On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Ted Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-06-25 at 11:07 +0800, Sandy Harris wrote: >> Evgeny Morozov has written a critique of the whole >> notion of using the net as a way to liberate the world. >> His book definitely has limitations; for one thing, he >> looks at the problem mainly from the point of view >> of US foreign policy. However, I'd say it is still >> worth reading: http://www.evgenymorozov.com/ > > It's not clear what this critique actually is from your email, the > linked website, the Wikipedia page on Morozov, or the Foreign Policy > articles linked to in the sources. He seems to be mostly critical of the > American government's two-faced chastisement of Iran and China, which > doesn't really speak to the relevance of the Freedombox project. It is a complex critique and the only way to get it in full would be to read the book. I'll try to summarise it, but of course no one should expect the summary to be exact. The book's title is "The Net Delusion"; the version advertised on the website has the subtitle "The dark side of Internet freedom" but the version I have (bought in China from a state-run bookstore, interestingly enough) uses a different subtitle "How not to liberate the world". That is a one-sentence summary of what I consider his main point. Morizov is highly critical of what he calls "Internet utopians". His main arguments are that: there is nothing inevitable about freedom of information leading to social and political change the net in particular and electronics in general provide powerful tools for surveillance and oppression as an instrument of foreign policy intended to promote democracy worldwide (which he assumes is a US goal, though he does discuss the contradictions), the net is not the right tool Now I do not think he is entirely correct and as a Canadian living in China I am not nearly as concerned about US foreign policy as he is. However, I do think he raises some interesting questions. In particular, I think the Box should be a partial answer to his first and second points. To me, the single most obvious and essential application a Freedom Box should run is some means of bypassing the Great Firewall and other censorship. My guess at how to do that would be to make every Box a TOR input node, but there are several other choices. One risk of the current net is that social networks, email providers, etc. can be used to track people, in particular to track them down when a government is irritated with them. Consider Yahoo turning in Shi Tao or the US gov't demanding Twitter records for people involved with WikLeaks. Those are Morizov's second point; the net as a tool for oppression. As I see it, preventing that sort of thing is the most important goal of the Box project and the question of how exactly to manage that is critical. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
