Arjen's blog

The Ducth Considerati think tank reported earlier this week that there is still widespread  downloading in the Netherlands. But for an allegedly 'broad' piece of research, some key parties were missing - Bits of Freedom, for example. Nor did the study consider fundamental questions about the social or economic value of copyright that lasts for more than a century (when once it only lasted for 15 years), probably because those ordering the report did not want that question asked, let alone answered. There was also no mention of the copyright industry aggressively lobbying behind closed doors where laws are hammered out that our European representatives are not even allowed to see, let alone influence.

The entire debate is reduced to a financial accounting exercise for a particular industry. So all is perfectly OK then, as I have nothing to do with it – I don't work in that industry – nor indeed do the vast majority of people. The comments  on Webwereld.nl quickly show that almost nobody takes such research seriously.

A lawyer from the American RIAA recently added some colour by saying that the public domain blocked free market capitalism. So much honesty can be scary sometimes. But the recent high point of the "e"G8 meeting in Paris was when Sarokozy and a few captains-of-industry gathered to decide what we should be allowed to do with our internet in the future. In response, a few uninvited representatives of civil liberties organisations held their own press conference (video - Lessig sums it up nicely from 7:00 minutes onwards).

These examples make it absolutely clear that the idea of any reasonable discussion with these vested interests is pure fiction. Wise people like Prof. Lawrence Lessig have been trying to start such a discussion for a decade, without success.  Writer and activist Cory Doctorow also tries to find a reasonable 'middle ground' between the interests of authors, the copyright industry and the rest of society, and himself provides a good example with his DRM-free books. The copyright industry (or “entertainment industry "in the Considerati report) ensures that any such a discussion is absolutely impossible by claiming industry interests and rights are absolute, without providing much of a broader social context. Large parts of the Considerati report read along the lines that providers of bottled mineral water are losing a lot of money because the local municipality washes its buses with tap water.

This week, a UN report declared that uninhibited  access to the internet was a human right. This makes the French HAPODI law (whereby, after three alleged transgressions, the citizen is disconnected) a human rights violation. As long as people have internet access, they will download material. If there is anything to be learned from the internet's last 15 years, it is that repressive measures against making digital copies always fail. Next year there will be yet more storage, wider bandwidths and cheaper processing power. This will only stop if we give up those basic rights as defined by the UN. A digital police state of Stalinist proportions would be needed to prevent copying. It is not insignificant that it is the copyright industry itself that is blocking any real move towards a wide-ranging public discussion on the reform of copyright.

There is a well-known rule for complex projects: Good, Fast, Cheap - choose two. You can get good and fast but it will cost. Good and cheap is possible, but it may require a little patience.  All three at once is usually not possible. We can apply a similar formula to the 'download debate':

Internet, Privacy, Copyright; Choose Two.

We can have the internet with the current functionality and openness while maintaining the right to privacy and free speech - but maintaining a 20th-century copyright model at the same time is impossible. Or we could give up our privacy and other civil rights to allow one specific industry to earn money in the same old way for a little longer. A last option would be to switch off the internet. But that is not realistic: a country like the Netherlands could not survive a day without the internet, any more than it could survive without electricity.

As a society we're going through the painful realisation that we can only have two out of the three options. Different vested-interest groups would no doubt make different choices but, like the vast majority of the people, I opt for the internet and privacy (this symbolises a whole range of civil rights). And thus the outcome of the process is already established, assuming we have a somewhat-functioning democracy (ACTA people do sometimes have doubts about this). Lawrence Lessig once joked during a presentation in Berlin that he, like Gorbachev, wanted to reform the system enough so it could be kept in place. Reform does not appear an option, rather a non-violent revolution is likely to happen.

Like any social change (the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage), this is also accompanied by heated debates, occasional legal sabre rattling and periodic propaganda reports from hired guns. But historically that will be just so much background noise. Maybe there will come a time, in the not too distant future, when basic civil rights make a comeback, upheld by the legislature and supported by the law enforcement agencies.

Until then, we citizens must defend our online rights with technical skills. Privacy can be upheld with crypto. To ensure mobile network neutrality,  run all your traffic through a VPN . On a day-to-day basis, it is not crazy to suggest that we should all explore the use of privacy tools more thoroughly.

