Would You Like to Stay Free Today?
Posted Tue Mar 27 01:15:51 2001 by steveg |
By Steve Gilliard
Russian police arrested a group of child pornographers today after
a long period of cooperation. If any country is food for cheap child
sex, Russia is it. A country completely lacking the kinds of stable,
ethical institutions that exist in the West, preying on children in
Russia is as easy as whipping out hard currency.
The hunt for child porn and pedophiles online is an obsessive one
for both law enforcement and the right, who are amazed at the freedom
that the Internet can bring to people. They sit there amazed that it is
not as controlled and managed as TV. Although there are as within, as
without, government who would like to change that
According to The Register, Microsoft plans to propose a "secure PC"
program for their OS's, which will prevent the use of unauthorized MP3
files. Other companies provide the ability to make remote searches of
your drives. The music industry can now use snooping
software to provide information on what songs are currently being
downloaded on Napster and other networks and get the IP for those
people using the network.
The federal government is mandating blocking software in libraries
to "protect" kids. Of course, the idea that adults might need more
knowledge than children has somehow escaped the thinking of the
Congress.
Pornography and pirated software are leading companies to encourage
a far greater level of intrusion into private citizens lives than we
have ever tolerated from government. We now can do little to prevent a
future employer from inspecting our credit records. Other records are
now for sale to those willing to pay the price.
But the question here is not about privacy, after all the Internet
is a public network where everything you do can be observed. People who
don't realize that can be embarrassed to no end. Making money off a
crazy ex-girlfriend can cause a backlash against you, even if she
sounds like a loon. Selling tips people send you can piss people off
more than you can ever imagine. The Net is a public space, but so
intimate and personal that people forget that. More than one person has
had their romantic endeavors splayed across the net for public
amusement. Or their business plans.
What amuses me about conservative thinkers, at least those allied
with the Bush administration, is that they see the government as the
dead hand upon innovation, yet do not mind the way that private
companies can sell your information or restrict your freedom in a way
unimaginable by any government agency. If the federal government came
into your home and did any one of those things without a warrant, you
could sue them back into the stone age. But when Microsoft plans to
expose your hard drive to even casual snooping, and the alliance
between the geek world and the men in black is a strong and old one,
you might need to consider who is actually the greater threat to your
freedom.
Government is not censoring anything here, but they are backing the
censors fully. Who makes blocking software? Not the Department of
Education, but private companies. These companies have only the profit
motive to guide them and when they are guided by that alone, ethics do
not get in the way. The same, wonderful capitalists who buy sweatshop
and slave labor goods from Asian countries.
Once upon a time, these companies used to sell things like
"restraint" devices and "crowd control" batons to countries where
elections were held by various army battalions at the point of their
Soviet, European or US made guns. Amnesty International has many a file
on how US ingenuity was used to torture and maim people.
Then, to make it better, US military instructors would aid in
teaching our third world friends in how to get the most out of their US
equipment. In a place called the School of the Americas, at Ft. Benning
GA, we turned out a couple of generations of Latin American mass
murderers and torturers. Our British and French Allies did the same. We
won't even discuss our Cuban neighbors and the former KGB. At least
they merely imported home tested methods.
But the thing missing from most of your history texts, the worst
thing we did in the cold war era, is what happened in Indonesia. The
fourth largest country on earth, it exists only as a place to surf and
where the BBC sends occasional reports from, for most Americans.
Sukarno rose to power after World War II with Japanese help,
because he opposed the Dutch colonial masters. After a brutal four year
war (1945-49), which saw active help from the British for the Dutch,
Sukarno took over. By 1964, Indonesia had the largest communist party
outside the Soviet Union. It was also engaged in a quiet war with the
British Army in Borneo. Where it was getting its ass handed to them.
The military, tired of Sukarno's internationalist interventionism,
deposed him. It then went after the Communist Party. With plenty of
help from the CIA and the US military.
A recent estimate suggests that between 500,000 and 600,000 members
of the PKI were killed in about a year and a half. With the knowledge
of the US. Java is a very small place with a whole lot of people, so
there was no place to hide. The Year of Living Dangerously only
shows a glimpse of the kind of murder unleashed on the countryside.
Whole families disappeared. All endorsed by the US government without
lifting a hand.
If you think your rights, as regards private companies, are any
more protected than a Javanese communist in 1966, you are sadly
mistaken.
Uncle Sam doesn't have to do anything to promote censorship. It
doesn't have to write new laws, or fund new programs. All it does is
let private companies erode your basic rights. It's no violation of
civil law to force you into an agreement where a private company can
treat you like a bitch. You may eventually have to litigate it, but
until you do, your rights end at the workplace door.
The only way to protect your rights is to protect them. If
Microsoft wants to sell a grossly intrusive product to placate the
imagined rights of other large corporations, you need to make sure that
you're going to protect yours. If Reaganesque conservatism has one
great failing is that there is a willful blindness to the power of
corporations to infringe upon your basic rights which outstrips
government.
You dislike what the government does, you can get people to vote
against their bills, you can elect a new government, or at least try
to. You can't vote Bill Gates out of office unless you're a stockholder
in the company. Microsoft can affect your life in a billion ways, and
unless you get lawyers or drive public opinion against them, their
decisions affecting your life are private.
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