hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3578.txt

Episode: 3578
Title: HPR3578: Linux Inlaws S01E54: Electronic Freedom Never Mind the Civil Rest
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3578/hpr3578.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:44:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,578 for Wednesday the 20th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Linnix and Laws Sayy, Electronic Freedom Never Mind the Civil
Rest.
It is part of the series Linnix and Laws.
It is hosted by Monochromic and is about 87 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is a discussion with members of the Electronic Frontier, Georgia about Electronic
Freedom Civil Rights.
This is Linnix and Laws.
A podcast on topics around free and open-source software, any associated contraband, communism,
the revolution in general, and whatever else, fanciful.
Please note that this and other episodes may contain strong language, offensive humor,
and other certainly not politically correct language.
You have been warned.
Our parents insisted on this disclaimer.
Happy mum?
Thus, the content is not suitable for consumption in the workplace, especially when played
back on a speaker in an open-plan office or similar environments.
Any miners under the age of 35, or any pets including fluffy little killer bunnies,
your trusted guide dog unless on speed, and Q to T-Rexes are other associated dinosaurs.
Welcome to Linnix and Laws, season 1, episode 54 of Thing Martin.
How are things in the Kingdom?
They are very windy, very windy, yes.
But I just...
Probably not so much.
You're me, right?
You've got to hold on them between before it gets there, sir.
I understand that Lizzie has corded to today, or over the weekend.
Lizzie sent me a mail saying, sorry, I got it too.
Yeah.
Yeah, so she can't make it on the show, I'm afraid.
Yes, for those people who are not in the loop, we are talking about the queen of the Kingdom
who apparently has caught COVID on the outstretched, I'm afraid.
Lizzie, if you're listening, you may...
I hope this is over by now, because we may release this a little bit,
kind of later than we actually recorded.
But this is not about COVID, or Queen Elizabeth, unfortunately, I'm not at,
because I can speak for Martin too, we are just at the very bottom of our heart.
We are not only loyal, this is what we are right, this is all right.
Martin, I'm joking, we're not.
But this is not about the right, it's all the Kingdom, there was a lot of other species.
But this is rather about the Georgia, and before I get this wrong, guys, why don't you introduce
yourself?
Okay, I'll start.
This is Scott Jones, I'm Acting Director of Electronic Frontier's Georgia.
I've been, let's see, Electronic Frontier's Georgia was founded in 1995, I've been active
in it since 1996.
And this is, essentially it's a hobby, and my day job, and my day job, I'm a system administrator
and I've been a developer in the past, so I'm familiar with technology, I've worked
in technology for quite some time.
Excellent, over to you, Chuck.
Okay, Chuck Delozer, I am with Electronic Frontier's Georgia, when it has been, when we've
needed it, I have called myself the community outreach coordinator or things of that nature.
I have been the person who's going out to reach out to a lot of different groups that
are doing other work that are not necessarily technology related, but find that in the work
that they're doing, whether it's some type of political issue, or maybe it's with homeowners,
wherever they are, they find that technology is in their lives, and so I wanted to try
to be a liaison to get them involved in the kind of work that EFGA is interested in at
a state and local level, which is defending civil liberties and privacy.
And Keith.
Keith Watson, I just recently retired from Georgia Institute Technology, where I was ahead
of information security for the College of Computing.
I'm a G.A.C. Certified Institute, Security Institute, handler, and my original life,
I was a submarine Navy Electronics Technician, working in cryptography and civil intelligence.
I used to sponsor, when I was at Georgia Tech, I captured a flag team for them.
I'm co-founder of Atlanta Locksport, so if anybody's in the lock picking, I love lock picking.
I also host the look at chapter of EFCon here in Atlanta called DC-404.
I'm a moderator of Atlanta Cybersecurity Engineers Discord server, and a member of Atlanta 2600 chapter.
And I'm also co-developer of a capture of the flag called Network King of the Hill,
where we host monthly capture of the flags at DC-404 and at 2600 meetings,
when we're not in the middle of COVID.
So when we get back to meeting and personal, we'll go back to hosting those.
I'm not only do we have...
Sorry, go ahead.
I've known Chuck for many, many years, and when...
Not sorry, Chuck, Scott.
I've known... Actually, Chuck, I've known you for a while too.
Scott, I've known for many years, and when he told me about EFGA,
I immediately volunteered for working with them.
Primarily, I do a valuation of bills that come online this year.
We've got a spade of them that all relate to privacy, security, online safety,
that sort of thing.
So governments tend to measure with my crometer,
mark with chalk, cut with ax when it comes to their bills.
So we try to give them some semblance of guidance
in regards to information security and privacy,
so that the bills don't cause more damage than good.
That's the basic idea.
And before we go into the background of the EFGA,
let me round a little bit about the beautiful South.
Nevermind.
Georgia Tech.
And more than please have actually somebody from Georgia Tech on the show,
because that brings back more front memories
while the trading through Georgia and Atlanta specifically.
Guys, we are more than happy to have you on the show.
But enough ranting.
Why don't we start?
Because I reckon there are about two listeners out there
who do not know what the electronic frontier is.
Nevermind the electronic frontier foundation.
So why don't we go into a little of the history
about the EFF and the EFGA in general?
OK, let me start talking about the EFF.
EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It was started in the, I guess, around 1990,
or based on events that happened around 1990.
There was a small...
Which were?
There was a small gaming company called Steve Jackson Games.
They're still around, but they got rated by the Secret Service.
And they were innocent at the time.
But at the time, I think there was a lot of concern about...
There was a lot of concern about...
We had this new technology coming in.
And we had law enforcement that didn't understand it at all.
And so the founders of Electronic Frontier...
People got together and eventually decided
there needs to be an organization that would speak
on behalf of people in this technology sector
and people who were working in technology
who had issues with their rights.
And so a couple of people got together and founded
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It's often been called the ACLU of Cyberspace.
And the mission is...
The mission is kind of at the intersection of technology,
civil rights in the law
and how the law interfaces with technology.
We find a lot of times, even today, years later,
we have legislators, judges,
that other people that in positions of influence and power,
that they don't quite get how technology affects
people's rights.
And that's been part of the problem.
And so that's kind of been why EFF
needed to be created or founded.
So again, we have an American organization called
the American Civil Liberties Union or the ACLU.
And so, I'm sorry, EFF has often been compared
to the ACLU, but they're dealing with technology
and technology-related issues.
And so they have been called the ACLU of Cyberspace.
Go ahead.
For the Stosure People, I'm an active sponsor of ACLU
for the simple reason that I believe in their goals.
So let's forget about the EFF.
Let's talk about American civil rights
and other stuff from it.
I'm joking.
I'd be more than happy to talk about that, actually.
No, no, don't decide.
I reckon we'll use our finalist name in case.
But no, let's go back to the EFF.
But I find the analogy to the ACLU
quite more than fascinating, actually,
because I fully concur.
These two organizations have a lot in common
from a, I wouldn't say philosophical perspective,
but almost, and probably we get shot for this
from a communist or socialist perspective.
But we go into that, I reckon, in a minute,
with regards to, you know, a five-year-old,
and all the other stuff, right?
Sorry?
You mean you share the same principles, right?
I think what are you trying to say?
Exactly, yes.
Martin White, because you are actually one,
but kind of, the prototypical communist on the show,
why don't you chip in now for a change?
