20 years ago), such countries will be the slowest to see its policy adapt to new circumstances. This is interesting to watch in the light of these countries clinging the hardest to old structures.

Meanwhile, and especially in times of change, privacy remains your own responsibility.

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This article was previously published at Private Internet Access.

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

Told you so: Airport-style identity checks coming to train travel

Belgium: Several European countries will start requiring photo ID from passengers to ride trains, similar to airport identity checks. The requirement concerns the high-speed Thalys and Eurostar services in Europe, with the vague goal of “tightening security and tracking criminals”. Activists said this would happen when useless security theater appeared in airports – it will just spread, but people dismissed the idea at the time as preposterous, probably because it still is.

Reuters reports that Belgium, Netherlands, and France intend to have passenger lists and passport checks in place on high-speed trains by the end of the year. This is despite all three countries being part of the European Schengen zone with borderless and paperless travel – similar to how you don’t need to show papers when traveling between states inside the US or Canada.

When the airport security theater was rolled out, spearheaded by the USA following September 11, 2001, many privacy and security professionals criticized it for being intrusive and ineffective, respectively. Most notably, security guru Bruce Schneier pointed out that the only thing that really had a positive effect on security was the locked cockpit door, with a half-nod to armed air marshals as another possible measure that actually works (though being an air marshal is apparently one of the most boring jobs ever, with a horrible turnover combined with long and expensive training).

As a tragic side note, that one positive security measure – locked cockpit doors – has instead resulted in the death of 144 people.

The rest just doesn’t work. It’s theater, security theater. There’s even a YouTube channel with a guy constructing explosive devices and weapons only out of things he buys after the security check on airports.

And of course, it’s violating people’s privacy – their privacies of movement and of location. (In the TSA case, also their privacy of body.)

When these identity checks and this security theater appeared at domestic flights (at least domestic Scandinavian flights, which were as unchecked as bus rides before 9/11), activists warned of a slippery slope that politicians would like it so much, despite it being utterly ineffective, that train travel would be next. Everybody dismissed the idea as absolutely ridiculous. And it is. It is just as ridiculous when being forced onto train stations this year, as it already is at airports. We’ve just gotten used to it at airports already.

“The bullshit this generation puts up with as a temporary annoyance, the next generation will instead regard as the natural order of society and how things have always been.”

Germany is refreshingly choosing to not participate in these identity checks. It would increasingly seem that Germany is the only contemporary country who learned anything from totalitarian near-history, the only country that really has it in its blood, bones, and marrow that civic rights are there for a reason and are not to be taken lightly.

Make careful note at this time of the little remark at the end of the Reuters story: “The scheme will not be enforced… on bus services.” This is the first time I see somebody even mentioning the possibility of having a photo ID requirement to ride a bus. The idea has been conceived.

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This article has previously appeared at Private Internet Access.

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

With the TPP and the TTIP gone, what threat to liberty comes next?

Civil Liberties: Asia Nikkei has just reported that the Trump administration has formally withdrawn from the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a protectionist agreement masquerading as a free trade agreement. This also indicates certain termination of the corresponding TTIP agreement. Before the champagne pops open, though, it’s important to realize that something else will happen instead, and we don’t know what: these policies go back a full four decades.

Since the late 1970s, the United States has projected industrial dominance across the world by tying aggressive trade negotiations to its foreign policy. This was a bold and unusually aggressive move in the 1970s which was recommended by the ACTN, the Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations, a committee which was headed by Edmund Pratt Jr – the head of Pfizer – and which reported straight to President Carter.

The background to this tectonic shift in the late 1970s was basically Toyota. When the geopolitical strategists in the United States observed that the American public actually preferred Japanese cars over the freedom-loving (and gas-loving, and spare-parts-loving) cars of ole American Detroit, it was written on the wall that the United States could no longer compete on industrial production alone. Putting America first, a number of committees tried putting in place international agreements that would ensure America’s status as king of the hill even in the face of superior industry elsewhere – essentially a very advanced form of rent-seeking.

The American negotiators first went to the United States WIPO with this proposal, where they were rather unceremoniously kicked out on the street, the United Nations seeing the proposal for the rent-seeking that it was. Instead, they needed to hijack another forum and convert it to what they wanted, and there were many to choose from. The choice fell on the GATT forum, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades.

