hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1097.txt

Episode: 1097
Title: HPR1097: The Cyberunions Podcast
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1097/hpr1097.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:54:52

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This is the CyberUnit Talkshow for Monday, May 7th, 2012.
Give me net freedoms!
Hello and welcome to CyberUnions, I'm Walton and I'm a buzzer with Scotland.
And with me is Steven.
Yes, yes me and you've gotten me up so early in the morning, Walton.
Nobody gets me up this early unless they make me breakfast.
Where is it?
I want my breakfast.
How are you doing in midday Scotland?
Yeah, it's after midday.
It's after two o'clock recording, so a little bit of sunshine which is welcome and for
listeners it's Bank holiday Monday so I hope that if you're in the UK you're enjoying
a well deserved day of rest and you're still in bed and not working.
That's a hopeful sign.
I don't think the same holiday exists here because that was last Monday, the actual May
1st which is when you're supposed to take the day off.
Though this is my first time ever being in a country where the day is actual holiday.
It's actually interesting, I have to say because the May 1st marches here were huge and I
got one hell of a tan.
Well done.
Yeah, but like the police were escorting every single march, there must have been about
10 or 15 different marches all going to the Sokolow which is like the center of the city.
And it was actually really cool to see, honestly, granted that most of the unions here are
pretty damn corrupt and they put corruption on a whole new scale where you kind of want
them off you to be involved.
But other than that like in the States, I was reading that there was a lot of occupy the
a lot of the radical groups and the immigration groups did a really good show of support and
solidarity out there.
Chicago.
Seem to have had a good article written on it which will put a link in the show notes
that was coming from I think it's it's it's it's strits, it's strits, I can't pronounce
the IRC name, but Matt Johnson in our IRC had sent a link about an article covering
Mayday in Chicago and the differences this year in comparison to last year, of course
last year was also when some have been loud and was killed, which really kind of killed
the May 1st feel, but no pun intended on that one.
But it was it was really good, it was really cool to see an article being written about
it, but I think as Matt had suggested in the IRC they give a little bit more credence
to our ability to understand socialism and the actual consciousness within the labor
movement, but it was it was a good article, so we'll put a link in the show notes for
it.
How are how are things in the the UK?
Things are I guess things are interesting across Europe Mayday wasn't huge here way
it sounds like it wasn't in Mexico, but yeah there's certainly some consciousness about
it.
I guess the big news here is that we had local government elections, so for for local
authorities, local councils, across England, Wales and Scotland and mostly the news is fairly
good.
The Conservative Party, the Tories vote was decimated, they did really badly, the Liberal Democrats
to the party that went into coalition with the Tories and essentially sold out, did
even worse, labored it pretty well, the Greens did a lot better than usual, the Scottish
National Party did pretty well and the fascists were completely wiped out, so generally a big
shift to the left, the one disappointment is that the blonde buffoon, Boris Johnson
remains mayor of London with a reduced lead, but unfortunately people chose to vote for
vacuous liberty nonsense over any kind of substance which is disappointing, but generally
an interesting result and an interesting election period in Europe generally because
there's the election in France which might see the return of all of which would be I guess
a shift to the left in France as well and also next week I think significant elections
in Greece and being seeing that Europe is the last holdout of any remnant of the social
democratic post-war settlement and that Greece is the domino in the final neoliberal assault
on social democracy, what happens in Greece is crucial because if Greece falls then the
next domino is Spain and Portugal and Italy and then the last kind of last holdout of
social democracy is destroyed and we're all in the same neoliberal wonderland that you've
been trying for most of your life. Thank you, thank you, it's a great experience I must say.
That sucks and let's hope it doesn't come to that but let's also hope that there's a big
revolution at some point soon, please. We need it desperately and not anyhow but that sounds
good. In fact I think the election is something that we'll have to cover next week and just
try to give a recap because I know France is having elections this weekend that is going
to be, it seems like that the social party is likely to take out Sarkozy which is anything
better than Sarkozy so it'll be interesting to see where that goes as well.
