Nederlands
English
Category: democracy
11-02-2014, the day we fight back
Today is the 11th of Februrari 2014,“The Day We Fight Back”. We fight against out-of-control spying on our privacy as free citizens. We fight against Orwellian espionage because we know where it leads to in the end.
The text below is inspired by the speeches of Winston Churchill in during may and june 1940. While the nature of the opponents of democracy and freedom is different today the consequences of losing the fight are just as dire. Our society and the planetary eco-system is a great trouble. We need our democracies to function and our internet to be free so we can adress the great challenges of out time.
“What Cory Doctorow and Aaron Schwartz called the fight against SOPA & ACTA is over. The battle against TTP and global surveillance continues to rage on. Upon this battle depends the survival of the internet and our democracies. Upon it depends our own way of life and the long continuity of our institutions and our culture. Once again the whole fury and might of the enemies of freedom will very soon be turned on us now.
Those working towards a police state know that they will have to break us or lose this conflict. If we can stand up to them, all of the Internet may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States and Europe, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new corporatist Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted technologies.
You ask, what is our policy? We can say: It is to hack, by server, laptop and phone, with all our might and with all the strength that Turing can give us; to wage lulz against a monstrous tyranny, rarely surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all cost, victory in spite of all the terror, corruption and lies.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our networked homes. To ride out the storm of surveilance, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of the hacktivists – every one of them. That is the will of free citizens, the technologists and the creatives, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend their native internet, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there will be no free culture and no culture of freedom.
Therefore we shall go on to the end:
we shall fight in Europe,
we shall fight on our browsers and our operating systems,
we shall fight with stronger encryption, and secure hardware,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength
we shall defend our networks, whatever the cost may be,
We shall never surrender.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the Internet and its hacker community last for a thousand years, they will still say, “This was their finest hour”.”
No go participate or organise a cryptoparty, support people developing better tools (mail, web, secure systems and all this Free-as-in-freedom Software) or ask other people if they value being able to read without being read at the same time. Privacy is a human right according to the UN Declaration of human rights and yes, you to have something to hide as well.
First they came for the trade-unionists
Originally for Consortium News – Warning! this article violates ‘Godwin’s Law ‘ in almost every paragraph. Regrettably all these violations are all based on historic facts and documented current events.
From Rick Falkvinge’s blog post:
When the famous skyline landmark building in the world’s economic center was attacked in fire and flames on that fateful, horrible day, and our elected leaders decided to go to war against terrorism under the banner of “you’re with us or against us”.
When the blame for all evil was unanimously put on people from the Middle East with their foreign religion, and all of those were made suspicious.
When patriotic new laws were passed almost immediately in the emotions from the attack, and those laws suspended most civil rights. When the word “Homeland” suddenly started being used again, after having been practically extinct.
When the country went to war, one after another, in the wake of that attack. When internment and torture camps for those middle-easterners and other unwanteds were created – outside the country borders, in order to hide what was going on from the public.
Indeed, the 1930s were a very dark time in Germany, and the Reichstag fire in Berlin set off a chain of events that might – theoretically – repeat itself.
After more than six months of revelations about the global surveillance infrastructure built by the U.S. government and its “allies” (i.e. smaller countries that believe smiling-at-the-crocodile-in-the-hope-he-eats-you-last is a good long-term strategy), many people and politicians still tout the “I have nothing to hide” attitude toward the most over-armed, hyper-intrusive super-power in human history.
In a recent New Yorker article, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was quoted as saying: “My phone numbers, I assume, are collected like everybody else’s, but so what? It does not bother me. By the Supreme Court decision in 1979, the data is not personal data. There’s a Google Map that allows somebody to burgle my house, it’s so clear and defined, and I can’t do anything about it.”
For an elected U.S. senator to state the above is quite astonishing. Apparently a 35-year-old court decision, Smith v. Maryland, from a technologically different era is considered unalterable scripture (by a lawmaker!) and the power of the Google Corporation is simply accepted as a law of nature. Like the speed of light or the boiling point of water. What did that influential Italian political thinker from the 1920s say about the merger of state and corporate power? Wasn’t that the (political) F-word?
Europeans look on in dismay at how the world’s once-leading democracy has utterly lost the plot and slides in accelerating fashion toward societal models that we tried in the 1930s and 1940s and found seriously wanting. We’ve seen this movie and know how it ends; with way too many people in scary uniforms and lots of barbed wire everywhere.
