Richard Stallman: Snowden leak a chance for privacy, time to fight Big Brother

[bemildred]

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Richard Stallman:

Not so easily. I am not trying to prevent an investigation of me, I am not against the ability of the state to investigate people when there are some grounds, suspicion that they can take to the court, and say “please approve various kinds of searches of this person” – that needs to be done, because we need a state to do a lot of things, including catching criminals and prosecuting them. Unfortunately, the plutocratic states today, they only want to catch the small criminals, the giant criminals, they are too big for jail. But, we do need that, and I don’t want to make that impossible – what I object to is making a dossier about everyone all the time, because then, if the state wants to get somebody, even for a bad reason, the state can get tremendous amounts of data, and can always find something to punish that person for. So, we should design our digital systems so they are not recording data about everybody all the time. They should be able to start recording data about somebody when a court gives an order to investigate that person. They shouldn’t make a giant dossier of months or years of information about everybody. Because that starts to resemble what secret police did, and I guess, in fact, still does in lots of countries.

Sophie Shevardnadze:

You’ve been saying this for many many years – you’ve been talking about PRISM-like programs five, ten years ago. Snowden made that point right now – and everyone is now up in the air with it, going crazy about the revelations… How does it make you feel, that nobody listened to you?

Richard Stallman:

I am very happy, that Snowden told us what the U.S. government and some other governments are really doing. I had no proof - I’ve been saying for many years that if we look at the Pa-Triot Act – I won’t call it “patriot” because its as unpatriotic as you can get in a country based on a idea of freedom – I said, “look at this, I would guess that they are collecting all the data about everyone, regularly, fast enough so it doesn’t get erased between collections – but that was just a guess. Thanks to Snowden, we know that in some cases, specifically phone calls, the U.S. government is actually doing this, and we know that there are other governments that do surveillance without even the flimsy limits of the U.S. governments – so I’m tremendously happy to see that Snowden has called the publics attention to this injustice, because our cause now has more momentum, we might, maybe, be able to stop this.

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20130721115151548

[warrprayer]

1. now or never

Snowden stuck it to the overclass big time. Whether we keep pushing is up to us.