Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cinquemb | Hacker News Reader

I found this part to be interesting:

"These companies may well be complicit in grave human rights violations. A criminal case against a French company for exactly this business behaviour is now under consideration of a Paris court and could set an important precedent for others. Can we hold companies and their executives accountable for complicity in human rights violations and creating security threats by knowingly selling digital arms to repressive regimes?"

Should/Can we hold weapons manufactures accountable for helping aid nation states/organizations in their conquests or for individuals during crimes?

Somehow this comes off to me as these tools are only ok for some ...hardly digital freedom.

I also like how there is little (or no) discussion on about individuals and the role they should take in ensuring their digital freedom. I guess only nation states and corporations are the enlightend despots who must insure freedom upon us. Sounds kinda doublespeaky to me.

I don't know the details of the French case, but there is a valid question here:

If I make some widget, that turns out is used widely, and happens to be used by an oppressive regime, am I helping commit opression?

What about if I make a tool that really only has uses that look like oppression, but some of those cases are not opression and some are (say web filtering - parents can use it to protect their children, and opressive regimes can use it for censorship)?

What if I create machine learning software that finds activists and determines the best time to arrest them?

What if I work with a regime on custom extensions to a medical program that helps find the optimal torture times and methods to break people the fastest?

At some point the use of "your freedom" is just a shield behind which one tries to hide complicity in removing others' freedom.

At some point the use of "your freedom" is just a shield behind which one tries to hide complicity in removing others' freedom.

Unless one happens to find themselves on the side of the people who get to define what is "oppressive regime" and "others freedom".

It's not as clear cut as one may think when you consider the perspectives of other societies and the people in power there (even as individuals who learn how to create their own tools for their own means become more powerful). The whole UN regulation issue makes light of this [http://blogs.cfr.org/patrick/2012/12/04/un-control-of-the-in...].

Selling weapons outside France is heavily regulated for french manufacturers. The question in the french case (google for amesys france) is whether or not those digital goods should be considered weapons (and be regulated as regular physical weapons).

My opinion is that the USA tends more towards individualism and Europe more towards collectivism which would explain the authors approach to handling issues at the European level (Combined with the fact she is an MEP so is heavily invested in the European system) and probably also underlies your sensitivity to 'doublespeaky' statist approaches. I made an assumption about you there that may well be unfair.

However, It would appear there is a wide spread of individualism vs collectivism across Europe http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/26956-Map-of-Individual... and when you dig into the comparisons the USA isn't that far from the UK or similar EU nations like the Netherlands where the author hails from http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html.

I have to admit the scale of the issue makes me think of collectivist approaches similarly to the author but I'd be interested to hear of individualistic approaches.

No worries, your explanation of where she is coming from makes sense to me, but I see freedom in our current statist paradigm on a spectrum from freedom the state "imposes" on its people, and the freedom people give themselves.

The the individualistic approach that I had in mind is for people that are deeply concerned about being able to access/share information will need to take a more proactive approach to the technology they use. There is plenty accesible technical information online that is not blocked which can enable people to help create the solutions they want instead expecting the government to be swift in protecting their interests.

For me personally, because of all the issues around the state possibly mandating backdoors in consumer electronics like cellular devices, made me look for alternatives like this: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

I also think because individuals have much more power on the internet than over any other aspects of society (due to the lower barriers of meaningful participation, though many choose not to exercise such power over themselves do to ignorance,connivence or w/e), individuals should take some responsibility for their own interests as well.

At the end of the day, even if the state mandates something, if their ability to enforce such mandate is not totalistic, organizations and individuals will find ways around to achieve their goals with the freedom they give themselves.

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