No, I'm not really...
Not on not the real communist.
I don't think we need to bring
the political preferences into the...
We do, Martin, we do.
No, we do.
And probably we do, it's hard to get away from that in Georgia.
Extra, extra likeness.
By the way, for anybody who's listening to this
and interested in that original case
with Steve Jackson Games,
there's an excellent book called The Hacker Crackdown.
You can get it on Amazon.
It might be available free now on Gutenberg,
but it's about that entire case.
The interesting thing about the book
is it's written from both sides of the issue.
The author wrote from the perspective of the people involved
and from the perspective of the government
and how they collided
and the aftermath of all that occurred.
It's a really interesting read.
Wow, okay.
Why don't we kind of shed two more minutes,
shed a little bit more lives like two more minutes
on the EFF, its origins and the history
before we go into the EFGA in more detail.
And your aims, ambitions,
world domination, all the rest of it.
So you want to know more about the electronic frontier
foundation?
Yes, because I reckon that at least two of our three lists,
well, four lists, maybe,
maybe haven't come across the EFF in that line of detail.
We did a show on the OSI about,
what was it about, half a year ago?
Maybe it's about this.
We also had somebody from the FSFE,
FSFE, sorry, the FSF Europe on the show,
but the EFF kind of has escaped us so far,
but now that we have you on the show,
apart from the Georgian kind of focus
or focal point rather,
why don't you shed some light on the EFF history
and that sort of thing?
If you are a game.
Well, I'm completely qualified to talk about the history,
per se, but I would say when you mentioned
free software foundation, Europe or wherever they are,
I think the electronic frontier foundation
is focused more on the law.
And they do have a lot of lawyers who go over
a lot of technology related legal cases.
And what the EFA, the Electronic Frontier Alliance,
which our group, the Electronic Frontier's Georgia,
many similar names and you have to keep them all straight.
I think that what is another piece
of the EFF's history that is noteworthy
is that they have created the Electronic Frontier Alliance
to enable groups all across the United States
to form of their own accord and to be citizen advocates
and citizen activists.
That's how I found Scott and eventually,
because of Scott, that's how I found Keith.
And that's where you can be an average person like me
who while I did go to Georgia Tech for a while
and I was in a design program and architecture,
my background is not technology related per se.
I'm more of somebody who's a hobbyist and very interested
and said the Electronic Frontier Foundation
has enabled someone like me to learn from the kind of issues
that it highlights on its website at eff.org,
but plug that.
And it also allows me to meet people that are like Keith
who is an ex-military person who has worked for many, many years
at very high levels in technology
and someone like myself and many of the other people
that we meet at EFGA events
would never have the opportunity to meet someone like that
or Scott in the systems administrative position.
And so the EFA has allowed people to come together.
And I think that's something that we should highlight here
about both our group here at the state level
and what the Electronic Frontier Foundation
has done across the country.
So it's a fact to say that the EFA bridges somewhat
the gap between, I'm exaggerating now,
but bridges the gap between the EFF
and some of the aims that the ACLU stands for.
Yes, yes, in fact, we as a group here
Electronic Frontier's Georgia will contact the ACLU
and the ACLU will contact us
because we will be able to provide support to one another.
And I know that from other, you know,
conference calls that I've been on
over just either as a viewer or sometimes as a participant,
that happens across the country.
I mean, I've learned about technology related issues
in California because of the EFA groups hosting something
that the ACLU of California has done or for instance
and things like that.
So it really is kind of an umbrella
that is bringing a lot of different groups together.
Great.
Excellent.
Martin, sorry, I had a question too.
I was going to ask, so all three of you
come up at the angle from a technology perspective.
And you're looking at laws and bills.
How do you get around all the legal speakers?
Would you have lawyers in your group as well?
Or are you able to deal with that angle of the review as well?
Well, we actually don't have, yeah, this is Scott.
We actually don't have attorneys on staff.
We do have attorneys who have volunteered their time
and energy at times.
They had either worked, he'd either worked, I guess,
for gratis or maybe for very low rates on certain cases
that they felt were important to where it is important
to make a precedent or some situation like that.
But again, we don't have any staff attorneys
or anything like that.
And we are kind of light on the legal expertise side.
But the good news is that through the electronic frontier,
or electronic frontier alliance,
we have a connection to electronic frontier foundation
where we can talk to their attorneys at least indirectly
or we can discuss a particular problem that we may have.
They can run it by their legal department
and they can come back to us
and give us some advice on the legal side.
Now, we do know local attorneys here,
but with the local attorneys,
they're basically doing it nights and weekends
kind of as a favor to us.
Whereas electronic frontier foundation,
it's their day job.
So they're able to jump on things more quickly.
And we do talk to some of the other organizations in town
including ACLU of Georgia, the Georgia chapter
and they have staff attorneys as well.
So we don't have attorneys on staff with us
or attorneys that are 100% dedicated to our group,
but we do have access when we have a legal question.
And also, it's not impossible to understand legal issues.
People assume that it's written in some strange language
we can't read.
It's actually written that you can't understand it.
Sometimes you have to look up terms.
Over time, as you expose yourself to it,
it becomes more accessible.
So I'm an advocate for just jump in and start somewhere,
read about it and learn about it.
As citizens, we have some responsibility
to be involved in the process.
By definition, well here in the United States,
our government is sort of predicated on the idea
that the government should have limited power.
And what power it does have,
it should be observed and monitored at all times.
And it's our duty as citizens
to make sure they're getting it right.
Okay.
And if we don't and something goes wrong,
it's our fault for not having intervened.
So it may be perceived me from abroad,
but yeah, it's different.
I realize that in other countries,
they're going to look at this like,
I've got three heads that makes no sense to them.
So I understand that.
I've lived abroad, so I do get that it's very different
in other places.
There's in the case of the United States,
where we're called upon to actually be directly involved.
And those people don't pick up and run with that.
We have the opportunity to do so.
And it impacts all of us.
There have been some very bad laws that got passed.
The DMCA, the,
I can't think of it right off hand.
The cyber crimes bill that was passed
that have some very, very bad side effects
that are still being worked out.
Recently, we had one, two years ago,
called SB315,
which was going to criminalize cyber research
in simple terms.
Like if I noticed that a website had a vulnerability,
I just happened to notice that,
and I reported it,
then I could be prosecuted for criminal hacking.
And so we were able to get a working with not only the FGA,
but a great number of other people
chimed in on that bill
and was able to get the governor to veto the bill.
So that would have caused all kinds of havoc.
There was a recent case here in the US
where a reporter
noted I was looking at a website
and pressed F12 to view the source code,
which is not an uncommon thing to do.
And noticed that on the webpage it didn't show up,
but in the source code,
it had the social security numbers
of all the people working there.
So he reported it.
Yeah, and he reported it.
And the governor of the state wanted him prosecuted
for hacking, criminal hacking.
Now, yeah.
And so everybody in the industry,
people like the FF,
also other cybersecurity experts in the country
said, no, governor,
I don't think you understand
and explained what F12 does.
And that viewing source code is not criminal hacking
and that he was completely offline.
And he doubled down and said,
no, no, I want him prosecuted.
And it went through several rounds of that.
And eventually, just recently,
I think two weeks ago,
the prosecution in that state
said they were not going to pursue the case.
And so the governor's students
and prosecuted, but the prosecutor said,
no, we're not pursuing that.
