Protection from governments, was Re: Privacy Concerns with UbuntuPhone

On 30 April 2014 23:15, Danyl Strype <[email protected]> wrote:
"Protecting our privacy and security from our government may seem a fairly
theoretical concern in Aotearoa for most people (for now)."

IMO this is an important point to bear in mind whenever legislation makes
(or leaves) opportunities for misdeeds whether by the government or by
others.  We must be constantly aware that today, THIS government, THESE
politicians, would not use these for bad purposes but tomorrow.........?  I
was alarmed by the acceptance of full-face covering, not because I think
people should "dress like decent Christians or agnostics/atheists if they
want to live in our country" - that's dumb as well as very unkind.  I spoke
my opinion in a social group and was told firmly that Muslim women would
not rob dairies, break into houses and beat people up in the course of
property crime.  Fair point.  But if I were already a criminal, male or
female, I'd be very interested in the fact that there is one disguise that,
unlike ("Customers are requested to remove hats before entering this bank")
beanies and scarves, and balaclavas, must not be discriminated against.

The present is not indicative of what someone will do tomorrow.  Introduce
a security hole today, you can be sure that someone will find it and
exploit it.

Electric fences are great for keeping stock in the paddock or strip-grazing
area, except goats.  Cattle and sheep internalise the "rules" and it takes
some time before one of them notices opportunity.  Goats, however, have
super-awareness.  The moment the electric fence shorts out they're onto it,
out of it.  Smart criminals and the kind of governments we don't want but
may find we've got (who predicted Labour morphing into Rogernomics eh?) are
like goats.  They've moved - against our best interests - before nice
trusting people have noticed there is a hole in our collective security
from exploitation.

It's not just governments of course.  You got that already, right :-)

We all need a paranoia filter through which we can look at new developments
that don't show up when we look at them with our normal calm eyes.  A
removable filter, attached to our Swiss army knives perhaps for using when
needed like the tool for taking stones out of Boy Scouts' hooves, because
fulltime suspicion would ruin our own and other people's lives.


Kathinka.


Kia ora koutou
>
> Thomi, it might be bad vibrations in my tinfoil hat (nice image BTW ;)
> but I can't help but feel your responses here are coloured by bad
> feelings resulting from my harsh words about Ubuntu and the Amazon
> Lens etc some month back. I welcome the UbuntuPhone, and the work you
> folks are doing, just as I welcome Android, Replicant, FirefoxOS and
> all the other free code mobile OS you mentioned. I understand that all
> of these teams are constrained by an oligopoly of hardware
> manufacturers, as I said in my first email on this topic, and network
> gatekeepers, as revealed by this discussion (again, thanks to everyone
> who's chipped in).
>
> I'd like to think you're pushing the software freedom boat out as far
> as you can, at each stage of development. Mind you, it does make it
> hard to give you the benefit of the doubt, when you engage in a flurry
> of fallacies (ad hominem, false binary, strawman etc) in defence of
> the proprietary components of your employer's product, rather than
> saying something like 'yes, we are concerned about the proprietary
> baseband, and we will continue to push for a fully open stack until
> our influence in the mobile industry (combined with that of other free
> code OS teams) is enough to achieve it'.
>
> Worik and Katinka have already addressed your false binary on
> security/privacy (since it can't be perfect it's not worth worrying
> about). It's true that software freedom is not an ironclad guarantee
> that software is privacy-respecting, secure, and bug-free. What
> software freedom is usually pretty good at though, is making sure that
> software does not have malicious functions built in as 'features',
> such as sending an endorsements for the device I'm using, to everyone
> in my address book, purporting to be from me. This may not send my DNA
> to the NSA, but it's still highly undesirable. This kind of
> profit-motivated malware is prevented by using devices running free
> code software, because such software can be swapped out for a
> non-malware fork or alternative.
>
> As for the surveillance state, again you're right that there's no
> ironclad certainty of privacy. The more authoritarian the state, the
> less privacy there is. However, there's a big difference between the
> effort involved in stealing my handheld and cracking into it, and
> passively harvesting my data through backdoors hidden in proprietary
> components. Technologists can't (by ourselves) prevent authoritarian
> states, but we can certainly design our technology so that it serves
> user freedom and democracy, and frustrates invasive authorities as
> much as possible. This is basic social responsibility in engineering.
> http://citizenengineer.org/
>
> Protecting our privacy and security from our government may seem a
> fairly theoretical concern in Aotearoa for most people (for now).
> However, I can't overlook the fact that friends and colleagues of mine
> were spied on for two years and arrested on completely fabricated
> charges in Operation8. No convictions except for four counts of being
> collectively in the presence of some old hunting rifles without a gun
> license, charges which would have been dropped like the other 14
> people's were (due to illegal state surveillance according to the
> Supreme Court), if not for the trumped up criminal gang charges, on
> which they were not convicted. Then there was the DotCom raid. The NZ
> state is not always gentle with those who threaten elite interests
> (whether its fossil fuel mining and monocrop forestry oligopolies, or
> proprietary software and copyright oligopolies), however
> non-violently, and we need to remember that old quote about freedom
> and eternal vigilance.
>
> On 22 April 2014 17:48, Thomi Richards <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> only when it's turned on eh? It must be old :) <<
>
> Until a libre handheld is available, I use the oldest phones I can
> find which still work.
>
> >> I'm assuming that we'd all rather have a third player in the mobile
> market (whether it be Canonical or someone else) than keep the existing two
> players in power? <<
>
> At the end of the day, I'm not the least bit interested in the number
> or the power struggles between proprietary vendors. Until you resolve
> the proprietary baseband limitation, you are essentially a
> subcontractor to proprietary vendors, as are Android, FirefoxOS, et
> al.
>
> >> Regarding closed device drivers, this isn't a new situation for Linux
> either - 15 years ago it was very hard to buy a desktop computer that
> didn't rely on proprietary drivers <<
>
> Yes, but this is not mandated by your ISP. Bit of a difference. Alex
> has covered this point beautifully with his road/car/driving analogy.
>
> >> If you want to make any real positive changes here, I can see two
> approaches. One is to improve the software we already have, particularly
> the crypto stack. <<
>
> I'm a user and an advocate for users, not a programmer. It's a bit
> hard to convince people that the participation of non-coders is valued
> in open source communities, when we keep getting told that to
> contribute we need to "improve the software".
>
> >> The other is to lobby government for fairer and clearer legislation
> around when, where, and how surveillance is permitted. Maybe, once those
> things are sorted, the next task will be to tackle device firmware. <<
>
> I'm already active on the this second bit through my work with the
> Pirate Party, giving advice to the ICT spokesperson for the Greens,
> networking with activists from Mana, Internet Party, and other parties
> and organisations. In fact this is why we're having this conversation.
>
> You missed the third approach though, which is to support vendors who
> can provide a usable product that respects my software freedoms and my
> privacy, even if their product is not the prettiest or whatever. This
> is one way I use what little influence I have to push vendors towards
> greater respect for software freedom. It's up to the vendors who are
> developing devices, and encouraging people to use them, to decide
> whether they care about these principles, or my custom (which
> admittedly doesn't add up to much $).
>
> Hei kōnā
> S
>
> --
> Daniel Strypey Bruce
> Community Developer
> Disintermedia.net.nz/strype
>
> "Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
> - .ISOcrates
>
> "Voting... is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The
> last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will
> get a version of it through a dessicated question, and then will
> submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into -
> what else? - another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of
> impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
> you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you
> can do nothing."
> - Neil Postman, 'Amusing Ourselves To Death'
>
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