I mean elections are here in Mexico coming up in July and it's kind of ridiculous but we should
definitely talk about that next week. I'm sorry I'm stretching it still morning. I just want
to share one other thing just on a little brief little tech thing before we get into our interview
which is a really, it's a really extensive interview that I think is really good. Just this
morning I was reading an article about open street maps which apparently Apple which if
nobody really knows, I think we may have said this number of times but Steve Jobs and Apple
were the first violators of the GPL, the free software license. They had been using and
switched from Google Maps to open street maps but open street maps has a very strict thing
of if you use it which you're free to do please give credit and initially Apple didn't
give credit but through this article we'll put a link in the show notes for. Surprisingly
an Apple iOS developer may be the reason that Apple actually ended up giving credit for the open
street maps so now on their on the application I think it's on their iPhone or iPad I can't
remember which one is specifically I don't have either so it is irrelevant to me but it is
cool to see that Apple is giving credit to open street maps which in turn gives open street maps
credibility which is actually a very good tool to use instead of Google Maps if you don't want to be
trapped. But I also found out in addition to that in duck duck go if you do the bang osm as in open
street maps it'll do a search on open street maps that was bothering me because if you just did
bang maps it would go to Google Maps and I wanted to use open street maps and just guessed and it
works so bang osm does open street maps on duck duck go I'm really liking and duck duck go a lot
more the more I use it yeah it's phenomenal searchability it just it seems so much more intuitive
in a lot of ways too even though there's some things you have to learn about it it's just after
while you're like wait I don't have to deal with all this Google ad crap this is great so but yeah
so it is a good thing without further ado Walton I think we should actually jump into this interview
it is quite extensive so yeah and I'm excited about it because Smody MacArthur is really really
interesting I've heard a lot about him read a lot about his stuff read heard a lot about the
about any of the Icelandic modern media institutes and now the international modern media institutes
and it's a worthwhile and fascinating project and I think it's going to be fantastic so here we go
enjoy so joining us today on cyber unions is Smody MacArthur from the IMMI which thank you
for joining us Smody yeah thanks for having me now what does the IMMI stand for?
well it used to stand for Icelandic modern media initiative when we started the project but
now we've found a day an institute around it to kind of keep the original IMMI project as we
call it and and a few other projects under one half so that's called the International Modern Media
Institute we thought we were being very clever when we came up with that but really it's just
confusing. IMMI is how I pronounce it so yeah and so Smody can you tell me tell us a bit about
what what IMMI does what what is the project about what are you trying to do and what was
why did you start it? well we started it as a kind of idea of taking the best laws from around
the world and packaging them up into this kind of shield or safe haven thing with the idea of
making Iceland into the best country in the world to host information now okay really we don't
really want to stop at that using Iceland as a kind of test bed is quite good because it's a small
country with a very strong democracy and and kind of you know it's it's nimble it's quick it can
it can take sensible decisions very quickly but ultimately what we want to do is just raise the
bar on free speech and privacy rights and access to information and communications just raise
the bar high enough that we pull it up globally and and kind of be able to lobby different countries
to adopt similar laws so it's it's a best practice standard that you're trying to develop and set
and hoping that activists in other countries will use that example to push for some of the laws
in their own countries yeah exactly we we want to kind of break the mold that you know since
since I got involved with internet activism or information activism about you know almost 10
years ago we've always been on the defensive and you know the internet has always been taking hits
but one of the things that we're trying to do with this is kind of reverse that trend a little
bit and and start being proactive in saying okay this is the the kind of legislation that
the internet wants to to protect itself against people who want to to damage the internet and
damage human rights and and free speech and once you kind of put that kind of value statement
forward and it's very easy to tie it up with commercial interests and and human rights
no arguments and and actually just any any argument is easily one with this kind of rhetoric so
so that's basically the idea starts the start entering the conversation as a as an attack
vector as opposed to a defensive strategy that's very interesting now now exactly I guess I being
from the US we supposedly have great free speech laws which is a whole nother thing when it comes
to practice actually that's not really like the United States Constitution says that Congress
shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech etc but that doesn't really stop you know city
councils for instance so one of the things we we've been seeing quite a lot in relation to the