But those are the kinds of problems you have.
I'm finding the rules.
Yes.
Yeah, you know,
sometimes legislature wants to do,
now mind you, this is a bit hyperbolic,
but they'll want to do things like,
math is too hard with pie being interrational.
And but couldn't we just make it three to make it easier?
And they do the equivalent of that
with some of the bills
and that they try to pass related to technology.
They don't really understand
how the technology works quite often.
In fact, there's one bill I'm reviewing currently,
where in essence, the bill says,
insert magical technical wand here
to solve other problems.
And that's, sorry, that doesn't work that way.
Or AI will fix our problem.
Well, AI doesn't,
isn't a magic bullet.
It doesn't fix everything.
It doesn't solve those kinds of problems.
And quite often we find out
it can't be relied on upon
in a way that we think it can.
So those are the kinds of issues we deal with
in talking to the legislators
in trying to get them to understand
the technical underpinnings of what's actually possible.
And those things which should be moderated
and those things which should not be moderated.
But Keith, you see, at the end of the day,
despair not, I'm tempted to say,
because there is hope at last.
For example, I mean, I'm a great admirer
of, for example, the American Constitution.
Because the people wrote the American Constitution,
knew what they were doing.
And this is a red line that goes through your legislation
at the end of the day.
For example, you can only do two terms.
So at the end of the day,
Trump had a maximum of eight years.
I hope it stays at four.
But that's my personal opinion.
The point that I'm making here, guys,
you just have to take a close look.
And this is federal legislation, this is state legislation.
You have more checks and balances that you know of
or that the common Joe blog in the street perceives
and there is light at the end of the time.
That's what I'm saying here.
And if you read the Constitution carefully,
it's already built in the whole thing
on a constitutional level.
Of course, there are things broken
like the Electoral College.
Yes, sorry, I'm derailing completely here,
but hear me out.
The Electoral College and correct me if I'm wrong,
was built at a time when the population
was quite different in the US,
because you had much more people living in rural America
than you had now.
So the Electoral College reflects a state of the nation
about 200 years ago.
There is no, there's no surprise reading
that now, of course, with the whole shift
in the overall democracy,
what do I remember before, a population spread
that this is not adequate in modern times.
Let's put it this way.
So Bernie Sanders and friends do have a point
when they say the structure is broken,
but I'm tempted to say the whole idea is the valid.
Of course, I'm derailing now because
this is not a podcast, American history,
but the part that I'm making here is,
it's quite straightforward.
Your country has a lot of things going for it.
And your constitution, never mind the things
that come out of it.
And Keith, what you're saying there,
it just makes the point still applies.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
The, in the fact that it still applies,
you can have a whole, there's a whole debate
over the validity of our election system right now.
In fact, one of the things that we've had to deal with
over and over and over again is our election process.
In fact, I've had to go to battle multiple times now
over how we do our ballot counting,
what machines we use, the process we use.
And the most common thing that comes up constantly
is when somebody says, we put a man on the moon,
why can't we vote online?
But at the point.
And the problem is they don't actually understand
the underlying things that voting has to do.
In other words, what are called constraints.
I would run into this all the time
with students at Georgia Tech,
where they would say, why can't we do X?
Because from their point of view,
this constraints were very minimal.
And they just don't understand all the things involved
that are trying to be solved.
And if they did, they've come to a completely different
conclusion.
And on the surface, it looks simple.
So an analogy would be, we put a man on the moon,
why can't we build a bridge from California to China?
And you say, well, wait a minute,
you realize the ocean's deep
and we have limits on material technology
and construction methodologies.
And there's things like shipping lanes
and hurricanes or in our case typhoons in the Pacific.
And there's all kinds of mitigating issues
that you're not taking into account.
It's not like technology could wave a magic wand
and solve all problems.
If we put a man on the moon, why haven't we cured cancer yet?
You could easily say that as well.
Or why haven't we cured COVID yet?
We put a man on the moon.
Those are the same kind of arguments.
Well, those are the kinds of simplistic mindsets
that commonly crop up in these bills.
They're trying.
They're just, you'd think they're not trying hard enough.
One of the things I've noticed,
and I always kind of thought of this
at first when I started doing this,
was I was doing the legislators homework for them.
Isn't this their job to research this stuff
and find this stuff out?
Well, I then looked at how many bills
actually just in the state of Georgia.
There are several hundred, when I say several,
five, 600 bills per session for the state,
for the house and the Senate.
So there's like 500 plus bills in the Senate,
500 plus bills in the House,
some number of those percolate to the surface,
get some amount of viewing, get voted on,
pass over and cross over to the other side,
some process goes through,
and some of those come out the other end
and actually become bills or laws that get signed
by the governor of veto in some cases.
That is astounding, I'm out of work,
that the legislators are responsible for,
and there just isn't enough time in the day
to be that level of expert necessary
on all those subjects.
So when it comes to things like electronic freedom,
privacy and security, that's where the EFG comes in
and acting as a source that they can rely on
to give them that kind of in-depth,
technical understanding of what they're trying to do.
And that's the problem.
We can build technology which takes a great deal
of depth of understanding to do correctly.
And technology is a forced multiplier.
It is very difficult and takes exceptional focus
and detailed work to get it right.
In that case, it's a forced multiplier for good.
But on the other hand, it's really easy to get it wrong.
And when you get it wrong, it's a forced multiplier for bad.
So we've got it going against this
and that it takes hard work to get right.
It's easy to do it wrong.
And by simply not paying attention to all the constraints
and making assumptions like we put on a man in the moon,
why can't we do X?
Those kinds of things can lead to disaster.
So we try to prevent that as much as possible
and try to put some sanity in that process.
And it's all up to volunteers.
Nobody makes us do this.
We hope that other people would join us.
By the way, if anybody's listening to this,
we'd like to join EFTA.
Feel free.
The membership constraints are really, really heinous.
You have to show up and care.
That's basically it.
So things within the show notes, of course.
People, yes, I couldn't have put it better,
but at the end of the day, I'm almost tempted to add here.
And this is kind of the internally baked now.
Would you rather prefer the legislation to come down
from the hill as in Washington, D.C.
or being done on a state level?
I mean, let me take a step back here.
There are two nations, two types of nations on the planet.
I'm exaggerating now, but you know what I mean?
Centralistic ones, like the Kingdom, like France,
like Russia, what remains to exist, of course.
And there are also other types of nations,
like Germany comes to mind.
Of course, the US and other nations
that have a more federal system in place.
Both types have advantages and disadvantages,
but at the end of the day, I reckon the federal system
and the small personal opinion has a slight advantage
because it's more democratic at the end of the day.
Are you starting to be corrected for enough?
But let me just go ahead, sorry.
OK, I'll say this about it, because the internet
is kind of ubiquitously everywhere at the same time.
And so it seems like if you're regulating it,
it would make more sense to do it at the federal level.
But we found that special interests
who can't get their way at the federal level
will try to go to the states and get what they want with the state,
get what they want from the state.
So in other words, if you can't pass it at the federal level,
if you can go pass it 50 times at the state level,
you can essentially get a de facto federal bill.
But sometimes that's bad legislation
because it favors a particular special interest
and is really not in the general public interest.
So that's a tactic that you see sometimes
within the states with respect to state legislation
versus federal legislation.
