Why privacy matters and State Secrecy not
Today i saw a woman’s german article on how she wouldn’t want reports about her sex life spread through wikileaks. I wouldn’t like that either. But i see it as a misconception and confusion about two very different issues, namely personal privacy and state/government secrecy. This confusion is used and increased by many politicians for their own purposes.
Privacy means our rights to have a private life, private flat, private actions and private communications. We don’t want the state or the public to surveil us or intrude our private world unless they can show evidence to an independent court that there is something criminal going on.
State secrecy denotes making secret deals, performing secret communication with and secret actions against people or other states. Secret actions can naturally not be discussed in the public and are exempt from our judgement when electing officials. Increasing state secrecy very quickly leads to inner circles wielding great power. The 20th century has tons of bad examples.
Therefore I refuse the notion that if am positive about privacy i must also be ok with state secrecy. Or if i want a transparent government that i also must be ok with total surveillance of my private life. No way. Likely it’s rather true that the more transparent a government is the more secure i can feel with respect to my privacy.
On a sidenote, this all relates to a point in the hacker ethics made by Wau Holland and the Chaos Computer Club a long time ago: “Make public data available, protect private data.”
Wikileaks or: Welcome to the brave new “Terms of Use” era
Paypal “restricts” the bank account of the german Wau Holland foundation which managed parts of Wikileaks transactions. Citing from their statement :
PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to
a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that
our payment service cannot be used for any activities that
encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in
illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.
As with my yesterday notes a number of questions arise. What exactly is
illegal about wikileaks behaviour in the US? Was money laundering or
online fraud involved? Was wikileaks given a warning and asked to
provide clarifying statements regarding the usage of _their_ money? Do
they apply the same moral standards to all their customers and accounts?
For example, are they also closing all accounts related to the
Washington Times or related to Sarah Palin publically calling for
assasination of a citizen of Australia?
If we are learning anything from the Wikileaks case it is the willfullness
of young IT companies in the US to concur with public opinion or direct
government pressure. Up until now i presumed the likes of Amazon or Paypal
also incorporated some ethics. And this would mandate IMO to keep
distance to government actions and to resist government pressure especially
if it’s about something like wikileaks. It seems like the US goverment
used its advanced notice of the pending publication wisely: rather than filtering critical
messages they organised a huge campaign in the US resulting in Amazon,
PayPal and everydns and probably others to implement government policies
and quickly. No need to have special laws or evil government actions – just reference the Terms of Use and be done.
Who needs censorship if you have Amazon and everydns?
Yesterday Amazon stopped services for the wikileaks archive. Citing from the Amazon statement:
It is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.
So here you have a popular cloud services provider judging their customers content in a broad manner, stating conclusion, terminate services, done. Did they allow discussion? Do journalists need to keep and control all rights of the material they are publishing? Can Amazon show any evidenceof their “jeopardy” conclusion? Would they apply the same moral standard to e.g. blogs or other (journalistic) content that called for going to the war on Iraq – causing >100.000 civilians to die? Does Amazon really want us to believe the US governments outrage and Mr. Liebermanns actions are merely a co-incidence?
Then today everydns.net terminated DNS services for wikileaks.org with a 24 hour prior notice. Citing from the everydns statement:
More specifically, the services were terminated for violation of the provision which states that “Member shall not interfere with another Member’s use and enjoyment of the Service or another entity’s use and enjoyment of similar services.”
So supposedly there was an attack on their DNS servers and they interpreted this as wikileaks doing harm to others? Is this the future of how we handle attacks against single domain names? Would the same happen if it was the site of a chinese dissident or a Poker playing site or any other customer?
As things stand this puts me off these two companies and brings me again to the thought that we need an internet that is as independent from any single company or any single country as possible - it’s in the best interest for all of us in the long run.
Elastic Python deployment networks
Time for a bit of fiction on distributed Python deployment. As some of you know, py.execnet imperatively and elastically executes code in local or remote python processes, maintaining channels for exchanging data. Execnet has the wonderful zero-install feature which means no software except a Python interpreter is required remotely. The connection between Python interpreters is direct, i.e. the connecting side needs to know how to start the remote side. And it’s non-transitive meaning: given a A->B and a B->C connection there is no support for getting a A->C connection mediated by B.
I’d like to lift these restriction and introduce the concept of a deployment network through which execnet connections can be mediated. I am pondering a command line tool that creates a network of Python intepreters on multiple hosts like this:
execnet start mynet ssh=linuxbox.org socket=windowsbox.com ssh=osx.com
This would create a "mynet" deployment network of four Python interpreters running on different hosts and platforms: one local process and three remote processes connected to it. Let’s add a remote Jython process to the "mynet" deployment network:
execnet addhost mynet ssh=remote//python=jython
We can generally use the ‘mynet’ handle to work with this newly instantiated deployment network. For example, to get a fresh process on a certain platform from a Python program:
mynet = execnet.connect('mynet')
gateway = mynet.makegateway(platform="java")
The first line connects to our local ‘mynet’ process. The second line creates a gateway to a fresh Python interpreter, in this case a Jython process. The bootstrapping of the Jython-side gateway object is determined by the initiating client side. The two subprocesses communicate through an IO-connection that is mediated by the ‘mynet’ deployment network.
This is very exciting because the zero-installation feature is preserved on two levels: the deployment processes work on software coming from a single point, the command line above. And our "on-top" gateways operate with software determined from the initiating side, from the python code above. Interaction between the two worlds is limited to a connect operation and providing IO mediatiation. This means the deployment network facilities can evolve independently from the "on-top" execnet-elastic programs.
Conceptually it’s a very reliable and robust setting. The mynet processes should be able to run as robustly as unix shells. They are to provide a solid base for writing and deploying Python applications that span multiple interpreters. They don’t run applications in-process.
This is not all fiction. The current development version of py.execnet already works across and between CPython2.4 through to CPython 3.1, Jython and PyPy. And i intend to release execnet as a separate package soon, providing the basis for implementing the above fiction and lots of other on-top fun 
Let’s prevent a no-privacy world by better technology!
Dear Google, Amazon and web 2.0: you are doing a great job of providing cool services and apps, you are doing away with obnoxious installation and upgrade steps, your stuff often works out of the box and you offer convenient interfaces. Great.
Comes with a caveat, though: the loss of control of my data and my communication, loss of ability to install and run whichever programs I like. You as central organisations and your ruling governments develop the practical possibility to get at all this data, on a mass basis and retro-actively. Something needs to change about this or we all will be ending in a world with historically unprecedented power structures in the hand of few. A world with virtually no privacy.
Part of what i can do is thinking about cool new technology to counter these developments. I am convinced we need a more decentral application execution infrastructure. We need open cloud software and infrastructure that allows to have easy-to-develop apps run "on the net" – a wealthy network of PCs and mobile phones. A free wireless-type network, not expensive mobile "total control" networks.