Previous columns on copyright

Debate between HAR2009 en BREIN at Hacking at Random

Xeroxing the war

In 1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing,  a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense was quietly copying a secret report about the war. This report, which ran to 7000 pages, covered the progress of the Vietnam war in exhaustive detail. The analyst intended to share this highly classified information with influential politicians and scientists, in the hope that it would quickly bring the war to an end.

That analyst was Daniel Ellsberg, a former officer of the Marine Corps who worked for RAND, the Pentagon think tank. As a result of his experiences in Vietnam and his meetings with conscientious objectors in the US, he became convinced that the war was wrong. With his insider's knowledge, he already knew that it was militarily lost, but that the American government was misleading the people. Every day the Vietnam war took about eight hundred Vietnamese lives, more than two thirds of them civilians, and twenty American soldiers. Many more were seriously injured or maimed for life..

On June 13, 1971 The New York Times tried to publish a number of excerpts from these documents, but was blocked by the Nixon government through legal and political means. Senator Mike Gravel made a breakthrough by reading a large part of the document in the Senate. The reading of 4100 pages took a while, but the rules of the Senate do not allow a senator who is talking to be interrupted (the "filibuster"). Everything the Senator said automatically became part of the proceedings of the Senate and thus on the public record. The publication of this information was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war and the start the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Fast forward to 2010. The US is once again embroiled in unwinnable wars, launched on dubious grounds, that continue indefinitely without any clear strategy or goal. Every extra day that these wars continue, more civilians and soldiers die.

And now there are new people who leak secret information about the wars, in the hope that the resulting political pressure will bring them to a close. The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities – this is safer for both the whistleblowers and Wikileaks.

But the media's response is simply surreal. The bulk of the attention and the debate is about the Xerox machine – or at least the 21st century equivalent of it, the Wikileaks website. Questions such as "is WikiLeaks journalism?" and "should you be allowed to leak classified information?" are discussed in exhaustive detail by apparently intelligent media pundits – who with alarming regularity seem to have little understanding of the very technology they are discussing.

The first 'big' coup from Wikileaks, the “Collatoral Murder" video, led to a huge debate about the culpability of the helicopter pilots and whether or not it was reasonable for them to be able to distinguish between a camera and a grenade launcher. The key topic that was not discussed was the simple fact that the Pentagon had knowingly, for three years, lied to both Reuters and the families of the civilian casualties in Baghdad about the circumstances surrounding the shooting by an Apache helicopter, which was one kilometre away and which riddled two children with bullets from its cannon. The Pentagon made a statement in 2007 saying that it knew nothing of any injuries to children, even though it had been in possession of this video from day one and it leaves nothing to the imagination.

The deliberate lying from the start of the Iraq war continues to this day. The Dutch late night talk show, P&W, led the news on TV with "Dutchman involved in leaking attack video": that, after all, is news - apparently far more important than the fact that children were shot and there was a cover-up.

Wikileaks has already been the top story in the news for more than one week, and that's a problem. The Xerox machine is not important. Illegal wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies are important. The torture of innocent citizens in secret prisons is important. Spying on UN diplomats is important. Messing about in the internal political decisions of other countries is important.

So why is the entire media is so busy with the Xerox machine and the person with his finger on the copy button? Dear journalists, you have been presented with a cornucopia of scoops, many of which make Watergate pale into insignifcance. If African dictators were doing the things Western countries are being accused of, they would be dragged in handcuffs to the International Court in The Hague. Get to work!

Gran knows why

My grandmother was born in 1920 and left school at the age of 12 to work in her father's shop.  She has never used a computer (but has tried an iPod for audio books). She is now 90 and is still interested in what I do.

Usually I just quickly skip over the technical aspects, because it's difficult for her to understand. The “why” is much more relevant. Privacy, civil rights and the control of your own details/information. She understands this easily, without having to follow all the technical details of open source codes and cryptography.

Last Sunday, Bits of Freedom in Amsterdam  organized a lecture and discussion with Prof. Eben Moglen, a former programmer who is now a law professor and advocate for the use of free software. Part of his lecture was about the risks of cloud computing (see a previous lecture in New York on the same theme).

Besides his new plans for a technical project (the Freedom Box) , Moglen spoke mainly about the principles of digital freedom. Explaining this concept in The Netherlands remains difficult.

A video that Bits of Freedom tweeted about shows this problem. It's a short list of recent privacy breaches but does not explain why these are problematic. For many viewers there is still a pervasive feeling of "so what?”.

