Direct download as Ogg (00:09:52, 5.5 MB)

Summary: Stallman speaks about erosion of freedom on the Internet

TODAY’S part deals largely with the Internet and the full transcript follows.

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Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: I read an article yesterday in the Canadian press, I think it was CBC, writing about the ban effective today or yesterday of using a mask in a protest, so you can face up to 10 years in jail for merely attending a protest with something to conceal your face.

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Really? Where is this banned?

RSS: In Canada.

RMS: Oh, yeah, this sort of tyrannical law being spread around the world. You know, the ban on burqas in France is a ban on just covering your face, so this is in itself tyranny.

RSS: I think that recently the issue of free speech online [...] has been cracked down [on] in Korea — and when I say Korean I mean South Korea — because they don’t necessarily like the comments people make online.

RMS: No, they gave up on that. They [have tried] that and they gave up. They backed down.

RSS: There is a very famous case, people say about Carl Sagan when he was writing anonymously in favour of legalising marijuana for example. These things show you that in order to challenge an existing law, which may itself be unjust, you have to preserve people’s right to anonymity when they write things and as long as you try to take this right away you’re basically discouraging, scaring people’s away from being…

RMS: Yes. Well, yes indeed, those laws are tyranny, but we see in governments that work for the plutocrats around the world, they act like governments of occupation. So, systematically they change laws to make democracy just a shell. It’s lip service while everything possible is done to eliminate real democracy, to make democracy unable to oppose plutocrats.

RSS: There is a certain degree of overlap between the operations of the government of course. And to give an example of one revolving door, here in the UK a few days ago the manager of BT moved into a government position, some kind of a manager in charge of something and I made a joke basically because BT and a company which came from BT, called Phorm, was responsible to a great degree for DPI, for deep packet inspection in the UK, so everything that goes through my line — landline or Internet basically — is subjected to inspection and to analysis by BT and that’s another issue which relates to the need for privacy and the fact that even the ISP [...] it will be able to tell who you are and what you’re sending back and forth through the line. And that’s another topic people don’t tend to touch on very often.

RMS: Yeah, well, you know, they’ve just announced that censorship would be applied to the Internet in England.

RSS: Yeah, because we have to “protect the children”. Or the “Terrorists”.

RMS: And the thing is, censorship would be applied to everyone that doesn’t have a private Internet subscription.

RSS: Right. By default. So you’d…

RMS: But in public Internet ports it won’t be possible for you to turn it off. So the point is, it will be censorship that you can’t avoid unless you have your own Internet subscription and note it will be censorship of whatever they decide to censor. Now, they say they are going to censor porn. but every past attempt to do so has blocked other things as well.

RSS: I think the Great Firewall of China as it’s called actually started as a copyright thing, which is kind of funny because it’s in China… so they said we have to do this for copyright reasons…

RMS: You should check that because I don’t think that that’s true.

RSS: I read it somewhere. I found it to be quite dubious, but I thought…

RMS: Well, I don’t think that that’s true. They merely used porn as the excuse because they do try to block access to porn.

RSS: OK. And of course it starts with…

RMS: But I don’t think they would have given copyright as the excuse.

RSS: Well, that’s the trajectory. You start with the children and terrorists and then move to copyrights and expression of political dissent.

RMS: There was a case where we know that that’s an intended trajectory. You can try to find a reference for this, but somebody from the IFPI, which is the international organisation of record companies, said in an international meeting that he was in favour of filters to block child pornography because then they would be able to use the same filters to block other things.

RSS: There was a case where, I don’t think it was law-based person but a person working for Hollywood, [who] spoke about how they really like child porn and terrorism because that’s a very convenient pretext for them to bring…

RMS: I’d like you to… Can you find the reference?

RSS: ….Ars Technica at some stage. I did try…

RMS: Can you find it? Because the [incomprehensible - statement?] I found a reference for at one point and linked to concerns somebody from IFPI, not from Hollywood. It sounds like maybe you are thinking of the same case.

RSS: It was around 2010 or 2011, I think.

