I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Internet is the greatest engine of prosperity since since, say, the telephone or even since mass transportation. It allows us all to interact with people and business around the world without using up fossil fuels and personal resources in travel. It provides businesses with a customer communications channel connected directly to their back-end systems. On the Internet, life is good. And, as I have said on numerous occasions, it only got that way because the Internet is an open conduit for anything people can think of.

It has been recognized by lawmakers for years that openness is the key to the Internet’s usefulness. But, increasingly, that is coming to an end. The Chinese government routinely censors its domestic Internet and forces all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country through a giant gateway it controls. The US allows private companies to remove material placed on the Internet by third parties on accusation of copyright infringement. Australia looks likely to implement a national Internet filter in the name of pornography suppression. The UK is considering a “Digital Economy Bill” which would force Internet disconnections and filter access to websites. Even the New Zealand government is looking at a limited filtering system to combat child pornography.

All this brings me to my point: Can we, humankind, actually stand an open communications medium? One that lets all of us talk to all of us? Along with the huge list of economic and social benefits that brings? Observing the actions of government world wide, I’d have to answer “no”.

It appears that the Internet is just too open and too useful for humanity to come to terms with. Since the Internet is just a communications tool, this means that we, as a species, can’t tolerate open communications between all our members. That’s why I question whether the Internet is just too good for us, whether we deserve it at all.

But then, what can you expect from a species that can’t organize itself to operate in an environment of finite resources? There is no functioning mechanism for us to deal with global environment destruction or fossil fuel exhaustion, for instance. You don’t have to accept anthropogenic climate change to agree that we don’t have a way of dealing with it.

So, then, we are a deeply flawed race careering off a cliff of our own making. Does that mean we shouldn’t fight – that we should just eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? I don’t think so. For me, each of us who recognizes the problems should act as best we can to hold a mirror to human activities. That means calling governments and industries when they try to hold progress to ransom. It means arguing for cooperative approaches to dealing issues that face us. It means not hiding our heads in the sand about limited resources.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. But until we at least accept the questions, neither will any of us.

How we deal with the Internet and its ability for us all to communicate will the question I posed in the title: is the Internet too good for us?

It’s not a straightforward issue. On the one hand, most of us would accept that there is value in providing an incentive to create clever things that ultimately benefit many people. That’s the public good argument for copyright and patents. On the other, our culture and our technology are built on the work and ideas of others and controlling people’s access effectively controls our development as a species.

These are important matters that need a global consensus. What I’m seeing at the moment is an attempt to enclose the commons of ideas for the benefit of a few and to detriment of us all. That’s been the case for a century at least, but the arrival of the Internet has pushed things to a whole new level.

That brings me to ACTA, the treaty being negotiated in secret by our government and others, which is at least partly about the interaction of copyright and the Internet. I’ve railed against the secrecy around ACTA before, because it prevents the ordinary people whose lives will be affected from having a say in it.

There have been some remarkable revelations about ACTA in the last few days. Firstly, there have been three leaks. The text of the Internet chapter, an analysis of some countries’ views on transparency of the agreement, and an analysis of each country’s negotiating position on the Internet chapter of the draft ACTA agreement. We don’t know where the leaks are coming from, but it’s clear that many people negotiating the agreement are unhappy with the insistence of secrecy coming from (we now know) the US, South Korea and Denmark.

Nat Torkington has analysed the New Zealand positions from the latest link. New Zealand’s negotiators are pushing for clarity, for reasonableness and for transparency. Good on them. It looks as though New Zealand is making its view more felt than many other countries. Even so, what we end up with, of course, is not just up to New Zealand.

People in our government are listening about the lack of transparency. Our negotiators have just issued a call for submissions on some points of the Internet chapter ACTA by 31 March. This, coupled with the leaks, offers ordinary people a chance for some kind of say. So does the PublicACTA event to be hosted by InternetNZ on April 10th, right before the next round of ACTA negotiations which are to be held here in Wellington the following week.

It’s good that we have found out more about ACTA – even if it is mostly through unacknowledged “leaks”. It’s good that New Zealand is pushing for transparency. We need to empower our negotiators and those in like-minded countries to reject the extreme positions that some of the other countries are taking. Do consider sending a submission, even if it’s just “the current model works well, don’t change it”. I’ll write some more detailed points and publish them here well before the deadline.

However, it’s still appalling that a treaty that will affect everyone is being negotiated in secret, with an agenda being pushed by one industry based mainly in one country which won’t let the secrecy be lifted for fear that other countries’ citizens won’t let them stay in the negotiations.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We’ve had a glimpse of it. Let’s throw the curtains wide.

