[Peace-discuss] Drone spying comes home and privacy XOR safety is a false dichotomy

[J.B. Nicholson]

Here's an interesting pair of videos with a theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8PDpUKg5PI -- "Big Brother for your home - Amazon unveils a flying spy" -- the
drone spying function (part of what killer drones do) comes home as
Amazon announces a flying drone to be used inside the home. This home
drone doesn't appear to have weaponry attached to it, but the spying
component is now being sold for home use. I presume that Amazon keeps
the data collected by this flying device with a camera (and, I presume,
a mic). This means that all of the insecurity of letting someone else
keep data on you comes with this new product and service.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COoRi3g-tyw -- Sophie Shevardnadze interviews Richard Stallman on safety & privacy
and the false dichotomy that encourages us to think that we must give
up privacy to gain safety.



Stallman is one of very few people giving clear and correct thought to
these issues including the distraction of breaking up the big tech
companies as though breaking up these companies will fix the injustices
we face.

The host poses compound questions with multiple parts each of which
need to be addressed separately (because each part contains assumptions
to be challenged and falsehoods to be debunked) but at least she lets
Stallman do that unpacking and repeatedly has him on her show. See 
https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/456509-digital-privacy-internet-surveillance/
 for a previous interview between her and Stallman from 2019-08-05.

I do plan to include Stallman's interview in the upcoming set of
recommended videos.


In this most recent interview (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COoRi3g-tyw) there's a problem with one
of the titles around 18m which I'm sure Stallman would have corrected
if he had seen it -- "Richard Stallman: Being under collective
pressure, people can't say 'no' to using commercial software" doesn't
capture what Stallman had said. Change the word "commercial" to
"proprietary" and you'll get a better summary of what Stallman
addressed.

Commercial and proprietary don't mean the same thing even if they often
go together (a lot of proprietary software is commercially
distributed). Commercial means being done as part of a business
transaction -- Microsoft, for instance, wants you to purchase their
word processor, Microsoft Word. This is not what makes Microsoft Word
unethical. Paying for the software is quite a small detail and the free
software movement Stallman started has no objection to selling copies
of software for as much money as one can make doing that.

Microsoft Word is unethical because it is proprietary software -- users
of that program aren't allowed to study how it works by reading its
source code, users aren't allowed to alter the program's source code to
make it suit their needs, users aren't allowed to distribute copies of
the program (either unaltered or altered) to help other computer users.
Proprietary software is the significant problem, the problem that free
software addresses head-on by developing software people are allowed to
run, inspect, modify, and share (either commercially or gratis). Check
out LibreOffice (https://libreoffice.org/) for a free word processor --
LibreOffice Writer -- that runs on all modern OSes which respects your
software freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share. LibreOffice also
happens to be available gratis. LibreOffice has a spreadsheet (Calc),
presentation (Impress), database (Base), drawing (Draw), and other
programs.

You can see that distributing a program for a fee (commercial) is not
the same as having no right to inspect, modify, or share a copy of a
program (proprietary).

-J


P.S. Regarding "XOR" in the subject: that term means "exclusive or"
which is a way of saying at least one and at most one of the two things
on either side of the XOR must be true to make the whole statement
true. For example, a binary bit on a traditional computer is true XOR
false. This is different from how a quantum bit on a quantum computer
works.