Should they decide they do not like us encrypting our files or obscuring our online activity, it would be very hard for authorites to take open source software away. The nearest they have got is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act [a failed 2002 anti-piracy bill] which was intended to protect music companies who wanted to put DRM [digital rights management, a tool to prevent copyright-infringement] into music by making trusted computing compulsory. The idea was that computers would be required to have a special chip that would only let them run programs that would be cryptographically signed by some authority. You would not be able to run your own programs.
The bill got nowhere and such laws are unlikely to because open source software is so ubiquitous. It runs the Internet. Samizdata runs on a computer running the Linux kernel using GNU libraries and uses an open source web server, database and blogging software written in languages compiled by open source compilers and interpreted by open source interpreters. So do everyone else’s web sites. Most of the electronic gadgets in the world that have any software at all have open source software in them, including phones and TVs. None of this is going away.
As much as Google and Microsoft have brands to protect, if the government makes laws big companies have to follow them. Governments have no such hold over open source programmers who are geographically, organisationally and ideologically dispersed.In other words, don't bunch up your forces. And never, ever let the government get control of either communications or programming.
If you're in the mood for a terrific story about cyberparanoia, John Varley's 1985 novella "Press Enter" is available for the cost of shipping from Amazon, paired with a pretty good old story by Robert Silverburg, "Hawksbill Station," about a time-travel penal colony.
As always, they can just nationalize Facebook. Like they did with GM.
ReplyDeleteThe NSA methods were developed during Bush and maybe before. Obama was just too lazy to do much about it, except make sure it didn't catch Jihadis.