However, on the other hand, there are times
when the activist community is wanting
to try out a legislative initiative or something like that.
And they start at the local level first,
and then they go to the state level
if it succeeds at the local level.
And then maybe they take it from the state level
to the federal level.
So there's good reasons, and maybe not
so good reasons to change what I might call the scoping
as to whether it's local state or federal.
But ultimately, the internet is kind
of ubiquitous everywhere, and a consistent model is helpful
because it's pretty much the same everywhere.
One last interjection here.
Of course, on the federal level, you
have a concentration of funds because it's
easier to lobby on the federal level
than on an invisible state level.
It goes without saying.
So if you just put a cup of millions onto the hill,
you can save billions on the state level.
I'm joking, but you know what I mean?
Well, actually, this is a really good,
this is a really interesting topic, actually,
because there's theory of what's better,
centralized, or a federated system.
One of the advantages of a federated system,
and a good analogy of this, is imagine
all the products and services you use in your life.
Are all of them provided by, to pick on Apple,
are they provided by Apple?
And the answer's no.
And that's because Apple has an invented or thought
of every product or service that you want to have.
They've thought of good products and services,
but not all the ones that you would want.
So when you get into a centralized system,
you end up with a one organization trying
to come up with solutions for everything.
Well, if you think about it, all the solutions that we have
in life today are not created by a centralized system.
They were created by individuals somewhere who had an idea
and ran with it and got a bunch of other people who said,
hey, I like that idea too, and joined in on it.
And it eventually became an Apple or a Microsoft or a company
in some cases, or just a good idea in other cases.
So, and the good idea spread.
Well, the minute you say that we're no longer going to allow
those decentralized ideas to flourish
in a sort of an intellectual marketplace,
that it all has to come from the central location.
Well, that assumes that that central location
will invent, think of, and solve all the problems
from all the myriad ways that all those people manage
to come up with throughout history.
And that's not a possible solution.
So, it's kind of like saying, rather than using this gigantic
multi-processor supercomputer we have called the world
and all the individuals in it,
let's just use one IBM X86 computer down in the basement
of some government building instead.
And that's just by design, not a good idea.
You won't come up with all the novel
and incredible solutions that people were able to come up with.
Now, neither system gone to extreme is the solution.
You need some marrying in the middle.
And that's where this whole process
of the EFGA and government comes in.
There are some things that you do want to bubble,
take those ideas and take them to the middle
and use them in a government centralized manner.
And that's where you create a law.
And there's other things you want to just let
be done at the local level.
I'm pretty sure that where I live and I have
all kinds of wildlife in my backyard
that they do not want the same rules here
that they want in a lockdown dog park
in the middle of Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles.
Obviously we couldn't even manage the wildlife here
like you would a dog park where everything's on a leash
and has to have somebody pick up after it.
You can't do that with wildlife in the backyard.
So those are examples of things that only work
at a local level at a specific location
and don't work universally everywhere.
So Tim Cook, if you're listening,
Stalin and Lenin are not role models.
Do not do as they did.
I'm exaggerating guys, but you know what I mean?
That is a precise example of the problem.
In fact, because Stalin decided to make
a centralized system that causes massive famine
that caused, killed a whole lot of people
when they had a working distributed system that worked.
And they decided to kill it and go to a centralized system.
And it had unintended consequences.
Yes, sorry, Martin, but I'm digressing.
Well, I would jump in and say the one thing
that I've heard everyone say in the last few minutes
is it is about product and service,
which I can understand some of that argument
that you can't ask for that to be filtered through
or audited somehow with one central location
at the federal level maybe here in the United States.
If we were using this as an example,
but I would say that the governance of things,
I think a lot of what I see happening
where it impacts a person's life, technology and surveillance.
I think the governance of that is very important.
And I think a lot of the missteps happen at a state level
because that's when states who for whatever social reason
or some other type of reason will do their own
patch on something and that's maybe an area
where the internet, if we want to just call it the internet,
I guess everybody kind of stumbles over what terms to use.
But I think that kind of federal level governance
or coming up with a set of guidelines
is something that we're greatly lacking.
And that's something that will end up having
a lot of unintended consequences
because the things that will be reactionary
that will happen at a state level will mean
that if you live in these states,
you will be able to act accordingly or be treated in one way
and you will have different experiences if you live in another.
And for me, the kind of utopian vision of the beginnings
of the internet world that we're all growing up
and living through now, it's more fractured
because of that type of arguing
without that overall kind of governance.
And I don't have an answer for how that should happen,
but I know that the United States is needing desperately
to step up its game and start looking at things
at a federal level and not allowing
personal information, medical private information
that they claim is always protected by HIPAA
and some other laws that we have here in the United States
or other very personal private areas
to be collected and data harvested out
to whoever the highest bidder is.
And states are acting on that
or they're purposely not acting on that.
And your life experience is very different
depending on where you live here in the United States
and because we don't have a federal guideline
for how the internet is involved in our personal lives.
That's how it makes sense.
Yeah, Chuck, you've touched on a recurring problem
that we run into all the time regarding these kinds of laws.
The internet moves at the speed of internet,
it's microseconds, things changed constantly
and in ways that we could never anticipate
and extremely quickly.
Unfortunately, people don't respond that fast
when it comes to policy, procedure and governance.
An example is Henry Ford decided to use this new,
fangled idea that he did not invent,
it had already been around a while called the assembly line.
And everybody in business at the time
told him that was crazy, that will never work,
that will be another failure.
50 years later, they were teaching in a business school
that if you weren't using an assembly line
and those kinds of methodologies in your practices,
you were brain damaged.
But it took 50 years.
Nice.
So at the speed of the internet colliding
with 50 year cycles or changes occurring in generations
or 20 year increments, yeah, you're gonna have a collision,
you're gonna have a lot of noise and problems and issues
that arise as a result of that massive difference
in speed at which these two things occur.
And that's part of what we're dealing with
is stuff's changing so fast,
we literally don't have time to absorb
what is the potential impact of this,
what impact would we like it to be?
And then the third problem is,
well, wait a minute, will that device or technology
actually do what it was intended?
And that's the idea of hacking in the original senses,
which I deal a lot with is discovering the difference
between what something was designed to do
and what it is capable of.
And sometimes that what it is capable of can be a good thing.
For instance, using a screwdriver to open a can of paint,
that's a good thing because you don't have the actual tool
necessary to open a can of paint for those who don't know
there is a tool made for opening cans of paint.
But a flat head screwdriver will work just as well.
Well, that's hacking because that wasn't the intended use
of the screwdriver.
Now, that's a simplistic idea of it,
but we'll wait a minute, would that cause a problem
if suddenly using a screwdriver to open a can of paint
caused an unintended consequence?
And that would require legislation to fix it.
That might take a while.
Well, when you're talking things like coming out
with baby monitors that are open to the internet
that anybody can access, they do a showdown search,
showdown is a service, by the way, SHODAN,
to find all the cameras and they can use it
for some nefarious purpose.
Yes, that has happened and happens regularly.
Well, do we need Registration to say that if you're building
a baby monitor, it actually has to be safe,
not just says it's safe on the package,
that it actually has to be safe,
and there's a standard for what that safe is.
Well, now you get into this political debate
that takes 20 years, and in the meantime,
they've sold five billion baby monitors.
A classic example of that is Android phones.
