The War on the Internet event, which was co-hosted by EFA and the Australian Greens, was held at Trades Hall in Melbourne on 21st January 2012. It featured:
Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing
This is a video of the talk by Scott Ludlam:
War on the Internet event #3 - Scott Ludlam from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.
Scott Ludlam is a Greens Senator.
Copyright and trademark infringement on the Internet is a very real problem, and reasonable proposals to augment the ample array of enforcement powers already at the disposal of IP rights holders and law enforcement officials may serve the public interest. The other side of the issue is the future of communication on the Internet.
The US Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill. The legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader.
In the Stanford Law Review Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post argue that the bills take aim not at the Internet’s core technical infrastructure:
the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains.
They also argue that the bills also take aim at the internet's economic and commercial infrastructure as well.
Credit card companies, banks, and other financial institutions could be ordered to “prevent, prohibit, or suspend” all dealings with the site associated with the domain name. Online advertisers could be ordered to cease providing advertising services to the site associated with the domain name. Search engine providers could be ordered to “remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name,” and to disable all hypertext links to the site.
Both bills suggest that these remedies can be meted out by courts after nothing more than ex parte proceedings—proceedings at which only one side (the prosecutor or even a private plaintiff) need present evidence and the operator of the allegedly infringing site need not be present nor even made aware that the action was pending against his or her “property.”
This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Capitalism is in crisis is a recurrent theme as the cycle of unsustainable booms and inevitable crashes means that countries teeter, protests rage, unemployed multiply and inequality increases. The crisis of legitimacy in capitalism deepens.
Naomi Klein in Capitalism vs. the Climate in The Nation says that climate change highlights an important characteristic of capitalism. This is:
The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.
Klein argues that it is not opposition to the scientific facts of climate change that drives denialists but rather opposition to the real-world implications of those facts. There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.
In the past the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster is the logic of capitalism.
Mark Lilla in Republicans for Revolution in the New York Review of Books says that sometime in the Eighties neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history.
He adds:
Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times...Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base. They all agree that the country must be “taken back” from the usurpers by any means necessary, and are willing to support any candidate, no matter how unworldly or unqualified or fanatical, who shares their picture of the crisis of our time. [The] apocalyptic mind works [through convincing] people that if they bring everything down around them, a phoenix will inevitably be born.
What’s so disturbing is that they don’t feel compelled to explain how even a reduced government should meet the challenges of the new global economy, how our educational system should respond to them, what the geopolitical implications might be, or anything of the sort.All this is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.