Through a series of sessions where countries were played against each other, GATT was slowly converted into something called “GATT-plus” at the time, where a new global trade agreement would honor protectionist monopolies of the United States – particularly Hollywood’s distribution monopolies in the form of aggressive copyrights and the pharma industry’s monopolies on manufacturing drugs – in exchange for being able to trade at all. This way, it didn’t matter if Japan had better cars, or indeed, better everything. The world would pay rent in any case. (Of course, such a scheme only works while the US has a majority of the internationally recognized exclusive rights, but in the 1970s, China was nowhere near overtaking the US in quantity of patents and other monopolies).

Once finished, this new agreement was named TRIPS – and a new body was created to oversee it and supersede GATT. This new body was named the WTO, the World Trade Organization.

With the Internet entering the stage, the copyrights in this agreement started to collide with basic liberty – specifically, privacy. Where our parents had had the right to send an anonymous letter containing anything they wanted without it being opened in transit, powerful forces in the copyright industry wanted to curtail this liberty for our digital children, on the simple basis that “they can’t make money if anybody can send anything to anybody else anonymously”.

Not that it should matter; tomorrow’s civil liberties should never have to take a back seats to preserving yesterday’s business models.

Quite notably, even when these agreements were sold with the argument that they don’t change existing laws or only cause minor changes, it’s important to understand that the agreements also lock out the possibility of future reform. Their entire purpose is basically to tie the hands of legislators.

In order to understand just how critical enforcement of the copyright monopoly is to the United States geopolitical dominance, we can look at what happened when Russia applied for entry into the WTO. The point of controversy was a site named allofmp3.com, a site which sold mp3 files at far below record-level rates, and did so completely legally under Russian law as it was classified as a radio station, albeit a digital one.

The United States demanded it closed. That was the only notable American demand for Russia’s accession.

So let’s back up here a little: two former mortal enemies who had held each other at nuclear gunpoint 24-by-7 had come to the negotiating table and agreed to settle their differences. The United States could have asked for anything, absolutely anything. And so what did it ask for?

It demanded that Russia close a bloody record store.

This is when you start realizing the scale of importance of these frameworks. They’re not free trade agreements, they’re domination insurances.

On June 1, 2006, the New York Times reported that US trade negotiators have warned Russia that the continued existence of AllOfMP3 could jeopardize Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. This was reiterated by the United States Trade Representative Susan Schwab in remarks to the US Chamber of Commerce on September 28, 2006. — Wikipedia

Fast forward to 2010 and “TRIPS-plus”, known as ACTA (deceptively named the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement). This was going to be yet another ratcheting up of protection of US industries across the globe – among other things, it would put generic drug production in India out of business. But in this case, the Internet rose up in response to the copyright industry overreach against liberty and managed to defeat ACTA in the European Parliament on July 4, 2012.

There is no small irony in Europe asserting its independence from American special interests as momentously as this on July 4 of all dates.

Without the European Union, which is the world’s largest economy, there would be no global ratcheting up of protectionist agreements. (China was the probable target of the ACTA framework, seeing it was the only major economy not a party to the negotiations.)

And so with the defeat of ACTA, liberty activists knew that the trade negotiators would come back and try again. It’s their 9-5 job, after all. But they wouldn’t hinge success on European consent again. Therefore, in the next round, the trade negotiators went west from the US and east from the US in separate trade agreements essentially saying the same thing, but independently from each other, avoiding the ability for the European Parliament to put en end to the whole shebang as disappointingly as last time around.

The westbound post-ACTA agreement across the Pacific was to be called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP.

The eastbound agreement across the Atlantic was to be called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

All this has a straight line in history back to the WTO, the Carter era, and Toyota overtaking Detroit.

The TTIP had run aground in negotiations with Europe – one negotiator mentioned that in several years, not one single of the 20-plus points in the agreement had come to closure – and in particular, something called the ISDS proved controversial: a framework where corporations cound sue entire countries for making unfavorable laws in the face of their business model. Yes, it is exactly as insane as audacious as it sounds. For a prime example, see when Philip Morris used such a framework to sue Australia for requiring plain cigarette packages.

This is why it’s very interesting to see the Trump administration announce a withdrawal from the TPP. It ends 40 years of United States trade policy. While some are calling Trump’s policies “protectionist”, that’s not necessarily true – these policies since the 1970s have been protectionist if anything.

So it remains to be seen what the U.S. Trump administration will do instead. I have a hard time imagining all the built-up rent-seeking will just be dropped on the floor.

If you want to read more about these background events, I can recommend the book “Information Feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy?” by Drahos and Braithwhite. It’s a bit heavy, but shows through deep interviews with the 50 most involved people what really happened behind the scenes when the WTO came into existence.