The Dutch Example
Those lessons are particularly instructive for us Dutch. Since the mid-1600s, Amsterdam was a refuge for ethnic and religious groups from all over Europe who fled various forms of repression and persecution. This freedom and societal diversity was one reason why the Dutch trading empire flourished with technological advances (such as wind-powered sawmills for fast boat-building) and economic (corporate and stock) innovations.
The tolerance and diversity helped the Netherlands develop into a conflict-avoiding nation of traders who got along with everyone so they could sell them stuff. We kept out of World War I and sold a lot of planes to Germany. Municipalities registered people’s religion and ethnicity for a range of practical (and mostly benign) purposes such as allowing the local civil servants to operate in a culturally sensitive way.
The Dutch government kept this fantasy of remaining neutral going for a long time, right up to the early morning of May 10, 1940, when the German Wehrmacht rolled into the country and swept away our poor excuse for an army in barely four days. After the Dutch surrender, the vast majority of the German army was pulled out of the Netherlands and put to work in other places.
For the vast majority of Dutch people life went on pretty much as before. Resistance to the occupation was almost non-existent and many Dutch were happy to work for the government (the number of civil servants almost doubled during the occupation) or in industries that boomed because of orders from the German army.
It was not until 1942 that the enthusiastic data-collection by the Dutch government turned into a human catastrophe. Over 100,000 people – who thought they “had nothing to hide” – had provided accurate data on their Jewish identity and listed their addresses, enabling the most complete persecution of Jewish people in any country during World War II (with the exception of Poland where the Nazis had more time and fewer logistical challenges).
The other problem was the pro-authority attitude of most Dutch (even if that authority was a brutal military occupation by a foreign army). The famous Dutch “tolerance” often expressed itself as “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t bother me.” That included shoving fellow citizens into cattle-cars on their way to death-camps. There was no occupied country where Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem – “first they came for the Socialists…” – was more applicable than the Netherlands.
Troubling Comparisons
Though comparisons with the Nazi era are always problematic, aspects of that time and U.S. society today are eerily similar. The United States seems under the de facto control of a consortium of banksters and an military-industrial-security complex begging for blood, all feeding off each other and feeding into a political/media system that controls the national agenda and marginalizes people who dissent.
This structure has made many citizens afraid of their own shadows and lacking the information to ask meaningful questions even if they so desired. There are two political parties, the minimum number to have at least the pretense of a democracy, but – on issues relating to “national security” and the “surveillance state” – the Republicans and Democrats offer little that is significantly different, except at the fringes of the two parties.
Sen. Feinstein’s blasé acceptance of the National Security Agency’s collection of electronic metadata on virtually everyone and President Barack Obama’s mild “reforms” of the NSA fit with what you can expect from many “security-conscious” Republicans, too.
Yet, the unpleasant reality is that the U.S. government has built a turnkey infrastructure for a level of totalitarian control that repressive leaders of past eras could only dream about. The NSA’s metadata lets the government chart a spider’s web of your associations with multiple “hops” to draw in the networks of other people whom you have never met. The scheme takes guilt-by-association to whole new levels.
The U.S. government also reserves to itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere who supposedly represents a “terrorist” threat to the United States – and to do so on the say-so of some unaccountable and essentially anonymous intelligence officials.
A Political Excuse
The only missing element for a full-scale tyranny is a political excuse to flip the switch and turn this machine on full-power. Perhaps the excuse could come from another “terrorist attack” or from another financial meltdown as the government seeks to control social unrest. Or a thoroughly unscrupulous President might just rev it up to go after his enemies. But the point is the equipment is now in place and ready to go.
Many people still find it hard to accept that the U.S. government could take such a monstrous turn. But its modern history – from Hiroshima through the Vietnam War to support for death-squad regimes in Latin America and the invasion of Iraq – shows a callous disregard of human life and an acceptance of mass slaughter, even genocide, as a policy choice.
I realize that these concerns that I’ve raised violate what’s known as “Godwin’s Law”, i.e. the avoidance of comparing current events to the Nazis, but – regrettably – these comparisons are increasingly unavoidable. One could even revise Niemoller’s famous poem for the present:
First they came for the Muslims in a dozen countries
but most of us did not share that faith so we said nothing
Then they came for union leaders and social activists
but we did not want to be labeled as lefties and so we said nothing
Then they came for the journalists
but we long stopped reading political news and so we said nothing
Then finally, when the government came for us
there was no one left to say anything”
Arjen Kamphuis left his native Netherlands (an active participant to the warcrimes in Afghanistan & Iraq) over 5 years ago for Germany – the one country that has learned deep lessons from trying out various forms of totalitarian regimes.