In The Netherlands, the problem explaining this issue is that we have no recent experience of a government that has seriously gone off the rails (unlike Spain and Eastern Europe). The use of a good recent example can be seen in an employee of the German T-Mobile explaining why the British government's Stasi-style tapping of all mobile phone traffic might not be a good idea. Churchill must be turning in his grave.

As we have only experienced two real disasters in The Netherlands in the last 100 years (the German occupation and the 1953 flood),  we as a people fall back on WW2 to explain the importance of  civil rights. And then the Godwin-accusations fly. For the post-baby boom generations the war is a (his)story that we read about, but which is not quite real. And the possibility that such a thing could happen again is inconceivable, and therefore unmentionable.

My grandmother has no such problem because she lived through it. A real war - where the previous government was suddenly replaced by a new administration that energetically started using data collected in previous decades, and which found the accurate ethnic records extremely useful: an administration which could put your neighbours on a train to Westerbork, and would shoot you for owning a radio.

Eben Moglen suggested that we all ask our grandparents why privacy and other civil rights are important. People who have lived through an oppressive state are largely immune to Godwin's rules. They can speak out from a personal, rather than an abstract, historical perspective. My grandmother is not well enough to speak out, but hopefully there are some grandparents out there who can explain to the younger, Facebooking and tweeting generation in The Netherlands the vital importance of privacy and other civil liberties.

When I'm done explaining things Gran always grabs my hand and whispers "just you be careful!". Because you never know what could happen when you are critisizing governments. She knows this, so take a bit of time to listen to your gran.

Dedicated to my grandmother, Tet de Boer - Olij,
Kollum 1920 - Leidschendam 2010

Cybercrime or the end of scarcity? The future of hacking.

On October 14th The Club of Amsterdam is meeting to discuss 'the future of hacking'.

The term hacking (and hacker) means very different things to different people. Most will associate the term with computer-enabled crime; from Russian mobsters stealing western credit cards to spammers sending billions of unwanted email advertisements for Viagra to Chinese intelligence employees attempting to break into NATO computers. For those calling themselves hacker (or being called hackers by their peers) hacking just refers to the creative use of technology, any technology, to do new and unexpected things.

These two very different meaning of the term continue to cause a lot of confusion in any discussion about it. This piece will expand on both the cybercrime and creative technology uses and see where they meet.

The term cybercrime itself suggests that computer and the networks that connect them are a new phenomenon in the eyes of law-enforcement and the justice ministry. If a crime is enabled by a telephone or car this is not worthy or separate classification. But if a computer or the Internet is involved a crime quickly becomes a 'cybercrime'. A recent BBC item mentions a big case were 45 million credit cards were  stolen. The financial impact of this theft was either not known or not made public. The trouble with evaluating 'cyber'-crime is both the scope of the subject and the lack of hard data. From copyright infringement via credit card fraud to child pornography (more accurately imagery of child-abuse) cybercrime is a field that encompasses a wide range of activities of varying seriousness and with very different levels of impact on the victims. Even more troubling is estimating the effectiveness of law-enforcement do prevent or these crimes or at least bring to justice the perpetrators after the fact. Can this effectiveness be measured and if we can, is it worth logging everyone's e-mail and cellphone communications to capture an unspecified number of thieves? Precisely because we lack clear information on both the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of the measures trying to cope with it  there is no way of telling either way. Frans Kolkman (Head High Tech Crime Unit East-NL) will hopefully enlighten us a bit more.

The much happier side of hacking is all the wonderful things people are doing with technology all over the world, taking it apart and making it do stuff the original designers and producers never imagined. Thanks to intrepid hackers computers have become utterly commoditized and all of us can get connected to the global Internet for 10 euros per month. This democratization of technology has spawned not only entire new industries but also new ways for people to communicate, organize and participate in global affairs whoever en wherever you are. Martijn Aslander (Life hacker) will talk with us about using all these tools to get more out of life.

Before computers became small and cheap people calling themselves hackers were tinkering with all kinds of other hardware. Now computers, sensors and other components have become so cheap hardware hacking is becoming just as democratized as merely using a computer. Alper Çugun will give us an overview of the possibilities and perils of the digital world meeting the real world again.

The first desktop factories, also known as 3D printers, for home use with use-at-home pricing are a reality today and over the next decade they will develop in the same way our commodore 64 developed into smart-phones and laptops. Cheaper and twice as powerful every 18 months. If we can all print our consumer goods at home, will anyone even want to steal anything? Of course someone will figure out a way to print an AK-47 (just for fun mind you!) and then things will get really interesting.