Meanwhile, however, liberty online just got a major reprieve from the aggression of the copyright industry (who gets to dictate major parts of these agreements). That’s something inherently positive.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

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This article has previously appeared at Private Internet Access.

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

My impressions of Satoshi Roundtable ]I[

Cryptocurrency: The third Satoshi Roundtable has just concluded in Cancún, Mexico. The Roundtable is a private gathering of 100 movers and shakers within the bitcoin industry, with no media present, and it’s held under Chatham House rules – meaning everybody can use the information shared at the meeting, but never disclose who said what or their affiliation.

First, it can be acknowledged that an event like this can feel like elitism to those who are not invited. Nevertheless, it must be argued it is a very efficient way to make shit happen, and seeing there’s nothing preventing anybody from inviting people to a relaxed meeting, there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing so just because the whole world isn’t invited. This is the third annual Roundtable (and yes, the knight on the picture is the Roundtable mascot).

These are my impressions, and I’m taking the liberty to be blunt. Being blunt saves time that is otherwise needed to guess what people meant.

The good

First, the meeting was superbly arranged by the Bitcoin Foundation and Bruce Fenton. It was set in just the type of location which makes it easy for participants to hang around the meeting venue instead of taking a taxi to whatever favorite other venue and splitting up, which makes all these magic spontaneous small meetings happen.

For me as a Nordic person, it wasn’t too bad to come to 27°C in the air and 23°C in the water in January, either. Not to mention the intense sunlight. (The sun doesn’t rise in large parts of Scandinavia this time of year.)

It was also a breath of very fresh air, after having felt the antagonistic attitude and tensions in online discussions, to see people meet and honestly try to exchange perspectives and gain understanding. In short, people are behaving not just like civilized adults, but like humble thought leaders. You’d never believe this if you just participated in online discussions.

The outstanding

The productivity in a meeting like this is amazing. It’s so intense, you’re having high-impact discussions with everybody you meet, every five to ten minutes at tightest. Almost every single interaction leads to cooperation opportunities. Meeting so many other movers and shakers in such a tight spacetime means there’s an ignition of opportunity pretty much with every person you speak to.

I also had very fruitful and frank – even blunt – discussions with people who represent ideas and objectives seemingly diametrically opposed from mine in the bitcoin sphere, and there was a humility in the air and a willingness to listen and understand that is plain inconceivable if you are judging by the online toxicity. Again, I’m not allowed to disclose whom or their affiliation, but they deserve a metric ton of credit for the attitude. You know who you are.

I’m leaving Cancún with eleven actionable items I wouldn’t have had without meeting all the amazing people here, just one of which would have been sufficient to justify the trip and attendance.

The beautiful

“Blockchain technology is an extinction event to traditional financial institutions. Like the dinosaurs, a few will survive by morphing into agile birds at a small fraction of their previous weight and size, but most will just die.”

I’m not allowed to disclose who said this, but I think it’s a beautiful quote. Roger Ver also posted the first part of it on Twitter, similarly without disclosing who said it, as is appropriate.

There was also a call for leadership among the people present – “we need to act like the leaders we are, and not tolerate bad attitude in the discussions: at the very least, we need to act as good examples and not foster a bad atmosphere”. This was very refreshing to hear and was met with applause.

The bad

The major bitcoin discussions concerned segwit and the present deadlock. As it’s taking most of the energy right now, I’m also going to devote a lot of space to those impressions. There were many hours of discussion with (a non-identified subset of) people present calling for “segwit adoption and activation now”, plain and simple, with frustrated expressions that Chinese miners are “blocking progress” by not signaling, deploying, and activating segfault, basically “because they should be doing so”.

In a speaking slot of mine, I stood up and made the observation that we (people in the room) are acting like a Toyota boardroom who are trying to make a decision that every family should buy the latest Toyota model. “It doesn’t work like that”, I said. “We’re not the Soviet Politburo commanding a planned economy. The reality of the situation is that we’ve made the market an offer, and the market is rejecting our offer.” I made the point that thinking the market should behave differently, no matter how good your reasons, is not going to make the market behave differently in the slightest. The Toyota boardroom doesn’t get to decide what car a family should buy, and the present company does not get to decide what code miners run on their own machines. The world isn’t fair, but instead of complaining about it, play the cards you’ve got on your hand. Give your client what they want and you both benefit.

