I’m into privacy issues and the fight for a free and open Internet from a political background. Even though I’m not a complete technical idiot, I really don’t know what’s going on under the hood. Show me a command line, and I will freeze without a clue what to do about it.
So, I’m like most people.
At the same time, the world badly needs some tech-based change. We need to build platforms for digital currencies, as alternative to government fiat-money. We need to rise the prize for surveillance by building decentralized systems, by making encryption the default option and by developing various P2P solutions.
At present, this is far beyond the ordinary user.
Ergo: We need to make privacy orientated technology user friendly.
Last year international information activist Smári McCarthy made this very point in his keynote at FSCONS 2013. A few extracts…
“Most people don’t care about technology, they care about doing the things that are meaningful to them. They don’t want to spend all day fiddling with GnuPG’s parameters or figuring out whether their XMPP session is being transferred over SSL. They don’t want to know about IPSec or AES.”
“No. They want to be farmers, or merchants, or dentists or doctors. They want to teach our children languages and mathematics. They want to build houses or spaceships or plumbing or bridges or roads. They don’t have time to work with bad technology that we made badly because we didn’t care about them.”
“What’s worse: when companies that don’t care about those people either give them highly usable software that doesn’t respect their fundamental rights, most people will go for it because despite its failings, it at least gets the job done. If what we offer them as an alternative is not at least as good in terms of getting the job done – from the perspective of a nontechnical user, it does not matter at all how ideologically pure our offering is.”
Spot on.
I like to believe that I’m at least as smart as people in general. Still, I prefer to have some qualified guidance when diving into these things.
As a matter of fact, I had Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge to install everything on my Linux laptop. And to guide me into PGP. And Swedish Internet icon (and 5 July chairman) Oscar Swartz to get my Mac to act in a reasonably safe way. I might have managed myself. But it would have been a slow and very painful process.
But people in general don’t give a fuck. They choose user friendliness before privacy. They are happy if whatever they get from the Mediemarkt shelfs works, no matter how exposed it is to government surveillance.
To fight back, privacy oriented options and solutions supporting an free and open internet must be the best ones. They must be ordinary peoples natural and carefree choice.
This said with the greatest respect for all the fine people who are putting their time and energy into fighting Big Brother command line by command line.
/ HAX
Smári McCarthy at FSCONS 2013: Engineering Our Way Out of Fascism »
Encryption must be implemented on the protocol level, so that everything is encrypted wihtout much user interaction nessesary. The only way to make it usable for anyone is to implement it as default in any software and network protocols.
But this will not be easy, you can be sure that corporations like Microsoft, Apple and so on will implement backdoors on government request. So it can only be secure if it is open source.
While true, it’s not the whole picture. Besides writing and deploying good software, we will have to take into account the economic model of today’s internet services that makes users pay with their data rather than their money. This affects a lot of things. Point in case: Why are none of the browser vendors interested in real user privacy? They are driven by the same economic logic as the rest of the industry.
For Freenet we try to get there – but we don’t yet know whether we’ll be able to build the momentum we need. See http://draketo.de/proj/freenet-funding