occupied movement is that free speech rights are quite easily trodden down when when it's
municipal authorities working together yeah that's and that's clearly clearly happening
definitely as I was just reading in case that the couple legislators and journalists in the
in the city of New York are actually suing the police department for violating first amendment
laws but they clearly there there are ways that the cities are able to get around it and put
regulations and violations and different things they it's quite disturbing in a lot of ways but
how does how does the IMI MMI what how does go further in in this process well so the first thing
to understand is that all of the free speech protections that are ingrained in constitutions worldwide
more or less just came out of the kind of philosophical movement to the end of the 17th century
and the idea there was it was always just you know that's just a law free speech it was very
simple and protected but there wasn't any nuance to that and you know we're we're 200 years online
and you know two world wars an industrial revolution and an information revolution later
and the complexity of human civilizations has just increased so amazingly that it's
the the types of free speech protections that people jumped up 300 years ago or 200 years ago
just don't really manage to cover it anymore so one of the ways we're trying to do this is just
by adding a bit of nuance yeah we're we're looking looking around at the different types of
situations that that come up and just you know once we've identified an actual problem
then we try to abstract it a bit and and see if if the problem has any other kind of angles to it
and once we figure that out then we can start saying okay this is a law that we need to to build
so one aspect of that is for instance libel tourism libel tourism is this kind of weird situation where
in most countries when you sue somebody for libel you need to prove that they were libling you and
and in sensible countries them having told the truth is is actually a valid defense but in the UK
the truth is not necessarily a defense and what's more the the person who is accused of libel has
the burden of truth so so suddenly instead of the accuser having to to shoulder that burden the
the accused has to do it and that really makes things a lot more complicated it means that
accusers can tie people up in court for you know virtually indefinitely it's it becomes just a
question of how much money each party is willing to throw at the problem and this is really bad
so libel tourism is this kind of weird situation that lots of people take take their libel cases to
England rather than dealing with them in whichever country would be most appropriate and
finding ways of stopping that is is very important um New York actually came up with a way of doing
that a couple years ago uh which is basically to say um we're not going to um respect any any court
verdict which comes from a country that doesn't have uh first amendment style protections for
free speech and with the way we're going to try and do it here and actually this is kind of one of
the things that that can be you know ticked off our list is um Iceland's party to something
called the lugano treaty and article 34 of the lugano treaty more or less says that um that
a court in one country uh one member or a secondary state of this treaty can refuse to honor a
court verdict from another state if it violates the general rule of law so you know it's kind of
uh a neat little like kind of lawyerish hack that that allows us to just say you know if a court
verdict comes from England and well then we won't necessarily accept uh that court verdict here
and you'd have to retry the case in order to have it enforced which is exactly what we need
so i guess the the i-m-m-i passed in Iceland recently right um not exactly so what happened was um
back in 2010 uh we we wrote a parliamentary resolution proposal uh and that that basically means
it's a uh it turned out to be a parliamentary resolution so it was accepted unanimously um in
June of that year uh and what a resolution is it's just kind of parliament the the legislative
assembly saying to the executive we want you to do this and the executive now has to go and
and work through and figure out all these different laws and there's about 14 different laws
that need to be changed so this is kind of you know that was the start of what's going to be a
long process it's going to take two or three years uh more and you know it's it starts off really
really slowly so for the first two years we didn't really have anything to say except you know
we're working on it now recently uh we put out kind of our first status report which kind of goes
through you know okay we've we've gotten source protection through we've uh we've gotten this
Libertorism thing more or less uh put a lid on it um we've got um computer emergency response
team in the works we've got um certain changes to um information rights uh almost out of the
parliament um you know there's various things but but it's kind of just it's taking a long time
we haven't even started touching on the issue of whistle-row protection because it's just a really
big thing uh uh smoothly just on an aside one of the things that occurs to me is that all of
this has only become possible due to crisis um the you know the global financial crisis as we know
had um a devastating effect on Iceland which also led to a political crisis and if i remember
correctly there was a a massive change politically where some of the the smaller parties became
more prominent and I think it's a big hit to you on stutter. Is that correct who was a member