Some people seemed to take to this argument. Most didn’t, appearing to be stuck in the mindset that miners are there to serve the community, as opposed to the actual objective, serving themselves only as a rational economic actor.

I find it really, really frustrating that you have a room full of otherwise hyperintelligent people, who were told in very clear terms by the Chinese miners what those miners want about a year ago (a hardfork increasing the max blocksize limit for the present type of transactions to at least 2 megabytes), and today, you have the same people asking in frustration why Chinese miners are not adopting segwit when those miners said in bright blinking cleartext a year ago what it is they want, and it is not segwit. The lack of understanding the customer perspective comes across not just as substandard, but appalling to the level of downright confusing.

The conclusion from this meeting appears to be to do mostly nothing and just expect segwit to activate, possibly lowering the activation threshold (which would not go over well at all). I find that disappointing, because it means that 44 weeks from now, when segwit has definitely failed to activate (when the activation window closes), there will be a flurry of confused activity as what to do next. So in 52 weeks, we’ll be at anotherSatoshi Roundtable with absolutely no progress at all, if this is the only path worked on.

The alternative, of course, is that a hard fork happens in the meantime. There are at least four levels of hardfork that can take place, and the most likely is that enough miners just switch to a non-Core bitcoin distribution with a higher or dynamic blocksize limit – the second easiest level of hardfork.

I am aware of several hardfork initiatives, at three different levels, that are already underway with work progressing. I predict and anticipate an actual fork event to take place six to 18 months from now. And it’s not going to be “firing Core” as some would frame it; more accurately, it’s going to be “firing Blockstream”. The open question would be if such an event happens in time to preserve bitcoin’s first-mover advantage over other, technically superior coins – my crystal ball is very hazy on this point.

Overall, my assessment is that bitcoin is lacking project management. There’s no clear vision of what the community wants bitcoin to be, who the customer is, or what problem it should solve. This is maybe best illustrated by the rather random statement “It’s now clear that microtransactions have been priced out by rising transaction fees”, as one person stated in the meetings.

Yeah, bitcoin just lost two billion users, and it was presented like a freak, unforeseeable, completely unpreventable accident – like a volcano erupting. In reality, it was foreseeable for years and completely preventable. It’s okay to not prevent such a catastrophic loss of userbase as an active choice or as a choice of whom to target – but it’s not okay to merely observe “oh and by the way, this just happened”.

The ugly

The meeting started with the observation that there are now 70,000 transactions in the backlog. Despite this, a subset of the participants insist that there’s absolutely no problem with network capacity. It’s as if that subset of participants and another subset (including me) are living in different realities.

A further subset of people – I am still not going to name or imply an affiliation because Chatham House rules – insist on the importance of not taking risks with the bitcoin network. This comes across as completely counterfactual to me. We’ve seen a capacity ceiling approach for two years, and now we’ve hit it – how can you talk about not taking risks at the same time as you completely ignore the approaching and completely predictable capacity wall for several years? To many, this would come across as some form of arrogance, but calling it that would be to assign bad faith. I don’t believe in bad faith in this company; I prefer to assign the phenomenon to tunnel vision.

I’ve seen segwit rationalizations that doing a hardfork would take 12 months “and we must choose a fast path now”. Well then, the right thing to do would have been to start executing that hardfork lifting the blocksize limit a year ago, when miners declared loudly and openly that this is what they want. But that wasn’t done, and here we are a year later.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. –Chinese proverb

Of course, this argument could be trivially rebutted by claiming that something has been done: segwit. But in my blunt world, it’s results that count, and segwit is not happening. Again, this was completely predictable with a modicum of project management.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it was a very productive meeting that was superbly organized and executed. Some of my preconceptions were shattered, particularly with regard to attitudes and professionalism; others were more or less confirmed, particularly with regard to stances and action plans of various actors and actor groups, as well as my assessment of the political situation at hand.

After this meeting, I’m very bullish on bitcoin’s future. There’s one thing I believe in more than ideas, and that’s people. Specifically, people with the ability to execute those ideas — and there’s a ton of them here. They’re not going to let bitcoin die silently with a whimper, but something will happen to resolve this deadlock, and it’s going to happen sooner rather than later with all this energy around. I cannot predict what that event is — as I said, I’m aware of three hardfork initiatives myself — but I am quite sure such an event will come from somewhere.