Everyone having aces to technology has both benefits and problems; from youtube and wikileaks as new global media to road-side bombs detonated by cheap mobile phones and surveillance possibilities the Stasi could only dream of. In a world re-defined by technology everybody needs to become a little bit techno-literate. Ignorance of new possibilities will mean losing out on great opportunities for a better life and becoming a victim of those who would use the new tools for criminal or other bad purposes. Hackers might save the world, especially if every citizen adopts the hacker ethic of collaboration, free sharing of knowledge and an anti-authoritarian attitude to keep would-be stasis at bay.

Afghanistan: there is no 'why'

Western armies have now occupied Afghanistan for 7 years. The US invaded the country in 2001 because the Taliban refused to extradite Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban came to power after a bloody civil war that was the aftermath of a ten year war against Soviet occupation. That occupation itself was a direct consequence of a covert CIA operation started in 1979 to give the Soviets a 'Vietnam-type' war to damage their economy and military. Osama got support, weapons and training in the '80s to kill as many Russians as possible. The CIA plan worked like a dream, an unwinnable war in Afghanistan was the extra push required to break the Russian economy and end the cold war. Too bad if all Afghanistan was destroyed.

Osama was the reason and so US special forces got in the field to get him 'dead or alive'. The Taliban was willing to surrender him to the US, if the US would provide them with evidence of his involvement in the attacks of 9-11; for a brief moment western judicial values were embraced. Despite the fact that the US claimed to have this evidence, they refused to make it publicly available (it was said to have been shown to NATO partners in a confidential meeting in Brussels) because that might endanger the intelligence gathering process. The rest of the world, including the Taliban, had to take their word for it.

The Taliban refused to do so and on October 7th of 2001 (almost a full month after 9-11) the US began the search for Bin Laden. The Taliban was quickly defeated but Osama was never found, escaping out of Bora Bora into the Pakistan border area.

Fast forward 7 years. Afghanistan has an elected (sort of) government that has no power whatsoever outside the guarded compound it hides in. The Dutch military participates in the occupation of the country with the solemn promise that we will begin reconstruction as soon as the Taliban is defeated. When the mission started the Dutch Ministry of Defense was very clear about the how and why of the invasion of Afghanistan: "Osama did it" and so NATO had to invade. See this (Dutch) screenshot made in 2006:

The problem with this is that no-one believes any more in Osama's guilt when it comes to 9-11. Not Dick Cheney, nor the latest White House spokesdrone or even the FBI! The Dutch MOD has very schrewedly adapted its Afghanistan webpage and Osama is no longer mentioned. In fact the entire menu-item 'Why to Afghanistan' has been disapeared into a some dark place, never to be seen again. It has been replaced by the more neutral 'About Afghanistan'. This is not a redesign-issue because the Bosnia mission still has its original 'Why page'. For Bosnia there is still a 'Why', for Afghanistan apparently no longer. We're not there for a purpose anymore. We're just there. Afghanistan is rapidly turining into Iraq (both times), a war against a former ally, based on lies and impossible to win. So be a good citizen and repeat after me: “Oceania has always been at war with East-Asia”.

The Ultimate Business Model

I've discovered what I want to be when I grow up... Wall street banker! Seriously... what a job! When things go right you give yourself a million-dollar bonus. Or 10, Or 100. If things fall apart because your worthless commercial paper is now poisoning the financial infrastructure of the world you run to the governments to tap them for a $700 billion bail-out package saddling the US-taxpayer with debt for three or four generations. All the while keeping the aforementioned bonus of course.

This is called 'privatise-the-profits-and-socialise-the-cost' in strategy terms. It's a model where the profits (if any) of a certain activity become a private asset while the cost or losses (and these are not just monetary - think dead soldiers or a poisoned environment) is borne by society at large. This behaviour out of Wallstreet is extra double-plus hypocritical since the firms now asking for a handout of ginormous proportions have done everything they could over the last decades to whittle away what little oversight there was to prevent exactly the behaviours that led to these problems.

