[liberationtech] It's about time we publicly declared privacy was never dead.

Tue Nov 5 15:31:25 PST 2013

I should rather think "It is risen," given many of the impassioned
conversations I've seen -- but people don't know what to *do* and that
takes a coherent movement.

We seem to be convinced of the passivity of people in the US -- the
inexorable grip of the ergonomic chair or the couch on the collective
national ass.  That risk-taking has been bred out of the ugly American and
replaced with a nearly japonaise trend of "helicoptering" concern for
safety and permanent records.

Well, that is what the young people have been carefully taught but the
makers and a great many more feel something missing.  They are creating
their own tribes and communities because no one left a copy of the social
contract near the remote control, or maybe they clicked through the EULA
too fast?

In the absence of two generations since Watergate, DC has stopped any
semblance of respecting the hoi polloi electorate here. We have this Wizard
of Oz curtain around the beltway that got erected in 1960,  got anchored in
the 70s,  and cinched shut permanently somewhere around Clinton/Gingrich.

If these young people could dream together, on and offline, some hero's
journey -- to change their world reasonably peacefully, fighting dragons,
taking all that world building F&SF they love and putting that modeling to
work IRL?

Why aren't more of us working on that?  Helping find those young people,
building them tools, being their mentors and griots and healers, winding
them up and handing them this Great Hunt?

We can be academic and clever and analytic.  But law and software and
academic papers will not get rid of the USA PATRIOT Act or tame the cycle
of constitutional abuse in Congress and the IC.

We need a popular movement, and today that requires social tools,  funds,
will within our networks, and a great deal of the Art of the Possible.
Sausagemaking, my friends.  Not just clever language and fine speechifying.

I saw what, a couple/few thousand people in DC on the Capitol lawn a week
ago and the press made us look huge compared to the body count.  That's
momentum going by.

If privacy's dead, or undead -- shut the damn list down.  Liberation's
impossible in a despot's floodlight.  Hand Evgeny his Nobel and shut down
the Peace Prizes, or give them all to one big recipient for pacification
efforts against those pesky troublemakers in their misguided efforts in
Eurasia.

If privacy's not dead, who will plant the wheat with me?  What are our next
steps?

I know y'all are busy,… But the game is changing this year, don't you think?

yrs,
SN
On Nov 5, 2013 4:51 PM, "Joseph Lorenzo Hall" <joe at cdt.org> wrote:

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>
>
> On 11/2/13 7:06 PM, Shava Nerad wrote:
> > Sort of on the lines of the net neutrality or SOPA/PIPA issues and
> > all that, at the least.  But something nicely memetic and viral,
> > showing how this is an issue that has been foisted on folks in the
> > interest of the large corporations, to exploit a cultural change
> > that leads to profit, disengagement, and disaffection.  And general
> > vulnerability to the surveillance state.
>
> "Privacy is undead"?
>
> ::)
>
> - --
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> Chief Technologist
> Center for Democracy & Technology
> 1634 I ST NW STE 1100
> Washington DC 20006-4011
> (p) 202-407-8825
> (f) 202-637-0968
> joe at cdt.org
> PGP: https://josephhall.org/gpg-key
> fingerprint: 3CA2 8D7B 9F6D DBD3 4B10  1607 5F86 6987 40A9 A871
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