There's billions of Android phones out there
that are currently have multiple root accessible,
remote access, holes in them, security wise,
that cannot and never will be patched
that are going to be in service for years.
And there's nothing that says when they built those,
that they had to think of that in advance.
And that's the problem, was now that there's billions
of phones out there, they can be leveraged
to do some pretty heinous things.
What do we do with that?
That's just one technology.
That's just one device.
One operating system, from one company.
Multiply that by the number of companies,
number of devices, and the rate at which we can build new ones.
You got a serious problem on your hands.
That's where the EFGA comes in to try to help with that problem,
try to think through that ahead of time,
give our legislators a head up, heads up.
And things that the EFGA does,
we get ideas from other groups in other states.
For instance, if you have a state that comes up
with a really good template for a really well-thought-out
privacy legislation, we'll get wind of that through the EFF.
And then we can suggest that as a model for our state to use.
And if enough states do that, at some point,
as Chuck was saying, the federal government might step in
and say, you know what, there's so much fracturing here.
We're going to come up with an overarching one
that takes precedent over all those privacy
and give privacy to everybody, not just the states
that were ahead of their time that managed to give it
to their citizens.
We're going to give it to everybody.
That's the kind of thing that should happen.
No, whether or not that does or not.
That's another issue.
But we'll try to help help with that process.
I want to tell you, because you were kind of touching on this.
And Keith was kind of backing up what I was saying.
I don't know completely what's happening in Europe.
And I do follow some different groups.
I bookmark a whole lot of things.
But what Keith is talking about, like,
eventually, after the fracturing that the federal government
here in the United States may step in,
in the meantime, all of this calculation
that we're talking about with technology,
helping different IoT devices come online,
we have sensors in refrigerators.
As you know, I'm sure your listeners know all of this, too,
like in thermostats and all over the place.
But the problem is that we have to wait for all of these things
to be problematic enough and fractured enough
before the federal government comes in
and tries to really study something.
And it's granted, they're not smart enough.
And they don't have the expertise in that.
But it is no excuse that they're not smart enough,
that they haven't asked many, many expert people
because look at me.
I don't have a degree in computer science,
and I'm a part of a group of civil libertarians,
and I get to hang out with other people,
and I've had the gumption to do this.
Like, oh, I don't know how to do this.
So I may ask Keith, and Keith says,
I don't know how to do that either.
Well, I don't want to try this.
Well, let's let this other person,
because they do know this.
Did you know that guy is like a nuclear somebody?
No, I didn't.
And so you literally can't find the genius all around you.
And I don't understand why we give the government an excuse
to not do that.
Meanwhile, your thermostat is being looked at
by the service provider.
And nobody's bothered to say to the poor guy that's there.
Do you realize that you're taking all of this information
about all of these households and just passing it on
to the rest of whatever it is on the other end?
And we don't know what they're doing with that.
And some of that may sound dark and bleak,
and maybe we laugh about it a little bit
because we shug our shoulders.
We don't know what to do.
But at some point, people around the world
are going to find themselves very unhappy,
I feel, with that kind of backlash that happens
while we're waiting to catch up,
while we're waiting on our governments
around the world to catch up to things.
And I will close this comment by saying,
one thing that I have found that I think might be hopeful
and interesting is, I don't know if you all
have followed the elections in South America
that Chile has a new young president
that they did not expect to win.
And I was reading about them redoing
their constitution in Chile.
And one of the interesting things
that they have decided to put in their discussion,
I guess it's a long process,
is they're going to be talking about neural rights.
And I found that to be extraordinarily timely
because that is another frontier of data harvesting
that will take place because you will have
many, many more medical devices of the future
that will be doing brain computer interfaces
and all kinds of things in the telehealth space.
And neural rights will be kind of a concept
that we're going to hear more and more about in the future.
And I thought that was brilliant.
That the new, I don't know if the new president
is behind us specifically there,
but I know that it's being talked about
in the constitution that they're reworking right now.
So I found that that was interesting.
That there may be a young group of people
will be the ones to lead the way into the future.
It's not so great.
It's not so much, go ahead.
But before we do this,
it's very, very advanced.
The Chile story that you told us.
But on this particular note, Chuck,
I don't know if you're familiar.
I think it was Kay Chapman of the Software Freedom Conservancy
who says actually or required on a federal level
that the software of pacemakers has to be open sourced
because that exactly goes down that alley.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And we don't want to find with those types of things
that we are trying to play catch up.
And so we need to be serious about it
at a government level.
And we don't need to just, you know,
we don't need to so fear and doubt an uncertainty
about it all.
We need to actually be solving problems
and advancing the future.
In that case, exactly.
Just make a little comment.
And I think the bodies in the States
do an excellent lobbying work here now
in a very positive sense that exactly
that the organizations like the software
even conservancy basically lobby for this
on a state as well as as federal level.
And it just makes sense because same thing goes for cars,
same thing goes for a formative equipment.
If it's open sourced, everybody can take a look at it
and come up with a flaws if you're inclined to do so.
So if it's closed sourced, you cannot simply do this.
So I might go ahead.
Yeah, and I was going to say the same thing.
In fact, what you're doing is doing the same
what open source software is all about
is being able to review the laws instead of the code
and have many people looking at them
with their expertise as to give a good opinion on
whether something is sound or not
as the examples you mentioned.
And you can never achieve this by, you know, originally,
you can think of the government or the state needs
to hire more experts in this area,
but you're never going to be as good as the collective right
to that has many more eyes and many more viewpoints
and expertise is on any of these things.
So I guess that kind of makes the case
to how big is your organization
and how many people do you rely on
to do these kind of things, right?
If it's just two people that look at some laws
or 200, that makes a big difference, right?
So I guess that makes the case
for all your organizations in the same vein.
But are you actively trying to increase these numbers
or as you mentioned, Chuck, you rely on people
that you know as well for certain expertise as well?
But I think my answer is the answer that we always have,
which is yes, we would always welcome more help.
It is very challenging to do.
People are very busy in doing that.
And I think that when you find young people
that are in the college age, university level
or just right thereafter, there's a lot of energy
and that's a good recruiting ground.
And then you always find a good recruiting ground
with people who are nearing or going into retirement
as well because there's extra time available.
And it's when you're in between those two spots
that it's harder than ever to do it.
But one of the things that I think
that Electronic Frontier's Georgia and other groups
I've heard from try to do is do outreach
in different ways for different groups
or different demographics or ages perhaps,
in ways that will be accessible to them.
And I think, you know, I think Keith had said
for the four meetings that we have here in Atlanta
that we may do a hybrid when we're able to go back
because we're able to interact differently
with people doing the video than we do
when we would meet in this public space,
which, you know, you may not be able to make every meeting
but you could dial in.
And that wasn't always the case.
And so I think that's gonna be part of what we will have to do
because what we're interested in started out for me
just a few years ago even as something
that I did not have the opportunity to get involved in.
I had to read on the internet about laws
that were being passed or fought by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation on a website
and I did not know anyone in these groups.
And now it becomes a time where not only was I interested
and I got myself into a place where I met some people
but that the need for the checks and balances
are smacking people in the face
because everything is becoming more digitized
or automated or whatever technology does you or where
do you want to use.
It's right there with you and it doesn't matter
if you're interested in prison reform.
You can pick any kind of topic, agriculture, trees.
There will be some sensor or some monitor
or some something where technology will play a role in that.