All of this would not be so bad in itself if the US government actually had $700 billion lying around but they do not. Everyone of those dollars has to be borrowed from foreign lenders increasing their control over the US state. By now a significant part of the US is de-facto property of foreign banks and other large investors such as pension funds or sovereign wealth funds who have the power to implode the US economy at any time. I don't see a Dutch pension fund doing this but China might be interested eventually. This is a real time clock of the US national debt, just the tip of the iceberg but it gives a feel of what is going on. Injecting $700 billion into this mess is not going to solve anything structurally. The US is consuming too much and making too little. Sooner or later gravity much take hold.

With a twinge of (professional) pleasure I note that my scenario, developed in 2004, where the US becomes the fastest imploding empire in at least 2000 years. While the consequences of dollar-collapse will be bad for both the US and Europe it may just be the most effective way of preventing additional 'pre-emptive' wars in Asia.

An important lesson learned over the past four years when I started many of my presentations in the financial sector with the debt-clock: it's just as dangerous to be too far ahead of the curve as it is to lag behind. Not necessarily because the analysis is faulty but because people need time to adapt to new concepts. In 2004 most of my clients were not ready for the concept of a failing US state (or not ready to discuss it openly). Despite two openly stolen elections and an illegal war the US was still perceived as the standard to aspire to by many. After Katrina it became easier to be critical of US policies in the Netherlands, the images of a drowned city touched a nerve. Now the problems with some bad mortgages have exploded into a full-scale meltdown and both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have utterly failed to achieve any of their stated goals it has become possible to discuss these possibilities openly in polite company. The idea and the basic data are the same, the perception of the world has changed.

What will the next 'impossible' scenario be? Watch this space. Meanwhile ING bank can buy the rest of New York and we can call it New Amsterdam again, like before.

(the link to the PDF file is a Dutch newspaper set in 2030. What will the world look like and how did we get there? We ocasionally make these for clients too facilitate discussion about possible futures - an English version is being made)

A tale of two elections

There were two elections on my news radar the last two weeks. One in an African country now rapidly sinking into an economic crash and possible civil war, the other in the heart of the civilized west; the OOXML election by ISO standards body in Geneva. Aside from the locations and prices of hotels for journalists the differences were few. Bribery, fraud and intimidation were applied to achieve a specific outcome, never mind what the majority wanted. In the OOXML election even the standards organizations of proper democratic countries like Norway and Germany were unable to withstand the well-oiled lobby machine of the worlds most convicted software monopolist. In the Netherlands Microsoft was actually a member of the committee and prevented a committee consensus. So instead of voting against the standards, as 21 out of 22 members wanted, the Netherlands voted 'abstain'. The list of irregularities is endless but try some of the links above to get an idea.

To quote an ISO insider: "“OOXML’s BRM process is irretrievably broken; complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit”" (Tim Bray). The ISO process is dead and that is bad. Even though ISO was far from perfect it's open process did help many nations to agree on thousands of standards on anything from steel manufacturing to surgical gloves. These kinds of standards are crucial for a globalized high tech society.

It would seem that those in favor of the OOXML standard (Microsoft and a few of it's partners) did not have so much confidence that their 6000-page specification would make it to ISO standard status that they trusted a transparent en democratic process to take it's course. There way of treating the process was much like an African dictator with a chest full of medals. Utterly lacking in legitimacy but high on power as a consequence of an unlimited bribery budget and a willingness to bully anyone in the way of their goal. If they were not so much trouble you'd almost feel sorry for them.

Microsoft is of the opinion that everything went fine. Neelie Kroes and the EU have a different view of the matter. I feel another mega-fine around the corner. Not that any of this matters a lot to the fastest growing parts of the world. Brazil, China, India, Iran voted no. They represent a big chunk of the global population (as opposed to yes-voters such as Malta). If I were an applications vendor I'd make sure I stay ODF compatible. Several countries such as the Netherlands and Norway (that is now appealing their stolen vote) have already formally chosen ODF as the document standards for government. Others are looking to follow this lead. It's not entirely clear what Microsoft has achieved by gaining the ISO label. The governments that already choose ODF are not going back and Microsofts well documented behavior is not going to make then many new friends.

The EU appear to have been investigating the OOXML ISO certification process for some time now. Documentation from countries with where very clear breaches of protocol occured will strengthen the case for further antitrust investigations and possible additional fines or other measures. The victory of OOXML may turn out to be very costly indeed. And any credibility of OOXML as an 'open' standard has already been severely damaged by the deluge of reports about bribes, fraud and other forms of misconduct by Microsoft over the last year. A Pyhrric victory if here ever was one.

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?