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

Understanding the fundamental, irreconcilable conflict between copyright enforcement and privacy of communication

Copyright Monopoly: Enforcement of copyright is fundamentally, conceptually incompatible with privacy of correspondence. You can't have the sealed and private letter in existence at the same time as you enforce copyright, once communications have gone digital. This is the reason you see VPN companies and other privacy advocates fight copyright enforcement and copyright law: because society has to choose between privacy and copyright, and basic civil liberties are considered more important than one particular entertainment business model.

Why is a VPN company interested in copyright law? Why does a VPN company even question copyright law expansion and enforcement? Why do the most appreciated internet operators talk back a lot to the copyright industry – and are appreciated by their customers for that very reason? Why does the net generation generally say, as a blanket statement, that copyright law just has no place in an Internet world?

Is it, as some would claim, because BitTorrent users make up a majority of the paying customers of a VPN company or an internet operator? That the net generation just wants everything for free? That the VPN company profits from protecting criminals? You know, there are people who would actually claim this with a straight face, apparently serious. The facts are clear on the matter, though: BitTorrent usage is neither a majority reason for using a VPN, nor are heavy-bandwidth users particularly profitable. And the net generation has no illusion about everything-for-free being sustainable or even desirable – but they do defend their liberty ferociously.

No, the reason successful VPN teams are critical of copyright enforcement goes deeper. Much deeper. It has to do with the basic passion for privacy that led a founder to create a VPN company in the first place, and for passionate co-workers to share the vision of privacy being a civil liberty worth defending.

There is a little-acknowledged conflict between enforcement of the copyright monopoly – which is a governmentally-sanctioned private monopoly on distribution, duplication, and transmission of certain bitpatterns – and private correspondence as a concept. When I open a digital communications channel to somebody, I can use that channel to transmit private correspondence (thoughts, ideas, feelings), for which there is a constitutional right to privacy. But I am also technically able to use this channel to transmit a piece of music, at TV show, or a movie, which would typically be illegal – a violation of the copyright distribution monopoly, and there is no shortage of people who do.

Thus, the key observation here is that the infringements of copyright used to be visible to the naked eye in a public location – they could be a printed book for sale in a bookstore, or an unlicensed concert — but the infringements have now moved into private correspondence, into the protected private sphere. An active BitTorrent is a set of ones and zeroes that arrive at and leave my computer, interspersed with all the (other) private things I do on the same computer: browse sensitive information, send mail, advise political dissidents, et cetera. I could also be using email or chat channels to violate copyright, for that matter, at the same time as I’m sending anonymous evidence of governmental abuse to a reporter on another channel. The only way to discover the illegality of a small part of the aggregate bitstream my computer is transmitting is to capture and analyze all of it. Thus, we’re now at a point where enforcement of this distribution monopoly has become irreconcilable with keeping the very concept of private communications.

There's no way to say that private correspondence is still as completely protected as it's always been, but copyright-infringing data transmissions are not. They're mixed in with each other now, mixed with each other forevermore, and the only way to tell which is which is to look at the aggregate stream, pick it apart, and analyze it. The act of sorting requires observation. At the point somebody has sorted the private correspondence into legal and illegal, it is no longer private, by definition. Thus, the only way to maintain the concept of privacy is to prevent the observation, and as a consequence, prevent the discovery of infringements of the copyright distribution monopoly. There is no middle ground. None. It’s one or the other: privacy or copyright.

This is why a privacy company fights against copyright enforcement. It follows from that company’s very existence, which in turn usually follows from a deep passion for civil liberties on behalf of the founder and co-workers.

“If I send you an e-mail, that e-mail may contain a piece of music. If we are in a video chat, I may drop a copyrighted video clip there for both of us to watch. The only way to detect this, in order to enforce today’s level of copyright, is to eliminate the right to private correspondence. That is, to eavesdrop on all the ones and zeros going to and from all computers.

There is no way to allow the right to private correspondence for some type of content, but not for other types. You must break the seal and analyze the contents to sort it into allowed and disallowed. At that point, the seal is broken. Either there is a seal on everything, or on nothing.

So we are at a crossroads. We, as a society, can say that copyright is the most important thing we have, and give up the right to talk in private. Either that, or we say that the right to private correspondence has greater value, even though such correspondence can be used to transfer copyrighted works. There is no middle ground.”

