politics

<Originally a Webwereld column - in Dutch>

In the middle of election season in Iceland a debate is raging about the need to protect young children from violent pornographic imagery that can be found on the Internet. Although it is unclear what the scale of this problem is, there is concern about the methods used by some in the porn industry to market their wares. There is an idea that some firms use the old tobacco industry method of 'get them while they're young'.

As I was in Iceland recently I was fortunate enough to be asked my opinions on these matters by government officials. The entire debate is being conducted during election season, so the local media are on top of every word uttered by anyone from either government or the local digital civil liberties organisations. What causes most of the (international) attention is the specific plan to put a national filter on all Icelandic internet connections. This would be a first for a western democracy (although such filters have been tried in various Asian countries from Iran to China). Proposing a method that could very well be called censorship is incongruous in a modern and progressive society such as Iceland (the only country to have convicted its bankers over their part in the current global financial crisis).

Within a few hours of setting foot on Iceland I was asked by Smari McCarthy of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative to sign their letter of protest (by now published) against the filtering proposal.

During an informal dinner a few days later with officials it became clear that no decision on a filter, or any other policy, had been made. The government was looking into the problem and discussing possible solutions. The emotive nature of the debate causes the problems and solutions to get mixed up. I therefore attempted to structure the discussion over dinner:

Cory Doctorow's column in the Guardian about tech-politics and the importance of outreach by the tech community can be found here. Cory makes the point that ensuring your rights through technical skills is great, but not much help to society if the tech is too difficult for most people to use. Outreach activities and the hard work of polishing technical tools for non-techie use are of vital importance.

However, I do think that one important aspect was missing from Cory's argument, so my additional comment on another vital aspect of current tech/internet politics is below:

As nerd-politics is a subset of 'normal' politics, it's not just the nerd-part we need to worry about. The political system itself needs to function - at least some of the time - to get anywhere. If a country has a political system that retains the rituals of a democracy but no longer actually functions as such, then no amount of good nerd-politics (or politics of any other kind) will fix anything. Especially if such a fix threatens established and well-funded business interests.

It is perhaps no coincidence that all the bad tech-policy examples that Cory cites (SOPA, ACTA, TTP, DMCA, attacks on the Piratebay, mass reading of email, etc) orginate in the US and are foisted on other countries from there. While those countries deserve their fair share of blame for allowing a foreign power to bully them into this stuff, it is pretty clear where the problem lies. With or without nerds involved.

Either we fix the completely broken US political system (and good luck with that!) or the rest of the world needs to get better at ignoring absurd US laws and treaties cobbled together by lobbyists of private for-profit organisations. Neither those corporations nor general US politics concern themselves with the interests of the inhabitants of the rest of the planet. And the rest of the planet should respond accordingly.

Nerds (aka the tech community) can provide some tools to help out with that, as the Free Software movement and Wikileaks have shown.

Conservative party leader David Cameron held a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on April 3rd. Aside from the usual criticism (not all undeserved) at the current government he talked about the network society and bottom-up collaboration enable by ubiquitous access to IT. He (or his staffer) had obviously read "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win" by William C. Taylor and Polly G. Labarre. And a good thing too since it is filled with good examples of how to innovate by sticking your neck out and doing things differently.

About three quarters through the speech Cameron very explicitly stated that his government, if elected, would actively seek a greater use of opensource software and mandate the use of open standards for public IT systems. According to him this will enable faster innovation in the public sector while avoiding repeats of the very expensive NHS disaster.

The German Chaos Computer Club, the oldest and largest hacker group of Europe, made available to the public the fingerprint of the German Minister Schäuble for the Interior. They wanted to show how easy it is to obtain someone's identity when identity is based on fingerprints.

The German government is preparing to build a national database containing the fingerprints of all its citizens for the purposes of fraud-prevention and national security. Minister Schäuble is very angry about the release of his fingerprints and has stated he will take legal measures against the CCC. Dutch hacker Rop Gongrijp pointed out that the Minister's anger was curious since it was the minister after all who wanted to collect the fingerprints of over 82 million Germans and the CCC only collected one.

The German Chaos Computer Club, the oldest and largest hacker group of Europe, made available to the public the fingerprint of the German Minister Schäuble for the Interior. They wanted to show how easy it is to obtain someone's identity when identity is based on fingerprints.

The German government is preparing to build a national database containing the fingerprints of all its citizens for the purposes of fraud-prevention and national security. Minister Schäuble is very angry about the release of his fingerprints and has stated he will take legal measures against the CCC. Dutch hacker Rop Gongrijp pointed out that the Minister's anger was curious since it was the minister after all who wanted to collect the fingerprints of over 82 million Germans and the CCC only collected one.