On Monday, November 24, 2014 12:21:10 PM UTC-6, Leo McArdle wrote: > And Yahoo (and Google) is in the US, a nation which has never committed > human rights abuses, never attempts to censor, blackmail or imprison > whistleblowers and other civil liberties advocates, has certainly never > invaded a sovereign nation or overthrown democratically elected > governments to install dictatorships, and definitely doesn't try to > force companies to install backdoors or bend to its whim. > > Oh wait... that's not true, and doesn't really have anything to do with > Yahoo.
If Google or Yahoo have been complicit in doing so, or coerced to the point of being legally unable to resist, then a strong argument could be made against Mozilla's making deals with them, as well. Perhaps that is a conversation that also needs to be had. > > These nations' principles, values, and laws are antithetical to > > Mozilla's stated goals, principles, and values of openness, freedom, > > equality, and human rights. How then can Mozilla be funded by them? How > > can this be seen as equivalent to Mozilla's former deals with Google? > > Because you could reasonably argue that the US doesn't have a shining > human rights record. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any country > which has an untarnished human rights record, except maybe the Federated > States of Micronesia? (I'm not sure any search engines operate out of > there, though...) You're right, although I would still argue that the U.S. government's abuses are not in the same league as these other nations, and its legal framework is a whole different ballgame. To not recognize these distinctions is to gloss over important details and, ultimately, the truth. But you're also wrong, because being funded by Google or Yahoo is not equivalent to being funded by the U.S. government. It's not the same as being funded by what are effectively arms of the Chinese and Russian governments. > > I'm sure that everybody who works at the NSA reads the Mozilla Manifesto > before they go to bed and thinks, "Good job, me, I upheld this today!" I'm not sure what your point is here. Who knows what the whole truth really is, but companies like, e.g. Google and Apple, have publicly protested the NSA's attempts to infiltrate their networks, and Google's even increased its use of encryption on its intranet to resist snooping. They've also both announced the use of encryption by default on their smartphones, despite loud protests by the FBI, et al. In China and Russia, they wouldn't even have the option to protest or take technical measures to resist. Because of that, I think your comparison is not reasonable. Now if Mozilla were being funded by, say, AT&T or Verizon, that would be a different matter. But, once again, the most important issue is not merely what search engine to choose by default, but Mozilla's being funded by these entities. The former is a string in about:config, while the latter is the exchange of large sums of money. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