— From the book The Case for Copyright Reform

Curiously, a lot of people seem to defend the copyright distribution monopoly in a vacuum – as if there was no cost to upholding it, as if there were no bad effects down the road, only somebody making money in a vacuum. “They get to decide how the fruit of their labor is distributed. How is that a bad thing?” Well, it is a bad thing when the consequence of that principle is that nobody gets to communicate in private anymore. It is a very bad thing. And that is, indeed, its consequence. Many seem to reason along this line:

“Because I (we) make money from this legal construct, it is just and righteous, and therefore this legal construct has a right and an obligation to keep existing, no matter what else happens.”

Worse still, some take the stance that infringing the distribution monopoly is “stealing”, despite this being obviously false from moral, philosophical, economic, and legal standpoints. Yes, legal – even the U.S. Supreme Court says that infringing the copyright distribution monopoly isn’t related to stealing, and U.S. courts have grown so tired of this false rhetoric they’ve even banned the copyright industry from using such terms in court, quite an unusual and far-reaching measure.

It can be debated whether there is a tangible loss of income involved; studies show the income to artists from direct copyright is “insignificant” when taking a statistical view and comparing it to overall creator income. Regardless, and this is an important point, even if maintaining private correspondence and thereby preventing copyright enforcement does result in a loss of income for some people, it is still the right thing to do: civil liberties do not get to compete with business models, and no entrepreneur has the right to dismantle civil liberties such as privacy just because they claim they can’t make money otherwise. These two concepts – foundational civil liberties and a particular business model – are concepts that reside on completely different levels in our society.

The reason this conflict receives so little political acknowledgment most likely has to do with the two concepts being in different departments, and nobody (so far) having considered the issue important enough to do a cross-department prioritization. Copyright and other forms of Industrial Protectionism typically reside in a Department of Commerce, and basic civil liberties like privacy typically reside in a Department of Justice or similar.

So there are two sides of a scale here that are utterly, completely irreconcilable, and society must choose one of them and abandon the other. On one side of the scale is private correspondence at the conceptual level, or at least whenever it happens in a digital environment, which is increasingly all correspondence there is. On the same side, as a consequence of the right to private correspondence, are also freedoms of the press and freedoms of assembly and opinion. Meanwhile, on the other side of that scale, we find a distribution monopoly for an entertainment industry — a monopoly which enables a few centralized business models for entertainment and arts, but isn’t remotely required for the vast majority of the conceivable entertainment business models. When valuing these two sides of our scale against each other, which side has more weight and importance to society as a whole? It should not even be a matter of discussion.

Of course, there is also the issue of a law that cannot or must not be enforced. Some people claim that there’s nothing wrong with the law, just with its enforcement. But the existence of an unenforced law is not justified the first place, and serves only to undermine respect for the legal system as a whole. After all, the text of law cannot be separated from its enforcement in practice.

There are many other civil liberties that are grounded in privacy, such as freedoms of speech, expression, and assembly; also the freedom of the press. These are also at stake. The Freenet philosophy is unusually clear about this:

“Of course much of Freenet’s publicity has centered around the issue of copyright, and thus I will speak to it briefly. The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say. This is important, most people fail to see or address this point when debating the issue of copyright, so let me make it clear: You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law. It is for this reason that Freenet, a system designed to protect Freedom of Speech, must prevent enforcement of copyright.” — Freenet Project philosophy

On the other hand, once you acknowledge that privacy must take priority over today’s distribution monopoly enforcement, you can instead reap all the positive rewards of every single human being having 24-by-7 access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. Just as when libraries appeared, the effect of this is not to be taken lightly. Moreover, all the tools for this effect have already been rolled out, all the infrastructure built, everybody already trained. All we need to do is to remove the ban on using it.

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This article was previously published on Private Internet Access.

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

The entire modern copyright was built on one fundamental assumption that the Internet has reversed

Copyright Monopoly: When the copyright monopoly was reinstated in 1710, the justification was that of publishing being many orders of magnitude more expensive than authoring, and so without it, nothing would get published. But the Internet has reversed this assumption completely: publishing is now many orders of magnitude cheaper than writing the piece you want to publish.

The copyright monopoly, as we know, was created on May 4, 1557, when Queen Mary I introduced a complete censorship of dissenting political opinions and prevented them from being printed (and thus the “right to copy” was born as a privilege within a guild, by banning all wrongthinkers of the time from expressing ideas). This stands in contrast to France’s attempt at banning the printing press entirely by penalty of death in at least two aspects: One, England’s suppression was successful, and two, the suppression has survived (albeit mutating) to present day.