Committee report electronic voting
From April 26th until December 18th 2013 I was a member of the expert committee on voting computers. This committe was instituted to advise the Dutch Minister for the Interior on the feasability of re-introducing electronic voting methods.
In the past (2008, 2012) I have always been very critical about the way electronic voting was implemented in The Netherlands up to 2007. The lack of transparancy of this method and the impossibility of recounts made this fundamentally incompatible with real democracy and,
after some convincing by citizens, even the government agreed on this.
The commission recommends:
- The use of electronic aids to make the voting and counting processes more reliable and more accessible;
- To this end, account will be taken of the preconditions formulated by the commission;
- The introduction of a single nationwide voting system, consisting of a voting printer so that the voter can print his or her ballot paper and a scanner to count the votes electronically; This system can be made suitable for all voters;
- It should be clear in legislation that the paper process provides the guiding principle;
- Should the voting method proposed by the commission not be implemented, in whatever event it recommends the introduction of electronic counting linked to the introduction of a smaller ballot paper.
More details in the English Summary of the report. For all the entire report, press coverage and interviews go to the Dutch version of this blogpost.
Votingcomputer: the zombie that just won’t die
<originally a Webwereld column>
Last month the VVD and D66 political parties (the Dutch equivalent of the Conservatives and LibDems in the UK) again proposed that the Netherlands should re-adopt electronic voting. Earlier this year the Dutch Association of Mayors also called for their reintroduction (don’t you just love it when non-elected officials comment on and interfere with the electoral process :-). While the use of voting computers in the Netherlands has been banned for over four years, even for water board elections, there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic problem with electronic voting.
While the many clumsy security problems (video) or the absence of the source code of the software (in the case of Nedap and SDU voting computers), are excellent talking points for the media and political agenda, these issues are not the core of the problem. And although the voting computer dossier at the Ministry of Home Affairs is now labelled with a bright fluorescent sticker: ‘radioactive, do not touch!", there is still a risk that local authorities or suppliers will continue to feel that voting by computer is best "if we can just iron out a few little bugs”.
The real objections are more fundamental and have little to do with security bugs or open source code. They are the fundamental principles underpinning our democracy, and are threatened by the use of voting computers. In the many discussions on mailing lists and web forums it seems that people have lost sight of these principles.
In the first year of operations of the wedonttrustvotingcomputers work group, there were many reassurances given by government and suppliers that we should not be so suspicious. The Netherlands is a great country, after all, and the suggestion that anyone would commit fraud with something so fundamental as the election was considered ridiculous. It was simply unthinkable, and further discussion or justification not considered necessary. This attitude demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of democracy. That is not a question of trust but distrust of organised power.
Through trial and error we have learned over the past few thousand years that power corrupts, and absolute power can corrupt absolutely. An enlightened dictator can be an efficient form of government, but how do you ensure they remain enlightened once they have the power? To solve this problem we have evolved a complex system of temporary mandate (four years), with checks and balances as the need arises. You can only gain power if the majority of people have said that they really want you there, and even then you will be closely monitored by 150 other people who are also only be allowed to do so because of the vote of thousands of fellow citizens. The system is far from perfect and is plagued by inertia and a focus on what is hot in the media, but we have yet to invent something better. This system makes it difficult to take important decisions publicly without authorisation. And a king or president cannot simply on a whim ruin the country or violate the fundamental rights of citizens – unless those citizens and their representatives agree to it by inaction, but then they only have themselves to blame.
The abuse of power cannot be solved by online publication of a voting computer’s source code because citizens cannot determine whether the published source code actually runs on the specific voting computers in their neighborhood. Even more important is the fact that 99.99% of the population cannot audit the code. Inevitably, it still comes down to having confidence in a very small group of technical experts. And having to trust a very small group (any small group whatsoever!) is precisely what we no longer want. If we have small groups of technicians whom we trust, we might as well make up the parliament based on a sample of a research firm. That saves a lot of time and paper and there is probably a great evening of TV programs that can be built around it.