And while that may not seem important
in maybe a job that you have
when you read the way people write legislation
they can really do great good or great harm
depending on how they verbalize technology
in the proposed legislation.
I think that's the easiest way for me to say that.
The words that they do lawyer in
or the words that they lawyer out
make a big impact on people's lives.
And that's where we need to have more people understand
that it doesn't matter what issue
you find to be passionate about.
There will be a technology related part of it.
And if you're looking at laws and you want to do
some citizen lobbying you need to be looking
in your local area in Europe or Africa or wherever you are.
What is my technology component to my area of interest?
And you'll find a goldmine of ways
that you can be more effective in lobbying
or catching the people
at doing the dirty deals behind the tables
because there's a lot of money in technology.
Otherwise, we wouldn't have to be talking about all of this.
All of us is indeed.
Yeah, I make sense.
So you mentioned a couple of examples
with the baby cameras and the social security numbers
on a website.
So, okay, just to talk about the process,
do you have an active, let's go and look at all these laws
or that are about to be passed
or are there people that give you some clues
about all the such and such companies
trying to push this law through, right?
And it's really needs some good attention
because I think you mentioned there's like five to 600
going on at any one point in time.
So how do you manage to keep track of all that
and find the ones that are being pushed too quickly
and all the kind of stuff, right?
It's, I use, able to stay on top of that.
So everybody listening, anybody wherever you are,
whatever your local jurisdiction is,
you need to look and find what the website is
for your local jurisdiction, your leaders,
your commissioners, whoever it is
that's making the laws and you need to go through
what's probably a clunky website that will not be as flashy
as the ones that you prefer to look at.
And you will find the legislation proposed there, hopefully,
and that's what we do as a group of people.
And it's not an organized fashion,
we know when the session is,
so we know that we should be looking a few weeks ahead of time
to see if someone's prefiled something.
And then if we use our library skills,
we are looking for certain keywords.
So you might say cyber security would be a keyword
or things like that.
And we then ask the website to pull up all the bills
in this area.
And so that's an easy way of looking to see
if there seems to be something relevant.
And you just have to really just go through them
one at a time, there's no easier way.
It is time consuming.
And then when you find something,
then we will bring it to the group
or put it on our action list
or I'll just send Scott a message and say,
did you see this?
It's like that.
And then we just start from there.
And there's a lot of interpersonal
and kind of networking stuff.
It's kind of like, if you see something of interest,
you build that kind of,
you build that kind of network,
not a literal technology network,
or just a collection of people that say,
hey, we like this kind of legislation.
If you see anything of concern,
send it our way and let us have a look at it.
Yeah, starting out from scratch,
as Chuck was talking about,
is a matter of one person can go to the website
and do some searches and find something
and something's better than nothing.
And then as you find more people
and more people find out about what your organization's
trying to do,
they will actually start reaching out to you.
You'll have friends who say,
who read an article in the paper,
they know that's an area of interest to you.
They'll call you and say,
hey, did you see that so and so over here
is doing something you should,
but based on what you said,
you might be interested in looking at
and I'll go check it out.
And so we essentially get more eyes and ears over time
through that networking that Chuck was,
or sorry, Scott was talking about.
That's how we find out about things
as well as our own research going into it.
And over time, you develop that group.
It doesn't start out of the gate,
but if you do anything,
however little, it's more than nothing.
And that starts the snowball down the hill, hopefully.
Okay, excellent.
No, that sounds like a good case to,
yeah, as you say,
it's a growing network of people
rather than putting a lot of technology in this case.
One more question from you and I'll leave it to Chris.
In the UK and Europe,
there are a lot of government contracts
that go out to tender and all this kind of stuff.
I don't know if you have the same in the UK,
but is that something that you would cover
in your work as well,
or is there a different organization does that
because as you may,
or suspect or not,
those of these contracts are written in a certain way,
favor certain directions, areas, preferences,
vendors, you know, what I mean,
it's them.
So is that something that you would cover?
Or is that something that you're more into
the legal aspects to protect people?
Well, government contracts,
the kind of contracts that can be led by government
are controlled by the law.
So in a sense, they are connected.
I think we did,
we did look at this kind of situation
with some of the concerns on the voting technology
that we have in Georgia.
And at first, we were looking at the law
and we were critiquing the law.
And then it got to the point where they had passed a law
that wasn't that great.
And so it goes down into the,
I guess it goes down into the purchasing phase.
And so once you're down in the purchasing phase,
then you are looking at the contracts and things like that.
I don't know,
it's not so much that we scrutinize the contracts
because once a law is passed,
the state has a certain amount of flexibility
to kind of do those deals behind the public's back.
And they can shield some things from public view.
But there was some public participation,
especially with the voting machine purchases.
And so we were watching it to the extent that we could.
Okay, is there a case to try and make that more open
that part of the person?
So what do you think?
Well, in a sense, that's a bigger problem
than just a technology problem.
That's the entire scope of purchasing in general,
goes above and beyond technology.
And I think if we have a particular example
or a particular item or a particular aspect
that we can work on, we can try to do that.
But it's all about procurement.
And government procurement, those processes
and procedures are much older than the kind of technology laws
we've had for the last couple of decades.
But what will happen sometimes is as they move
from a paper process to an electronic process,
then maybe some stuff gets kind of lost in translation
or they don't really capture the spirit of what the law was
when they move to an electronic process.
So that's another opportunity to kind of look at the process
and see if they're really doing what they should do.
But again, procurement is such a huge area
that we would be swamped if we try to take on all of it.
So we have to pick and choose what's in our interest area.
There's plenty of other laws out there
that I think have to do with social justice
or other kinds of justice that are just kind of out of our area.
And you have limits to what you can do.
So I think you have to make decisions
about what's really in your interest area
and what you can actually do or what you can actually accomplish.
Given that it's a volunteer organization
and you're not 40 hours a week or however many hours a week,
people have day jobs and you do what you can do.
There are some times we do get involved
with the purchasing process, but it's not direct.
Meaning we don't insert ourselves into the bidding process
or the request for proposal or any of that sort of thing.
Where we do get involved, however, things like two good examples
are ClearView, which is a facial recognition company
that was going out and courting police departments
to use their product.
And it was scurrying forth amendment laws.
And so we did get involved with that.
And where we saw police departments were doing that,
we would go and talk to police departments
or work with other groups that were talking
to police departments in regards to using facial recognition.
Another one is a product that we're working on right now
in trying to stop actually is a product called ShotSpotter.
And that's a gunshot detection system
that is being sold and deployed within here in Georgia
in several locations.
And it has some very honorous side effects
that have already been noticed in other jurisdictions
outside of Georgia and are several local cases regarding it.
So we do get involved in that sense
and that sometimes vendors come to law enforcement in particular
and say, hey, we've got this great surveillance technology.
You should really buy this.
And they do their sales pitch and they buy it.
And it wasn't a process of legislation putting it in place.
But now they're deploying this technology amongst us
and using it for law enforcement.
And in some cases, those methodologies
are using violate the law.
And so we have to go against that and work through legislations
on cases or through other organizations
to try to help with that.
And that's where electronic frontiers, Georgia,
since it does deal with privacy and security,
is it necessarily always focused on just legislation?
Okay, got it.
Yeah, just for the listeners that are not from the US,
can you explain to you?