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which is a point of pride in that no blood was shed (at least none that mattered to the history writers), people were really really really tired of the censorship, and wanted to end it promptly. Thus, the monopoly that was the foundation of copyright – the exclusive right to the London Company of Stationers to print anything in the country, in exchange for letting it pass by the Crown’s censors first – the monopoly of copyright was not renewed as the law required, and lapsed in 1695.

Yes, the copyright monopoly ceased to exist in 1695, after having been in effect since 1557.

The post-revolution British parliament would have none of it.

The formerly very profitable print shops, having operated under a repressive monopoly upholding political censorship, though — they would petition Parliament again, and again, and again, to reinstate their lucrative monopoly, but to no end. Parliament just wouldn’t introduce something like it again. What’s really interesting here isn’t the fact that the printers gathered their families on the steps of Parliament to weep for bread to their children, but the arguments they used, and what didn’t happen:

First, they argued that nothing would get printed if they didn’t get their monopoly back, as they couldn’t make a profit. The extremely noteworthy part of the argument is that they didn’t argue nothing would get created – but that nothing would get printed.

Second, the authors had no interest whatsoever in this construct. The printers and publishers were the ones arguing for the monopoly, claiming to speak on behalf of authors, and presented the idea that authors should “own” their works and have such “ownership” transferrable by contract — knowing full well authors would have no choice but to sign their rights away to the previous vested interest.

The British Parliament bought this line of reasoning, unfortunately, sending us down 300 years (and counting) of suppression of speech by those who have most to profit from suppressing it. This date – the reinstatement of copyright on April 10, 1710 – this is what the copyright industry deceptively calls “the birth of modern copyright”, in an attempt to conceal or dissociate from copyright’s origin as political censorship.

The real meat here lies in understanding that the entire underlying assumption, and justification of this construct, was that publishing was far more expensive than writing. Setting up a print shop required considerable investment and labor in order to distribute works, whereas writing just required pen, paper, and time.

“Far from viewing copying as theft, authors [in 1700] generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors.” — Copyright historian Karl Fogel

The Internet has completely reversed this assumption. Thinking in terms of time required, the effort required to publish is now approximately the equivalent effort of writing a few words – here in WordPress, it involves moving the mouse to the upper right corner, placing the cursor over “Publish”, and pressing the left mouse button. Thus, we can observe the following:

Where the reintroduction of the copyright monopoly – the “modern” copyright monopoly – was justified by publishing being several orders of magnitude more expensive than authoring, the Internet has made publishing several orders of magnitude cheaper than authoring, completely reversing the original premise.

Of course, there will be no shortage of people who profit from an artificial limitation, once it is in place. You could easily argue today that X and Y must not change, because A and B profit from the status quo — and so, the copyright industry readily claims that so and so many thousand jobs are upheld (“created”) by this artificial and harmful limit. But really, what kind of an argument is that? Who has the right to prevent the passage of time because they benefit from a lack of change? This is effectively the copyright industry’s single argument today.

And that industry will let nothing stand in its way – in particular not civil liberties such as privacy. They have consistently tried to erode basic freedoms under the guise of preserving the status quo, when what they’re doing is denying our children the liberties that our parents had, such as the ability to send an anonymous letter to somebody.

Further reading: The surprising history of copyright, and the promise of a post-copyright world.

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This article was previously published at Private Internet Access.

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

In science fiction, robot witnesses to crime are seen as normal. Nobody considered the privacy implications for present day.

New World: The Police wants the cooperation of a robotic witness to a murder case, requesting Amazon’s help in recalling what the domestic robot “Echo” heard in the room. Robotic witnesses have been a theme in science fiction for a long time — and yet, we forgot to ask the most obvious and the most important questions. Maybe we just haven’t realized that we’re in science fiction territory, as far as robotic agents go, and explored the consequences of it: what robot has agency and who can be coerced?

People were outraged that the Police would consider asking a robot – the Amazon Echo – what happened in the recent murder case, effectively activating retroactive surveillance. Evenmoreso, people were outraged that the Police tried to coerce the robot’s manufacturer to provide the data, coercing a third party to command the robot it manufactured, and denying agency to the people searched.

In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, a human detective is sent off to faraway Solaris to investigate a murder, and has to interview a whole range of robot servants, each with their own perspective, to gradually piece together how the murder took place. A cooking robot knows about the last dinner of the victim, and can provide details only of that, and so on. Still, each and every robot have a perfect recollection of their particular perspective.