After that, if there’s any time, we’ll have a brief look at a new theory of physics that may integrate gravity and quantum theory. Gosh. And, of course, steam cars.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news. If you don;t want to listen live, shortly after the programme, you’ll be able to get it as a podcast or just download the audio as ogg or mp3.

The movie companies’ claim was that iiNet knew that some of its customers were downloading copyrighted material over BitTorrent, because the movie companies had told it so, and that iiNet should have told these customers to stop or disconnected them. Sound familiar? It’s awfully like the “draconian” Section 92A of the New Zealand Copyright Act, rushed in in the dead of night by the former Labour government and taken out again by John Key’s government when they realised how unjust it was.

The outcome of this case was a comprehensive loss for the movie companies. The judge found that iiNet did not authorize copyright infringement, that it had no obligation to stop other infringing copyright even if it knew who they were, which it couldn’t. The judge was scathing about the movie companies’ contention that iiNet should disconnect its customer on the basis of an accusation of copyright infringement made by the movie companies, saying that a judicial process would be required.

Ultimately this was not just about one ISP. It was about the openness of the Internet. That’s why we saw the whole might of Hollywood taking on the third largest ISP in Australia. Presumably the movie companies thought that iiNet would cave to pressure and Hollywood would have established a precedent that it could control people’s Internet access. Good on iiNet for standing up for them!

I’m on Radio New Zealand National after the 11am news. After the broadcast, you’ll be able to download the audio.

No speaker notes for today – most of it was done off the cuff after the Apple launch. But if you missed it live, you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

That brings me again to the disingenuously-named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, whose contents the public are not allowed to know even though our governments are rushing headlong to sign up to it. It’s clear that this treaty isn’t just about physical goods, but contains a significant section about the Internet.

Make no mistake, the provisions of ACTA will require its signatory governments to limit people’s freedoms. There wouldn’t be any point to it otherwise. And, even though ACTA has been under negotiation since 2008, we still don’t know what’s in it! So, we have the unappealing spectacle of a collection of mostly democratic governments negotiating away their citizens’ rights without letting those citizens know what is being talked about.

Those who promote ACTA say that there’s a lot of information publicly available. That’s a curious kind of ‘available’ from where I’m sitting. We don’t have the draft text. On the basis of leaks, we believe it contains provisions to cut off people’s Internet similar to those rejected after public protest in New Zealand.

Some governments are providing information on ACTA by public briefing. The New Zealand government recently provided a face-to-face briefing to selected people. There weren’t any media in the room, and they wouldn’t allow people to blog or tweet. That seems to be a common requirement around ACTA. Someone who tried to tweet in a recent Mexico ACTA briefing was thrown out by security. Claims that the text of ACTA is no more secret than other trade agreements have been shown to be rubbish. Even the EU Parliament is demanding transparency.

Unsurprisingly, it is only the general public, the ones whose rights get curtailed, who don’t get to see the draft treaty. Industry lobbyists – those who stand to benefit from restricting people’s freedom on the Internet – have a process for getting hold of the text under strict non-disclosure agreements. Cynics might suggest that it’s those lobbyists who are driving the treaty in the first place. It’s no wonder, really, that those who would curtail everyone’s freedoms don’t want us to see that coming before it’s too late. If citizens knew what their governments were doing the treaty they might pressure their governments to get it thrown out.

Maintaining secrecy so your citizens can’t find out what law you intend to pass until it’s too late is a breathtaking abuse of process. Citizen access to the law-making process is part of the social contract underlying modern democracies. Breaking that is just plain wrong, and I’m sure most legislators know that. More pragmatically, pushing through anti-citizen laws under the cover of secrecy can only lead to further undermining the trust of governments by their citizens and disengagement from the political process. It won’t pass unnoticed that the nations can come together and fail to make a meaningful agreement about climate change but they can happily work away in secret to agree to advantage an industry at the expense of everyone’s freedoms.

I’m going to finish with another American quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.

There were some highlights: listening to the people who have built New Zealand’s free software high school, Albany Senior High. Linux desktops and servers. A great saving for the taxpayer and more money left for educating the kids. Some very committed people showing the way.

Glyn Moody, a UK journalist and activist, talked about how a culture of sharing underlies science, technology and the arts. He’s a fascinating person and I was delighted to be able meet him. He also put my points about ACTA rather more eloquently than I could in my own presentation.

Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell, the men behind Samba (the program which lets Linux servers talk to Windows desktops) both were there and did their own presentations. Andrew talked about teaching the community development model used by Free Software at university; Jeremy recounted some of his experiences in fighting for open standards and made some predictions.

As for the penguin? Tux is the Linux mascot. He was there as well.