It has often been said that paper ballots can also be fraudulent, with elections in places like Zimbabwe cited as examples. The important aspect here is not the possibility of fraud but the possibility of detection when it happens. Large-scale, and therefore effective, fraud in a paper voting system is impossible to keep secret and that makes it possible to intervene when small groups try to exploit the system. In most cases, fraud with voting computers is impossible to prove afterwards. The records are erased and there are no ballot papers available for another recount.
This was proven painfully during a local election where the candidate eldermen was also the operator of the voting computer. In the polling station where he was present he received an unlikely number of votes (higher than all other locations in the municipality combined). Yet the justice department was hard pressed to find actual evidence against this potential fraudster. Nor could the man ever prove his innocence. The result is therefore a situation where the integrity of the process itself is called into question, and thus the legitimacy of the ballot. The distinction is thus the detectability of fraud, not the (im)possibility of it.
Even with electronic voting with a printed ballot (the so-called ‘paper trail‘) there can be doubts about the results, and applications for a recount of a paper trail is also an immediate political issue (against winners, losers). At what point do we initiate a paper recount? Which sample is good enough for the loser? How do we determine that there is reason to doubt the electronic result? Is there a basic assumption that the computer counts accurately? So there are inevitable administrative and political barriers to requesting a recount. This, combined with the fact that polling can provide the perception of a "winning" coalition in the Netherlands, makes it attractive to manipulate voting computers. What is it worth to control the election of the 20th largest economy on the planet?
Despite minor incidents with the paper system, the integrity of the Dutch paper voting process has never been the subject of discussion. And even the Interior Ministry and TNO had to admit, after some urging from external experts, that the previous generation of voting computers was not compatible (nor had it ever been compatible) with the Dutch electoral law.
TNO hid the fact that the validation protocol of the integrity of the system had not been examined. Both the responsible officials and TNO’s "experts" were simply not competent to deal with this issue adequately. The OV-chip, EPD and the Diginotar dramas were repetitions of this incompetence, displaying no understanding, no adequate assessment frameworks, and no substantive oversight. And , of course, nobody is held responsible when things go wrong. After voting machines were banned, no civil servants and TNO employees were sacked for their screw up. Therefore there is very little confidence amongst external experts that future assesments on a different technical ‘Solution’ will be adequate.
We must prevent a situation where the integrity of the electoral process itself can be questioned, and thus the legitimacy of the outcome. The vital distinction is the ability to detect fraud, not the (im)possibility thereof. Voting computers create serious problems, are more expensive that the use of paper, and undermine the legitimacy of democratic governments. And as Churchill said: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’
(this column is a re-write from a 2008 publication I wrote for a Dutch magazine on digital government – now disapeared after site redesign)
The Declaration of Independence of Internet
(Orginal from 1776 here. Orginal from 1581 that is the inspiration for the original from 1776 here)
hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for people to dissolve the commercial, legal and moral bands which have connected them with an industry and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which their most fundamental principles entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all lives are enriched by the sharing of culture, that citizens are endowed by their democracies with certain unalienable rights, that among these are knowledge, true ownership of their property and the sharing of culture. That to secure these rights, laws are instituted among the people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any of these laws become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish them, and to institute new laws, laying their foundations on such principles and organizing their powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that laws long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such laws, and to provide new guards for their future cultural wealth. Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of the Internet; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of cultural distribution. The history of the present copyright industry is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the culture of the people of Earth. These are just some of the effects of the lobbying of the copyright-industry:
The destruction of our cultural heritage by forced obliteration and decay, by forbidding or hindering the reduplication and sometimes even the restoration of cultural artifacts. – The destruction of our future, by frustrating education and the sharing of knowledge, thereby condemning many to lower life standards than they could otherwise achieve, especially in developing countries. – The destruction of the creative process, by legally forcing artists and authors to steer clear of any sources of inspiration, and punishing them for accidental similarities and citations. – The destruction of free access to key, contentious pieces of political information by preventing maximum distribution of this information. – The destruction of human and natural resources, by forcing the re-creation of works that would be perfectly usable with some minor rework, but not allowing such re-use. – The destruction of social and economic order, by allowing the control of much of our heritage to end up in just a few hands. Leading to a society where a few have a lot, and a lot have little. – The destruction of innocent lives by transporting citizens of other nations beyond Seas to be tried for offences that are not even offences in their home nations …
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Corporations, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define tyrants, are unfit to be conduit of culture for a free people. Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our corporate cultural overlords. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their lobbying to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the limits of our patience and the growing existence of alternatives to their wares. The most recent efforts of the copyright industry to circumvent our most fundamental democratic institutions leaves us no choice but to defend our culture by taking it out of the hands of these corporations.