of your parliament who was able to put a lot of this through? And that's personally interesting
to me because one of the things we talk about on the show at the moment is the role of crisis
in facilitating change in how trade unionists and other activists can use the crises that we face
around the world to leverage situations which would have seemed intractable during the economic
boom a few years ago. So would you say that it's correct it's only due to a breakdown of some of
the old certainties that you've been able to bring this initiative forward? Yeah well certainly
Iceland went through a rough patch of economic woes starting in 2008 and that opened up a lot
of opportunities. Somebody said you shouldn't waste a crisis but I'm not sure it's only possible
because of that. This kind of thing, the crisis definitely led to a kind of line of thought which
allowed us to start thinking about these kind of things but I'm not sure that in a kind of
non-crisis situation it would have been entirely impossible to do it but the crisis certainly helped
and in part because it got kind of these well self-described radicals into the parliament you know
people like Birgitah who want to push for systemic change and want to you know alter the way politics
is done so you know having heard their absolutely changed you know it that probably made it
possible more than than a lot of other things because she kind of jumped on to this idea very early
on when we were talking about it and kind of carried it through and did all of the negotiations
within the parliament that made it the proposal go through but the other thing is you know when
you have a country that's gone through a crisis people start to be a bit more open to
weird or alternatives we had been kind of you know banking superstate on a micro nation
scale for several years up until until 2008 and you know when the banking sector disappeared
simply what we had left the left was fish and aluminum and people you know and cheap energy
yeah cheap green energy sure but we can't really export that and you know it's not really the only
way we can export it today is through importing boxite and exporting aluminum you know that's
a really energy intensive process but it's a really dirty process that a lot of the people in
Iceland just don't really want so you know at the same time we have a massively educated population
that's used to very very low unemployment levels and you know the people who really genuinely
want to be hardworking and the crisis moved the unemployment level from 1% up to 9% and just didn't
really you know people were left kind of wanting to to see something else come in now what we
what we're proposing you know frankly you know with data centers and so on data centers really
don't tire that many people you know that's not really their value but having data centers in
good environments with cheap energy and good legal protections and good connectivity to the outside
world is kind of a pretty requisite if you're going to start doing a heavily ICT based or communications
or information technology based economy and today you know there are some very big information
technology companies here like CCP for instance which is you know a very large computer game
company but they have to run all of their servers from London because the the latency is just too
high and then there's companies like Opera that run their their download system from here because
they don't really care about latency so you know within all this kind of realm of
of services that you can can provide online you know building the infrastructure and making
making that available will actually help for about two thirds of all of the different scenarios
that can come up and then you just need well-educated people to to jump in and make you know
so so it's also an opportunity for Iceland to develop a new sector to replace the whole left
by the collapse of finance yeah absolutely and hopefully a more diversified you know I mean
putting all your eggs in one basket is a you know not very clever and hopefully people here have
learned that lesson so it seems that the political dynamic in Iceland is much healthier in a lot of
ways than other countries and I guess one of the things that I'm wondering because I imagine
it has come up in discussion is the the actor and syspa which is currently going through
Congress in the U.S. right now what what the IMI IMI is thoughts on it and how to work I guess
I guess it'd be in Gens but that's my assumption yeah well I mean if we start with actor actor has
already been right or it's already been signed by the United States it hasn't been ratified there
and it's a multinational trade agreement and currently the only thing standing between
you know us and total doom is is European parliament and they have they have an election on it there
in June so what total doom means in this case is an absolute breakdown of intermediate
liability limitations a criminalization of corporate violations which kind of opens up the door
for all sorts of gross violations of free speech by simply just enabling a kind of chilling effect
the chilling effect coming from these companies which are using their intellectual monopoly
rights to to stifle the propagation of information through the world and it also has some kind of
weird other consequences like for generic drugs and seeds you know the actor isn't really just a
threat to the internet it's a threat to a kind of very large portion of human endeavors you know
write down to agriculture and the agriculture argument is one that you hardly ever hear anybody
talk about because the farmers just think it's an internet thing and the internet people don't