When reading this story in my teens, I didn’t reflect at all over the concept of a detective interviewing robots of the victim. Once robots had data and could communicate, it felt like a perfectly normal view of things to come: they were witnesses to the scene, after all, and with perfect memory and objective recall thereof to boot. If anything, robots were more reliable witnesses and more desirable witnesses, because they wouldn’t lie for their own material benefit.

Today, we don’t see a toaster as having the agency required to be a legal witness. We surely don’t see an electronic water meter as being a conscious robot. We don’t consider our television set to have agency, and being able to answer questions about what we do in our living room, what it saw us do in our living room and heard us say, the way a robot could be asked in a science fiction novel.

But is checking an electronic water meter’s log file really that different from asking a futuristic gardener robot what happened? And if so, what is the difference, apart from the specific way of asking (reality’s robots aren’t nearly as cool as the science fiction ones, at least not yet)?

Our world is full of sensors. That part can’t be expected to change. On Solaris, there were ten thousand robots per human being. I would not be surprised if there aren’t at least a hundred sensors per household already in the Western world.

It comes down to ownership of – and agency of – these hundreds of sensors. Are they semi-independent? Can they be coerced by a government agency, against their owner’s consent? Can a government coerce a manufacturer to coerce their robots, negating property rights and consent rights?

These questions are fundamental. And their answers have enormous privacy implications. If society decides that today’s sensors-with-some-protointelligence are the equivalent of science fiction’s future Asimovian robots, then we’re already surrounded by hundreds of perfect witnesses to everything we do, all the time.

The science fiction authors wrote stories about how robots obeyed every human command (the “second law”). The writers don’t seem to have anticipated with a large enough importance that humans have always used tools – and therefore also robots – to project force of conflicting interests against each other. When one human orders another human’s robot to betray its owner, as in the Amazon Echo case, which human has priority and why?

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

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This article has previously appeared on Private Internet Access.

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

Old lady denied exchanging life savings in old banknotes for new issue; could not prove innocence of money; dies

Repression: Ethel Hülst had saved for some old-age luxury all her life, cash-in-mattress style, and wanted to exchange her old-issue-note savings for new-issue banknotes. Faced with demands of proving where her cash came from, she could not produce receipts that would have been older than a decade. The Central Bank denied her an exchange of issue, having her life savings expire into invalidity.

The Swedish Central Bank is in the middle of an exchange of issue, changing old-issue banknotes and coins for new issue. This is something that happens regularly in most or all monetary systems – an upgrading of the banknotes and coins in circulation, supposedly done via a fair and controlled process.

But when Ethel Hülst, 91, tried to exchange her life savings in cash of 108,450 Swedish krona ($12,000; €11,300), she was denied the new issue in exchange for her old notes. The justification was that she was unable to prove that the money had been earned in an honest way, as defined by the government, with the burden of proof on old Ethel.

These are rules against ordinary Joes and Janes supposed to prevent money laundering and terrorism, which accomplish mostly nothing at the same time as the biggest banks are the biggest perpetrators (in the scale of billions-with-a-B) – the same banks that are supposed to enforce these petty rules onto small savers.

Of course, the rules weren’t in place when Mrs. Hülst started her life savings, so how could she possibly know she would have needed receipts from the time in question, twenty or forty or fifty years down the road? That was absolutely inconceivable at the time, that the government would not honor its own cash. (Something that, for one reason or other, has always been inconceivable — despite ample data points to the contrary.)

“She was asked if she’s been laundering money or involved in organized crime. I think our elderly, just like my mother, get rather offended by the government assuming them criminal”, says Anders, her next of kin. “She never afforded herself anything, not even a hearing new hearing aid. Saving what was possible for a rainy day was almost a reflex.”

Sadly, shortly after the bank had refused to honor her life savings, and the administrative court sided with the bank in the matter of refusing her now-invalid banknotes, she passed.

“The bank doesn’t save statements longer than ten years”, continues Anders, implying that it was a ridiculous rule to retroactively come up with a requirement for twenty-year-old receipts. “When mom was told the bank no longer had any statements from the time in question, she gave up. She felt as though the government was stealing all her life savings, and that was it.”

Her financial privacy was, paradoxically, done right. Saving in cash is not only private: with banks giving you zero interest – nil-and-zero risk premium for having the money in the possibly-insolvent bank – it’s also financially sound to have physical control of your store of value. The key message is instead that central banks can’t and shouldn’t be trusted.

Bitcoin users are not affected. Your privacy, finanical and otherwise, is your own responsibility.

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This article has previously appeared on Private Internet Access.

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