RMS: Well, that’s later than the one I’m thinking of, I think, so I’d be interested in seeing if there’s a second case of this.

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The next part will be out later this week. Stallman will also be touring the UK very soon, so I may try to get video interviews with him (depending on my work schedule).

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Direct download as Ogg (00:09:18, 4.9 MB)

Summary: The latest Stallman interview, which deals with NSA involvement in Microsoft Windows and how to use search engines anonymously

TODAY we turn our attention to two subjects which are not frequently tackled by the corporate media. The first one expands on matters we covered in the second part and to a lesser degree the first part of this interview. The second subject is anonymity. Browsing the Web these days is hard without identifying oneself, due to many cookies and cross-site interaction (e.g. Google and Facebook code inside plenty of Web pages). I asked Stallman what to use for search and the full transcript follows.

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Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: Whenever the source code is being passed for the NSA before release, as you see before the release of Windows Vista or Windows 7, they always pass it through the NSA and they assure you that it’s fine and that it [has[ gone through hardening of the operating system. I think fewer people will believe that after the Snowden leaks, but anyway I…

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Well, the thing is, it’s different in the case of Windows because Microsoft keeps that source code secret from the users, which is in itself reason to distrust it and that’s why it has the universal back door. The users can’t take that out, so once software is proprietary, that means that the owner of a program has power over the users, it subjugates the users and that is an opportunity for abuses. But that opportunity is not there in the same way with Free software where the users can change this code. Not only do it individually, but they can work together to make their own version of it.

RSS: I’d like to [discuss] different sort of strand of topics. I have everything written down in terms of, like, one-word or two-word kind of a summary of things I wanted to go through and the next few things are to do with browsing and the of of the Internet in the form of the World Wide Web.

So, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what do you suggest to people who want to do a Web search and what do you use yourself?

RMS: Well, it’s fine to use any search engine as long as it has no idea of who you are.

RSS: And which one would you personally use the most?

RMS: Well, I generally use DuckDuckGo first, but I will use the Google search engine also.

RSS: There are several… OK, this actually relates to a discussion I’ve been having all over the Internet in the past few months and the thing about DuckDuckGo, it’s hosted in the United States, whereas something like IXQuick or StartPage are based in Holland, and some people have pointed out that DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, which basically means Microsoft for search results, to a certain degree. And they also seem to be very…

RMS: Look, we don’t know to what extent [duck duck go records things]…. there is no proof that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track IP addresses, for instance, of requesters. And they could have been [tracking], right? What can they possibly do to prove that they don’t track people? The point is, I don’t refuse to use Google search engine either because I just never find myself in such a way… I always just use it from other people’s computers, people who have let me use them, of course. [If] I don’t have to break security, I borrow people’s computers for a few minutes… for a while [incomprehensible] to use, so my searches are done from lots of different machines and each of those machines is mainly used by others.

RSS: OK, so basically you suggest trying to discourage the tracking by using different IP addresses…

RMS: Well, you could use Tor also. The point is, if you identify yourself to a search engine, you are basically helping it track you.

RSS: And increasingly they do provide incentives for people to be logged in, explicitly, when they are using a service like YouTube or Google search engine, which is something that didn’t happen before and I think that’s something that exploits the need for convenience — to have people give away their identity whenever they use the search engine, which didn’t exist about 10 years ago, it’s a new thing. Also, I wanted to point out, I had this small argument with DuckDuckGo over the fact, for example, that even though they don’t retain the data, all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon, so Amazon knows people’s IP addresses and whether there is some tracking at the router or some place or another, there might be a third party knowing…

RMS: Yeah, the point is that, the NSA might snoop all your packets and see that you’re sending a packet to DuckDuckGo. You can’t stop that, so the point is, I don’t assume that doing the search there means that I won’t be recorded in any way, but there’s no way they would know that it was me.

RSS: So basically, the notion of anonymity is important here. The use of the Net anonymously…

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The next part will deal with anonymity in a broader context, so stay tuned.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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