All the presentations were captured on video. They’ll be available on the conference website soon.

I was really impressed by the efforts of the organizers. A bunch of volunteers put together an experience that was the equal of many professionally-organized events I’ve been to.

And it was a blast.

There are various measures available to Internet censors. China, for instance, runs the so-called “Great Firewall” – a single point of access for all Internet traffic entering and leaving the country. Centralized national firewalls offer a high level of control, but they find it hard to deal with traffic which is encrypted (as a lot of Internet traffic is, routinely). Almost invariably, they have to block a lot of material which is wider than their intended purpose, just to be sure. You can’t allow free access to Google if you don’t your population to even be able to search for specific concepts. Another issue is that the engineering for the great firewall gets quite problematic. It needs to be able to pass a great deal of traffic very quickly while filtering out the “bad” stuff. Finally, there needs to be a staff who are dedicated to controlling the filter, adding new sites to it, perhaps removing old ones, and generally dealing with issues it throws up.

A more limited technical measure is to control the Domain Name System (DNS) in the country. This means that people typing the address of a “bad” site into their browser would instead get a page saying “naughty naughty” or some such. In fact, if they knew the IP number to go to – and it wouldn’t be hard for a determined person to find this – they will evade this form of censorship altogether. This technique would involve its own engineering challenges as well as the problem of managing the list of bad sites.

And deciding what gets blocked is the core of the problem with automated, technical measures like the two described above. There’s no way for the general public to inspect the list of what gets blocked – if you publish the list, you are just publishing a list of sites that you don’t want people to go to. If you don’t publish the list, there is no accountability that governments will only block CAI (or whatever they have said they will). The list can and will expand for several reasons: incompetence, in the case of the Queensland dentist’s site blocked by the Australian filter; a desire to protect the filter itself (Wikileaks); and an extension or what we regard as repugnant or harmful, but don’t necessarily want a public debate about.

There is another technique that governments use to control what people do on the Internet. That is, simply, to watch what is going on within their country and apply real-world sanctions to people breaking the law. All countries do this to a greater or lesser extent. In New Zealand, for instance, the Department of Internal Affairs looks for images of child abuse (i.e. child pornography) and prosecutes people involved in making or trading them. The recent charges brought against a blogger for allegedly breaking a suppression order are another example. This approach seems the natural one for an open society like New Zealand to take. It relies on humans to detect and discern illegal activity rather than machines. That’s how our court system works. It’s also how law enforcement works. We don’t require people to have licences for cameras; of course not, cameras are widely used for a variety of entirely legal purposes. We prosecute people who use cameras to break the law. It should be the same for computers and the Internet.

To summarise: filtering the Internet is problematic technically, but most of all it is incompatible with a democratic open society. Prosecute the wrongdoers but leave the Internet alone.

I’ll talk about his case today on Radio New Zealand National after the 11am news, as well as handing out a brickbat and a couple of bouquets. After the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Gary McKinnon – British computer programmer – the facts

• Early 40s, originally from Glasgow although grew up in London
• Accessed 97 US government and military computers in 2001/2, from Britain
• Why: Claims it was to uncover evidence of UFOs – his activities in the computers seem to back this up
• McKinnon doesn’t dispute that he accessed the computers. He says that they were open (i.e. default passwords) and that he just left messages saying how bad their security was.
• US claims that he deleted some critical operating system files on some and caused $700,000 of damage
• Tracked down to Britain, arrested in 2002
• US announced it wanted to try him in the US “biggest military computer hack of all time”
• In 2006 the Brits decided to allow extradition to the US
• In the US could face 70 years, perhaps even in Gitmo
• Since then a series of legal appeals including to the House of Lords and the European Court, and the UK Home Secretary
• Wants to be tried in the UK. In the UK, still illegal but a far lesser penalty.
• Has been diagnosed with Aspergers by none other than Simon Baron-Cohen or Cambridge
• Still appealing but his chances look slim.
• A lot of public support – 80MPs calling for prison to be served in UK. List of luminaries, Sting, Boris Johnson, Bob Geldof, Terry Waite, the LibDems. Daily Mail running a campaign. Some people believe he was entrapped.

Opinion

• Do not tweak the military’s nose. Even if you think they are stupid. They have a lot to lose by being made to look stupid.
• The guy is clearly not on the same planet as the rest of us – UFOs, “Free energy”
• That’s what this is about and the UK government shouldn’t be letting the US military get away with it. Let’s have a bit of humanity
• Compare with Knox / Kercher case – 26 yrs for murder.
• Change law if necessary
• By all means try the man but do it in his home jurisdiction

Links

Gary McKinnon – evil hacker or confused Asperger’s sufferer?