really understand farming so you know I would love to see hackers going side by side with farmers
and you know everybody with pitch works but I just don't see it happening
but either way you know hopefully actor will be stopped and realistically even if you get stopped
in Europe then there's already lots of secretaries Mexico United States Canada Australia New Zealand
South Korea etc Morocco is even a member of it for reasons that are entirely beyond my
comprehension but so but the question is you know what becomes of it if if Europe doesn't join
probably what will happen is that its teeth will be drawn out to a sufficient extent that the rest
of the country is never actually ratify it but hopefully hopefully that will happen
but possibly the United States who are the insigators of actor will just say okay let's let's
just carry on with it anyway I mean at least we have copyright violations and in Mexico you know
taking care of for the next infeciable future and that would be a real tragedy
one of the things we've seen a lot in recent years for instance in New Canyon Constitution
so Kenya did a constitutional reform a couple of years ago and it has three different articles
providing for intellectual monopolies so when I say intellectual monopoly I'm saying I mean
what other people call an intellectual property but it's very strange for a country to have
three different articles on intellectual monopoly rights and this is kind of a global trend
that's happening where you know it appears that there was some lobbyism from some angle
that's managed to get into the canyon process and that's kind of an entry point of kind of
wedging the way into you know East Africa as a whole you know all these emerging markets are
you know just waiting to be tapped and or controlled by entrenched interests
so um Smody this is it's it's it's it's really really fascinating stuff and I was quite taken
with the way you described the split between the farmers and the internet activists and
um you know I'm wondering what kind of role the labor movement could play in this we had a
discussion before we started recording where you spoke about the industrialization of the internet
and and where is the digital labor movement why are unions not organizing people online and
I'm wondering if there's a way that unions can understand the importance and the implications
of these things and and maybe help to bridge some of that gap do you have any thoughts on the
later movements well yeah um the problem that labor movements kind of been caught up in in
last 100 years is that after the eight hour work week was established and and uh universal suffrage
those were the two big wins and since then not really much has happened it it's kind of gone
the same path as a lot of other kind of political ideologies or uh or you know uh goal-oriented
movements in the sense that once the goal was reached and nobody knew what to do anymore
and since then you know everybody's just been haggling over over the little stuff the the details
um one of the reasons I think that's happened is because of a massive centralization of authority
within the labor movement uh and the creation of hierarchies and um and power structures um yeah I
think we agree completely with that so so one of the things that you know we're looking at the
internet and this is kind of you know where all my analysis comes from is always looking at the
internet and actually looking at the industrial revolution because I think it's a fascinating
mistake in human history um you know you know the industrial revolution kind of promised everybody
you know um less work uh more uh quality of life uh you know uh better equality etc but then it
just didn't happen and it didn't happen because um there was this ownership element this
this kind of the control structure that came from the fact that the machines were really difficult
to build they were expensive to build and not many people could actually do that um so you have
things like uh in England during the uh 1811 to 1815 the uh the Lodite movement which you know
they're always put forward as kind of this anti-technology anti uh anti-progress kind of
group of uh terrorists but if you actually read through their writings you find out that they were
not really against the technology as such they were against the centralization of the control of
technology although although to be fair they're uh the way they um they put it forward at the time
wasn't really all that nuanced they they were kind of a couple of decades too early to to get
kind of uh kropot canite or or marxist analysis but you know uh that would have been uh really helpful
but um you know looking at the internet today you get you see exactly the same thing you see this
kind of trend towards greater centralization where you know uh two decades ago everybody run
their own email server they they communicated uh over used net news groups say um had PBS's you
know these kind of really decentralized and localized services that uh were very democratically
operated and now we have Facebook and Twitter and google you know each of these is quite nice
in its own right they they have you know they've managed to do some really amazing things but
because they're centralized services instead of being uh protocols that allow everybody to
communicate on the same power level um we we have this kind of centralization tendency and
one of the things we can do is just kind of take a step back and move towards this kind of
traditionalists approach to the internet and say wait let's stop this institutionalization
of communications and start building um these uh dispersed uh mesh networks of anybody who
wants to participate and let's do it by exchanging the institution itself for a language by which