We, therefore, the Pirates of the World, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of the Internet, solemnly publish and declare, that we are free and united, and no longer recognize the legal or moral validity of the copyright claims of aforementioned corporations, that we are absolved from all legal and moral allegiance to these corporations, and that all connections between the people of the Internet and the copyright industry is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and Independent people, we have full power to download, distribute, remix, broadcast, perform and to do all other acts and things which Independent people may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on strong cryptological protection, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred bandwidth
printable version for those ink-based-real-life signing parties here
Votingcomputers – the bugs are not the problem
While the use of voting computers in the Netherlands has been banned for over half a year, even for water board elections, there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of the problem with voting machines.
While the many clumsy security problems (video) or the absence of the source code of the software (in the case of Nedap and SDU voting computers), are an excellent opportunity to develop the topic through the media and in the political agenda, these issues are not core of the problem. And although the voting computer dossier at the Ministry of Home Affairs is now labelled with a bright fluorescent sticker: ‘radioactive, do not touch!", there is still a risk that local authorities or suppliers continue to feel that voting by computer is best "if we can just iron out a few little bugs”.
The real objections are more fundamental and have little to do with security bugs or open source code. They are the fundamental principles of the reasons why we have democracy, which the use of voting computers threatens. In the many discussions on mailing lists and web forums it seems that people lose sight of the fundamental principles.
In the first year of operations of the wedonttrustvotingcomputers work group, there were many statements by government and suppliers that we should not be so suspicious. The Netherlands is a great country after all and the suggestion that someone is committing fraud with something so fundamental as the election was considered ridiculous. It was simply unthinkable and further discussion or justification about it was not necessary. This attitude demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of democracy. That is not a question of trust but distrust of organized power.
Through trial and error we have learned over the past few thousand years that power corrupts, and absolute power can corrupt absolutely. An enlightened dictator can be an efficient form of government but how do you ensure they remain enlightened once they have the power?? To solve this problem we have evolved a complex system of temporary mandate (four years), with checks and balances as th need arises. You can only gain power if many people have said that they really want you there, and even then you will be closely monitored by 150 other people who are also only be allowed to do so because of the vote of thousands of fellow citizens. The system is far from perfect and is plagued by inertia and a focus on what is hot in the media, but we have yet to invent something better. This system makes it difficult to take important decisions publicly without authorisation. And a king or president cannot simply on a whim ruin the country or violate the fundamental rights of citizens – unless those citizens and their representatives agree to it by inaction, but then they only have themselves to blame.
The abuse of power cannot be solved by having online the the source code of a voting computer because citizens cannot determine whether the published source code actually runs on the specific voting computers in their neighborhood. Even more important is the fact that 99.99% of the population cannot audit the code. It still comes down again to having confidence in a very small group of technical experts. And having to trust a very small group (any small group whatsoever!) is precisely what we no longer want. If we have small groups of technicians whom we trust, we might as well make up the parliament based on a sample of a research firm. That saves a lot of time and paper and there is probably a good TV night to build around.
It has often been said that paper ballots can also be fraudulent, with the recent election in Zimbabwe cited. The important aspect here is not the possibility of fraud but its detectability when it happens. Large-scale, and therefore effective, fraud in a paper voting system is impossible to keep secret and that makes it possible to intervene when small groups try to exploit the system. In most cases, fraud with voting computers is impossible to prove afterwards. The records are then erased and there are no ballot papers available for another recount. This proved once more painful when a local election where the candidate gemeenteraadsid also operator of the voice computer was. In the polling station where he was present he was unlikely many more votes than all other locations in the municipality. Yet no matter OM could get around this potential fraudster to lack of evidence. The man can this lack of evidence but never convincingly prove his innocence. The result is therefore a situation where the integrity of the process itself is called into question, and thus the legitimacy of the ballot. The distinction is thus the detectability of fraud, not the (im)possibility of it.
Voting computers do not solve any major problems for the Netherlands, are more expensive to use than paper and undermine the legitimacy of democratic governments. And as Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’
Diebold leaks 2008 election results!
Diebold votingcomputers leak critical info, messing up the whole charade around the 2008 US Presidential election. What is the world coming to if one cannot trust the Overlords to keep a simple secret?