Was: Re: Privacy, fare well. Hope we will see you again (Was: Debian Edu Extremadura work meeting june 2006)
Am Mittwoch, den 04.01.2006, 10:50 +0100 schrieb Petter Reinholdtsen:
> (And for those of you believing that we should let go of our freedom
> to gain security, I trust that you know that there is nothing new
> about this discussion, and probably also know this quote from
> President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): "Those who desire to give up
> freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve,
> either one." It is still true today. Power corrupts, and giving the
> government more power by reducing our freedom will not give us more
> security only less freedom)
>
First I thought this must be Ben Franklin (1706-90) and read:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security,
deserve neither liberty or security"
After googling, I also found the Jefferson quote on the net.
*Does anyone know quotable sources for either and to what debate(s)
these quotes relate?*
Anyway it seems to prove that the idea of freedom was current round
about 1776. Interestingly the idea of freedom and parliamentary
democracy always refers to the (g)olden days of the 18th century and the
American and French revolution.
I find this disturbing since both seem to me outdated models. The fact
that we already lost the battle for civil liberties (R.Gonggrijp:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/920.de.html) should
make us think about new solutions. The current technology is not
compatible with idealist ideas about freedom and democracy almost 2,5
centuries old, that btw never really worked anyway. If we try to win the
battle for freedom, emancipation and our rights we cannot do so using
the printing press in the age of the internet. We cannot fight in the
streets and build barricades in age of tear gas and sophisticated crowd
control tactics. There is no use for a parliament and representative
government in a networked society where everybody is just a TCP/IP
connection away and nobody needs to travel to continental congresses
etc. Insisting on the old way, will make every Western democracy look
like Florida in the US presidential election of 2000. We must not apply
18th century solutions to problems of the 21st century uncritically.
Imho the solution lies in the erosion of resources of hostile
organisations both governmental and private. DEBIAN is doing this by
making the business of non-free software vendors difficult, not by
blowing up their buildings or stealing their money, but by making their
patents on algorithms and their closed source code worthless, supplying
better solutions. Ideally we should debianise governments, nation-states
and ticket offices in some way, any ideas?
Kind regards
David
--
If you work within the system, you come to one of the either/or choices
that were implicit in the system form the beginning. You're talking like
a medieval serf, asking the first agnostic whether he worships God or
the Devil. [...] You'll never get the hang of the game if you keep
thinking in flat-earth imagery of right and left, good and evil, up and
down. If you need a group label for us, we're political non-Euclideans.
- Illuminatus
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