we can communicate with each other so that makes sense yeah yeah absolutely so so taking
respect to the labor movement well what's happened there we've we've seen a super institutionalization
which has led to uh very few people having uh lots of control over the way we do things
and um there's practically nothing that happened because because uh the the entrenched powers in
the labor movement just uh don't have the uh any incentive to change to this status quo
so or in size I think yeah or or that so okay let's replace the institutions that are a labor
movement uh labor unions uh with a language you know let's figure out a way to allow everybody uh
who who could be or should be engaged in labor struggle to communicate with each other on a
peer-to-peer basis once we do that then we can start talking about you know real change of
the proportions that we were looking at you know uh around May 1st a couple of hundred years ago
oh actually 130 years ago but you got my music right in our in our last five podcasts we
actually discussed the history of May 1st and starting in Chicago in 1886 so yeah uh yes
hey Mark there we go very good yeah um yeah so I mean all right yeah that by the way it was
absolutely crucial stuff because that is the project that we're trying to to engage with is
what you've articulated there so uh it's very good to to hear it all from you um I work for a trade
union so I know um all the structural problems with with the organization and how there there's
there's a lack of insight and understanding of how um production has shifted you know there's um
it's we no longer in a forest manufacturing environment we are in a totally different world
the principles are the same people are still working we need to organize them but we have moved
into a different space and we need to approach that space differently so uh absolutely yeah
it's good to hear one of those well actually I have um I have some writings on the subject that could
be um it could be useful to you but let's let's talk about that and my experience has been working
with the labor with the laborings in the states and seeing the hierarchical structures of it
is just mind blowing and disturbing in so many different ways um but I was curious kind of going
a little bit back to the IMMI because I when I was looking through some of the information online
it had specifically mentioned stuff uh or goals of trying to protect whistleblowers and trying to
figure what what the idea is behind that and and how um and then what mechanisms will be in place
to to protect them in that situation okay well so protecting whistleblowers is probably one of the
most complicated things I've ever tried to wrap my head around uh it's it's not difficult to understand
it's difficult to plug all the holes um you see you have different types of whistleblowers uh so
commercial whistleblowers uh political um uh many people from inside uh state bureaucracies uh you
have uh people from civil society you have uh individuals who are not really connected in any way
to any of that uh in so far as they're whistleblowing and then you have uh the different problems that
they can be facing so this could range from uh losing their job so having financial troubles to
violating uh state secrecy laws or uh laws which are considered to be um anything from national
security interests to privacy rights um and then issues uh regarding um uh psychological health
you know basically whether uh people go into PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder after after
having blown whistle um something um and then of course physical threats so so uh needing uh kind
of similar things to witness protection programs or so on and you know that's without even getting
into all of the the complexities that come from uh the different types of agency the different
types of uh of exposure and the different uh people who are pissed off at the fact that they
just had the whistleblown on um so so you know it's a very wide spectrum of of problems that need to
be dealt with and uh in going into this we you know we we've been uh moving towards this by you
know just uh we we got the source protections through first we we thought that that was an
easier thing to achieve um and source protection is is basically allowing journalists to have legal
protection that uh prevents them from being worse and actually in fact punishes them if they do
expose their sources um so that's a very kind of you know good good start um then you know we're
we're gonna be moving towards that for a long time but effectively you know once we have enough
pieces in place we're hoping that the complexity of whistleblown protection will kind of dissolve into
into nothingness and will will have the perfect deal nice so we we have we have a few drafts that
we've been throwing around but you know it's really uh it's brutal stuff yeah no i can imagine and um
i'm thinking in the lines you were talking earlier about um Iceland has become kind of a
happen for a lot hosting for a lot different organizations and things like that and recently we
had come by the news of the server being taken down in New York um and i'm curious and this is
a little bit out there but if a server if the server was say in Iceland um with hypothetically an i
m m i fully supported thing in place um what i mean what what mechanisms would be there to to
prevent the FBI or or foreign governments from from forcing or demanding the hand of Iceland to
hand information over well so uh FBI has no jurisdiction in Iceland if they were to find
something objectionable in Iceland uh they could uh basically go through the same procedures the
