I wrote the other day about Jacob Appelbaum's obfuscation of Ultrasurf -- his deliberately obscure tekkie attack on Ultrasurf, a proprietary competitor to his opensource Tor -- because I felt the philosophical problems with his report would never get any attention, as only very technically-obsessed types would tackle it and everyone else would be scared off for fear of being technically inept or for fear of criticizing a fellow member of the geek squad.
I don't suffer from any of those problems.
So I made a comment today on Liberationtech questioning Appelbaum's motives. That's the right thing to do in an open society concerned about being under attack from sinister forces and contemplating the right way to resist them.
Liberationtech is a closed list run by Stanford University, the darling of Silicon Valley. Oh, they tell you it is not closed, because anyone can join it on their website.
But it is closed, because they don't publish the chat logs, the way other such listserves do related to universities or think tanks (like Johnson's List on Russia, for example).
It is closed, because it is heavily moderated. I've found that many posts that I've tried to put on it in the past get stopped by a very zealous geeky moderator who is very much steeped in the whole opensource Silicon Valley ideology and very keen to protect his fellow highly thin-skinned geeks.
The moderator will declare something "off-topic" or "too political" or "a personal attack" merely because it criticizes open source software. When an obnoxious Second Life persona posted a notice advertising her opensource products in SL, I complained but her spammy ad was allowed to stand and I was remonstrated.
I tend not to comment at all on the list as a result -- the chill on speech that heavy moderation inevitably brings -- just so I can see this closed list and not be banned from it and therefore unable to view this closed content. I prefer to spar with liberationtech on Twitter, where they cannot "moderate" me and sometimes have to explain themselves in public and moderate their own biased claims as a result. Openness of society is a good thing; it helps accountability. I don't think that notion of openness extends to stealing classified cables from a liberal democratic government and harming their diplomacy. I'm not for absolutism on this notion of openness regarding software as a property -- open source cultists sometimes claim they are for "choice," but they aren't really, they want to bulldoze people into taking their "choice" of open source.
Jacob Appelbaum's report is of course being discussed avidly on this list, mainly with gushing adulation and credulity and some minor tekkie things are being analyzed.
Here's my comment, in case it gets moderated:
Jacob Appelbaum's agenda doesn't seem to be entirely altruistic here with this Ultrasurf report.
There's a lot going on -- first, there's the desire of him (and his supporters) to attack the US government and "DC Lobbyists" merely for what they are, which is a hated government with a disliked Internet Freedom program, which has put him under investigation for his involvement in WikiLeaks (his buddies at the State Department notwithstanding). Second, there's the desire to attack any competitor of Tor, especially a competitor that adheres to the idea of proprietary versus open source software. These are religious matters.
In other words, when a person who runs a competing open-source software solution, who has his reputation largely wrapped in it, goes and publicly attacks a proprietary software solution as inferior and even harmful, and attacks a software used by a government that has him under investigation, it's ok to question where he is going with this.
There is the added dimension of the pornography issue -- Appelbaum's slam on Ultrasurf for blocking porn distracts from the fact that Tor is notoriously used for viewing pornography, including illegal child pornography. And there's the fact that Appelbaum has published his critique just as yet another criminal case involving the use of Tor for illegal drug sales is being publicized:
http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/045.html
There is no reason to take his concerns public, as the notion that "users need to be warned" isn't sufficient, as most users couldn't read a blog in English anyway, and most users don't care about anonymity, which they lost to their ISP anyway. They care about trying to access blocked sites, and perfection in this effort isn't required.
So this report seems a hostile, politically-motivated attack on his part.
What's important in the fight for Internet freedom are the following principles of non-coercion:
o no one should be forced or brow-beaten into using open-source software; proprietary software is ok to use. If your opensource software is demonstrably better, it will sell itself without you having to artificially level the playing field with constant ideological attacks
o no one who produces proprietary software solutions should be bullied into having to discuss their flaws openly or be forcibly outed as to their flaws; it merely helps give ideas to authoritarian governments and doesn't really help users.
o if you don't like proprietary software, you don't have to wage a jihad against it, you can make your own opensource software that is supposedly better
o pluralism is the best defense against authoritarianism, not everyone being forced to go to "the best" circumvention tool or "the ISP that secures your privacy". It's precisely when the market is open with a variety of options that authoritarian is undermined
o software does not have to be perfect to largely achieve its goal -- 1/99 binary thinking is a killer of freedom
o people have the right to be wrong about software -- an open society requires that right to be wrong and to float contrary hypotheses even if they are incorrect, politically or otherwise
o you don't have to be technically capable to criticize software that profoundly influences all of us as we increasingly move our lives on line.
My thoughts:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/04/jacob-appelbaums-obfuscation-about-circumvention.html
Catherine Fitzpatrick
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Appelbaum engages in a petulant self-justification on liberationtech and elsewhere, referring to internal communications supposedly found from Ultrasurf that called him "anti-American" -- he wants to ring that chime for all its worth because then he can make Ultrasurf's people look like McCarthyites.
That's arrant bullshit, as it's ok to call out his questionable motives without being some sort of McCarthyite. "Anti-American" isn't the point at all. People can criticize their own government and not be unpatriotic. But they can't hide behind *that* liberal value and expect that their motivations are therefore exempt from discussion. They aren't. He's under investigation by prosecutors. He may be related to a crime. Therefore he is fighting back, and it's in his interests to try to portray himself as an innocent victim and the US government as evil. He hates it that there are other people in this business of Internet freedom who have very different views and values than he does, and he wants to attack them -- they are infidels. He'd like to portray himself as a Brave Freedom Fighter, and as a Tragically Misunderstood Artist. He's neither; he's an unaccountable punk.
Questioning his motives isn't calling him "anti-American" or claiming that people can't criticize America. It's engaging in precisely the kind of critical free discourse that he himself claims to uphold. Critics aren't patriotic; they can criticize their country precisely because it is free. But that doesn't mean they aren't exempt from moral opprobation, or exempt from criticism as unaccountable, deceptive, and manipulative -- all features he has manifested time and again.
PS Ultrasurf has now published a response.
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