The two ones, exactly, the shop technology to us
because that's on the other side of the world.
Oh, sure.
Shot spotter is a, that's the actual name of a product.
It is a web of microphones that are deployed in an area
like the put them on light poles and things like that.
It goes back to a centralized location
at the corporation, Shot Spotter Corporation,
where artificial intelligence monitors the audio that it hears
and says, hey, I just heard a noise,
it sounds like a gunshot.
And then based on which microphones hurt it at which time
they can do audio triangulation to say
where it probably occurred.
Assuming it says, hey, I think I got something,
it passes it to a human operator who purportedly reviews it
and says, yes, that was a shot.
They notify the police, the police then go
and respond to it as a shots fired.
Now, it has some rather interesting side effects.
For instance, if you've got an area
where there's a general higher level of crime than normal
and you've got the police responding
to what's considered a shots fired situation,
they're in high alert, they've got guns drawn
and it may be a false alarm.
In fact, that's part of the problem.
Is the false alarm rate for Shot Spotter is extremely high
on the order of like 80%.
So, in that level, how much that number is
is being debated right now.
The company is saying, no, no, it's not that high
and there's other court cases saying, no,
it's even higher than 80%.
So there's the cost factor of deploying the police
regularly for false alarms.
There's the issue that when they do arrive,
it's like a SWAT team arriving with guns drawn
and it's a completely innocent situation
when people are in a heightened situation
and guns drawn, bad things trademark can happen.
So all of that's wrapped up in that fuzzy wobbly ball of mess
that's called Shot Spotter.
Sounds expensive to me, a false positive.
It's not cheap and that's part of the thing is,
they, it's determining, for instance,
would that kind of technology be a good idea
if it worked properly?
Well, if you think about it from a technical perspective,
yeah, that might be an interesting thing.
Since I do have opportunity to talk to police departments,
I could see whether that would be really useful for them.
If it could actually tell them,
this is roughly when and where Shot occurred
and they could respond to something
as opposed to waiting for somebody in a neighborhood
who heard it to call them.
That would be kind of a good thing.
But on the other hand, do you really want a network
of microphones placed throughout your neighborhoods
that records everything that's being said
with the near shot?
Yeah, that is a good or bad thing.
Probably yes.
Yeah, and so that's not grab isn't probably not, no.
Exactly, so that's one of the ramifications
as people said, oh, this is a great idea.
And they say, really, do you want them recording
the conversations you're having in your front yard
with your wife?
And it's like, no, maybe not.
Unless you're telling ads or something, that's okay.
But if you're not too bad.
Yeah, and so that's the kinds of unintended consequences
they didn't think of.
And then there's the issue of the AI.
There's case, I don't remember exactly where.
If anybody wants, they can always contact the FDA
and I can give them the info.
There's a case where a guy was actually prosecuted
and I think convicted over based on evidence
provided by ShotSpotter.
And they're treating ShotSpotter as if it's in court
as if it's a fingerprints or DNA that it's absolutely certain.
Well, evidence is it.
It's not.
It's AI says, I think.
And then an operator says, well, based on my best judgment,
it probably might be.
And well, that's not the same thing as a fingerprint.
And so let me guess, the open, the suffer isn't open
source and hasn't invented.
Oh, no, it is definitely not open source.
There you go.
Exception, there's an open source.
And not only that, it's not transparent.
I mean, when you said something about the money,
we don't really know.
There are sometimes you hear a figure,
but we don't really know how much the things are costing
to deploy.
There's a lot that people don't really know.
This was, in our particular area, it was,
I guess you would call it like an underwriting.
It was piloted by a local utility.
And in a small area, and to my knowledge,
there wasn't any kind of citizen input
as to whether or not you would even
like to be the test pilot of the area.
It was just something that was decided to do.
And that's not something that it was so problematic that they
pulled some funding on it, and I believe
is what they did here where we are.
Because they were seeing some of the court cases
pop up around the country, and there was probably
some pushback as things go.
But regardless, we don't have enough information
about something like this to really say
that it's a useful tool.
And my slogan, when they say defund the police,
I have a sense that people would not
like to be in a place where there were not police,
because it might be kind of nice to have some around.
But so the slogan that I came up with was not defund the police,
defund police technology is what my slogan is,
is because that's where the problems occur.
The people that are doing things have common sense,
and most of the time, again, have some training,
but the technology, the AI that's listening to something,
I'm the kind of person who would be like,
well, we wouldn't have that problem.
We just pulled the plug on that machine over there,
because the guy that I just talked to sounded like he had
some common sense, and would have followed the rule book
that he had in front of him.
And so because we don't have transparency about it,
and we don't have good information as to why you think
this would be important, and we've got pushback
from legal cases that show that it screws up.
I can't understand why anybody would want
to fund it in the first place without requiring that to take place,
but that's kind of where we are right now with it.
Guys, this has been more than interesting.
Unfortunately, we have a time limit,
but rest assured, this is the first part of a 100-part mini-series
on the EFF and the credits around.
You know, guys, I'm joking.
Before we finish off, of course, there's a little form
that we call the boxes of the week.
It's one of the picks of the week, the boxes.
So I'm losing it.
Martin, because you have a time constraint,
why don't you go first, Scott Keith and Chuck
is essentially what we do with the boxes is we name something
that crossed our mind worth mentioning.
It can be anything.
Legislation, movies, books, music, wild ideas.
So Martin, why don't you go first,
and then the guys can take it.
And I go last.
Yeah.
Under the spirit of anything goes,
I'm going to go with storms, because we had about three
or four in succession in the last week,
which is quite unusual, even for storms, of course,
not being the software, but rather with the weather phenomena
as well.
Yeah, just like high velocity winds.
And it just kind of makes you realize that, you know,
we have much technology, but nothing like the force of nature
that can put it on all pieces, especially if you live
on an island like some of us do.
Let's make it slightly more risky.
Yes.
Guys, over to you, Chuck, who wants to go first, Keith, Scott?
So what is it that was something that just crosses our mind?
Anything worth mentioning, yes.
Anything worth mentioning?
From Trump.
Sorry, of course, no, you can't include Trump if you want to.
No, so I love to see films from around the world,
because you know, it's kind of like a passport to another country.
And I guess in the spirit of what conversation and the jokes
and everything that we've been having,
I'm going to say Super Amigos.
This is a film by Aturo Perez Torres.
It's a Mexican film.
And it's really fun to see, because it,
well, you just have to go and check it out.
Maybe you can Google it.
I thought you said the Spie Amigos amount.
I remember that one.
Nope, Super Amigos.
It's like super friends in English, but it is by Aturo Perez
Torres.
The old audience.
Links within the show notes, I suppose,
or link within the show notes.
OK.
Keith, Scott, you next?
Yeah.
So you mentioned during the interview,
you mentioned software freedom conservancy.
One of the reasons I like to do interviews
is because I learned things.
And I hadn't actually heard of either I
hadn't heard of software freedom conservancy
or I had forgotten about it.
So I went and looked it up.
And this is really interesting.
So thanks for mentioning that.
So software freedom conservancy looks
like it was established in 2006 with the backing
of the Software Freedom Law Center.
That's really interesting.
I'll dig into that a little bit more.
But thanks for mentioning that.
I hadn't heard of that.
If I had, I had forgotten it.
Links absolutely will be in the show notes.
Keith over to you.
