Richard Stallman - Just Digital Society - Part 2
Discorso tenuto il 21 Dicembre 2010 presso l'Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti a Bergamo.
Transcript:
For instance I found out that in Barcelona there is a municipal swimming pool and he decided to keep track of who has paid to use the pool this year by their national id cards. So anyone to use the pool has to show a national id card to a computer which will keep track of exactly who is there. This was the easiest way to do it given that everyone in Spain was already required to have a national id card. So if you allow national id cards, you are inviting systematics and coordinated surveillance to extend into every part of life.
The next threat to our freedom in the digital society is censorship. Censorship is not new in fact the origin of copyright law in the UK and the US was a system of sensorship in the 1500, but digital technology, makes censorship easy to apply to whole communication. It's not feasable to censor everybody's letter, but it's easy to censor everybody's email.
So we now find that supposedly free countries like France are imposing censorship on internet access. Australia is considering censorship, is considering filtering access to foreign websites. Well, australia already has a system of censorship applied to links. For instance, Electronic Frontier Australia hosted a link to a foreign political web site and was ordered to remove that link or paying a fine of 11000$ a day. This apparently is because the censors think that some of the pictures on that website are disgusting looking. Think about that, is that political freedom? No.
Now Denmark also has tutoring of the internet. The list of sites to be blocked is a secret. But somebody leaked that list and it was posted on wikileaks. So that site is now forbidden. That list, that page which has the list, is now blocked. I can't remember whether it is Denmark or Australia or both that forbid access to that page.
So the first rule of censorship is you don't talk about censorship. They want to do the dirty work and hide it. So censorship of the Internet is not limited to obviuos dictatorship such as China and Tunisia and Iran and now I think Belarus also, but it's found even in countries that pretend they are free. The usual excuse it either child pornography or terrorism. But these excuses are not sufficient to justify destroy political freedom, which is what they do with censorship. The excuses are of course distorted and magnified anyway, because censorship is fundamentally wrong and nothing justifies censorship except perhaps a very limited things during a war.
But censorship apply to entertainment, how can that be justified, censorship apply to political arguments how can that ever be justified? We may not like the political arguments but that's exactly where freedom of speech makes the difference. Freedom of speech, if it is limited to saying the things we agree with, that's no freedom at all. the time when freedom of speech matters, the time when we tell whether a society has freedom of speech or not is when people say things that the establishment or the majority dislike. So if we believe in freedom of speech we have to defend the freedom to say things we disagree with. That political website i told you about is ??? a ??? website. I disagree with it totally but I respect their right to make their arguments and Australia has to respect their right also.
Very often, so called child pornography, I say 'so called' because often the people involved are not really children by usual criterion is a great excuse for censorship and for taking away various human rights and someone from ???, which is an international organization of record companies said at a meeting that 'we love child pornography, because that give us an excuse to censor the network, and once the censorship is in place we can take advantage of it for our own purposes'. So they recognize that is an excuse. So we dont want our countries to become like China, we've got to fight against all efforts to censor the Internet.
The next threat of our freedom in the digital society come from data formats that restrict the users. There are two ways in which the data formats can be unjust. One is if they are secrets. For instance, RAI television distribute its shows over the Internet in a secrect format, I think it is 'DC1', is the name of that. Supposedly a standard but it's a secret standard. In order to get a copy of that standard documents you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The machine readable forms can only be rented perhaps some day we can see a copy of that on wikileaks. So obviously this is an attack on the freedom of at least everyone in Italy, and to the extent that someone might view, legitimately view this programs elsewhere is an attack of the freedom of everyone who uses the Internet. And it will be good to organize a campaign to pressure RAI to stop using that format an use a documented format instead.