Icelandic police or any other uh entity in uh taking the issue to court and requesting an injunction
now um so the there's an understanding that uh you know under under our constitution that
there shall be no prior restraint meaning that you know you cannot be punished for for publishing
something until you've actually published it that that's kind of the first thing um then
uh in order to get an injunction you need to uh fulfill certain very strict criteria which um
you know are there for a very good reason uh so for instance if the issue is that there's a server
hosting child pornography then you know it'll be easy to get an injunction and that'll be taken down
um the second is is a kind of more contentious one is um a corporate violation so violation of
inflection monopoly rights um in which case the court will grant an injunction and it will be taken
down and the third is one which we are slightly worried about which is a general injunction um the
general court order which uh isn't really clarified in law and that's actually one of our projects
this summer is trying to figure out exactly what that um what that statement should be replaced by
so uh so there's a question of should libelous comments be taken down well we think not
if something is uh tagged as being libelous and maybe you know or rather if there's a uh court ruling
which says that a statement is libelous then it might be okay to uh to tag it somehow to
you know put a notice on the web page or whatever saying this is libelous content or this content was
um you know found to be libelous under this here court case but
generally speaking um we don't want things to be taken down because of court orders
um except in these very narrow cases so um you know protection of uh bodily integrity,
protection of miners uh that kind of thing uh is good but uh by and large it shouldn't be any
takedown orders uh smarty one of the projects that we speak about quite a lot on the show and which
people promote to people is is tour we think it's it's a useful tool for activists particularly in
countries where there is um a lot of set control of the internet do you have any any links or any
relationship with that project um not as such i know most of the people who work for the project
they're really amazingly cool people um and i fully support the project uh you know i use it myself
quite a bit um and and it kind of you know comes into the other aspect of all of this that
you know even though the project i'm working on is very tightly uh bound into trying to fix the laws
uh law is just policy at the end of the day you know then that's not the policy can be broken
anybody can just decide that policy isn't policy anymore and and uh that's not good enough
so you know uh without being too much of a technological determinist i i would say
you know try to get good laws try to hold good democracy but at the end of the day always have
have your backup plan and that should be um mathematically provable technological methods such as tour
you know that's yeah that that's absolutely fantastic um sorry this has been
really fantastic we've got listeners uh some of them working in software and IT and others are
are ordinary trade unionists um what kind of practical application can can you suggest how how
what is the best way that they can engage with with your projects and with what you're trying to do
okay that's a difficult one um so in part uh you know this kind of comes on to just
understanding what your threat model is um if you are hosting a dissident website that's
likely to be taken down and you might want to consider moving it to a country with a good
jurisdiction you know good protections for for free speech uh like Iceland um uh but
you know regardless of what your model is um there's always the the situation that
uh there's a massive erosion of civil liberties going on worldwide uh very much driven by the
the copyright holders and uh and so on uh or at least that's what we're being led to think um
you know uh the the copyright lobby is big and strong but realistically uh the the people who
want to uh get kind of uh old big brother on on us um they really welcomed this uh it's kind
of this uh lineage where uh a couple of i think it was last year or maybe the year before um some
representative of i think it was the international um uh phonogram industry uh organization
they they said during a meeting in Sweden that uh they really love child pornography because
uh once uh censorship has been uh uh allowed for for child pornography then they can start asking
for the censorship to be expanded to cover a copyright violation and well hey once you got
in copyright violation dealt with let's just expand it to cover political speech that
that's uh inconvenient to the incumbents or or whatever you know you you you start small and kind
of uh chip chip way it at our rights and um you know regardless of whether you're a technologist or
you know uh trade unionist or just a human living in a in a society you know we need these free
speech right we need these uh protections for for our right to communicate and uh protecting
them in your home country whichever country that is is going to be very very important for the next
couple of decades that's great this body thank you very much for for you're for coming
out to the show and this is exceptionally informative and i know where listeners are going to
really enjoy this um and we definitely as things progress with the with the i.m. and my in the
future um we definitely would love to have you back on and sometimes but thank you very much for joining us
yeah i love thank you for having me
thank you
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