Well, one thing that's, I've been thinking about quite a bit,
actually, is the result of COVID, is we've
done a lot of remote meetings, like we're having now.
And in some cases, like when we have a DC-4 formatting
or a 2600 meeting, we have people who
are in their area trying to do something similar.
And they'll join our meetings.
So we've had people from all over the world join
in our meetings.
And it's been a great addition to have these people
from all over with similar interests join in.
And I realized that when we go back to eventually
having our physical meetings, that we're
going to lose that input and lose that sharing, mind sharing.
And so I've been thinking about ways
that we can continue having that while still having
a physical meeting.
Now, this raises some, we're speaking of side effects.
It raises some interesting side effects.
DC-4-4, which is a chapter of Defcon, which
is the largest hacking conference in the world,
some of the people that show up where a tinfoil hat,
let's just put it that way.
And so not everybody but some do.
And to a point where we had a reporter show up
at one of our meetings, and nobody seemed to have any problem
with that.
We announced that there was a reporter there
to observe the meeting.
And then, toward the end of the meeting,
the reporter asked if they could take any photographs.
Now, we realize that some people might be sensitive to this issue.
So we said, hey, the reporter would
like to take a few photographs.
We'll stage the area.
So if you do not want to be in the photograph,
we'll make sure that you're not in the area.
And just saying that, two people stood up,
took their backpacks and walked out of the room for us.
And so there are some people that are extremely sensitive
to that idea.
The fact that everybody in the room had a cell phone camera
and got regularity to take pictures
without asking any permission whatsoever,
and how many security cameras they walked by getting there
seemed to be irrelevant in the conversation.
But that idea that they're very sensitive to that
is an issue.
So when looking at a physical meeting and a hybrid meeting,
where people are coming in from the outside,
and you don't know who they are or where they're coming from,
how do we share that?
How do we create a hybrid meeting that allows people remotely
to join us in those meetings?
This has another benefit in that, like now,
we're from all over the world having this conversation.
How do we allow people to join in in a conversation
and do presentations in our meeting?
Who aren't physically present?
Normally, we can only draw on the people who live within Atlanta,
or we'd like to draw on the world.
So how do we solve that problem?
And so I've been talking to Scott and several others
about the technology to do that.
The next problem is, how do we make that technology accessible?
What I might consider a minor purchase here
might be a month's person's wage in another country.
And we want to make it so that this technology
or this idea is accessible so that anybody from anywhere
with limited skill set and limited access to funds
would be able to join in and be participant in it.
So that's what we've been thinking about.
So your POX would be like BBB as a Big Boopletton,
or just see or something?
Yeah, actually, one of the part of that solution
is we're considering using Big Blue Button.
It's free.
The upside of Big Blue Button is it is open source, it is free,
but there's no online service hosting it for free.
So that means if you want to use it,
you must host your own instance.
Now, in our case, we have a person here in Atlanta
as part of DC44 who hosted on his service.
He has a commercial hosting service
and he hosted it for us for free.
He also hosts that for the EFGA.
We also, and 2600, he hosts all of those on his server.
And that was a generous thing for him to do.
But that's not necessarily accessible to everybody.
There's another open source product called Jitsi
that does provide hosting for free.
And so we're looking at things that lower the bar
for everybody.
And we would suggest, I happen to like Big Blue Button
for a number of reasons, for instance,
it makes it very easy to save the chat,
whereas there are other options that make it very difficult
to do that.
So yeah, there's a lot of technology involved here
and how we do it.
And also, maintain the privacy and the security,
the people actually physically attending the meeting
that if they don't want to be known by those not in the room,
we'll accommodate that as best we can too.
So that's kind of mixing all of that together.
It's going to be difficult.
But we'll figure it out.
I mean, finally, I mentioned that Keith,
because here in Germany, there are quite a few institutions
that offer a free BBB instance for the public domain.
And I'm that sure that there must be something
similar in the US too.
It's just a matter of research and finding it.
Wow, I'd be very interested in finding it.
I did look for it and didn't find anything.
So now that I know they're in Germany,
that gives me a place to look at.
It's possible they have outlets here that do similar things.
Or a company in Germany might also do it here.
The Chaos Computer Club, at least once run, as far as I can recall,
runs at least one free instance of BBB.
I'm not to show about the details,
but I'm not going to have to put you in touch with them.
Yeah, well, I know.
I know the Chaos Computer Club.
I know very much.
Yeah, I, yes, I go and watch her presentations online.
I have not been able to attend in person.
It has been a goal of mine to do so.
In fact, many, many years ago,
I was invited to buy another speaker to go with him
to that one of their events.
And I wasn't able to go and I, I wish I could have.
I did.
So yeah, I definitely wear them.
I watch your presentations online.
They have some excellent presentations.
There's one in particular about anonymity online
and how it's a double-edged sword.
It was very, very good.
Yeah, they're normally running a Chaos Communication conference
or something like this between the two years.
And this is really worth checking out.
Links, maybe, the show notes.
They also publish, they also publish articles online,
they're very good.
They do, yes.
Also in English and German.
And that nice, it leads us to my poxies, or my pox, rather,
is actually more than one at the moment,
not at the moment, rather, in general, for this week.
Almost tempted.
And this is a first on Linux and loss.
The pox, or my pox of the week is actually
the American Constitution, as I mentioned this earlier.
But I'm tempted to.
I'm getting to it.
No, no, no, no, no, rather than quoting it,
I'm tempted to just mention the author.
So with the author, you, and this is, of course,
a word, term, premier.
So let's go ahead.
It's James Madison, Richard Henry Lee,
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Wilson, Roger Schieman,
John Dickson, Dickinson, sorry,
Governor Morris, George Mason,
Elbridge Gary, Jerry, James McHenry, Rufus King,
James Pickney, William Patterson,
you Williamson, William Livingston,
George Reed, Jonathan Dayton, William Bloomfield,
Thomas Simpson, Simpson's, Irishman,
John Langdon, Nicholas Gilman,
William Samley Johnson, Gunning Bedford,
Daniel of Son James, Jason, I think,
P.S. Butler, another Irishman, Tom Smithing,
Robert Morris, Charles Cosworth, Richard Bassett,
Emma Pendleton, Luther Martin,
not came but just Luther Martin, Caleb Strong,
William Jackson, Emma Redlow, John Marshall, and that's it.
Guys, you probably not listening,
but thanks to a great piece of legislation,
still living on, still going strong,
you could have done much, much worse.
And if anybody's interested in hearing the behind-the-scenes
discussions, so to speak, that led to it,
and the debates over the ideas that led to what was
eventually codified in the Constitution,
go look up the Federalist Papers and read them.
Yes, I absolutely advise you.
Of course, the Constitution is online,
the links will in the show notes.
These people knew what they were doing.
Tempted to add.
And with that, people Keith, Scott, and Chuck,
thank you very much for being here.
It has been more than interesting,
and we are really looking forward to having the show soon
once again.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you guys, thank you.
This is the Linux in-laws.
You come for the knowledge.
But stay for the madness.
Thank you for listening.
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You find these and other dd's licensed under cc
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I'm joking guys.
I've never had anybody honor the constitution
by reading all of the authors off.
I feel like I did something very special.
That was pretty cool.
It's funny how the Europeans seem to know more
about the constitution than the average American on the street.
Yeah, that's sad.
That's gratifying, but sad.
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