The court, pursuant to a lawsuit filed by Mario Gonzales of Spain, ordered Google to remove from its search results a 1998 newspaper article concerning the public auction of Gonzales’s repossessed home. Gonzales did not claim the article was untrue or inaccurate. Instead, he asserted that information pertaining to him (in particular, information which might disadvantage him, justifiably or not, if made easily available to others) should be placed under his exclusive control with respect to Internet search results.

Thus was born the “right to be forgotten” — or forgotten by Google, at any rate.  Google is cooperating: They’ve set up an online claim/application process for those who want specific pieces of information removed from their public search indices. The court’s criterion for evaluating these claims is that the information is question is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,” although that raises the further conundrum of who decides questions of adequacy and relevance.

This case and its outcome touch on several issues with which civil and political libertarians, not to mention anarchists like myself, have wrestled for some time. While it seems incontestable that “privacy” is a valued thing, it’s not obvious just how market processes might produce similar outcomes with respect to claims like Gonzales’s versus the way a powerful state with long-armed courts enforces such claims.

In fact, for those who believe “privacy rights” extend as far as the court’s ruling seems to claim (or even farther), the ruling might itself constitute an argument against anti-statism or even “limited government” (a court in Luxembourg enforcing the demands of a plaintiff from Spain against a company in the United States with respect to the informational content of a global network doesn’t seem very “limited,” does it?).

To me, the ruling is evidence of the opposite proposition. The fact that markets would probably not produce the same results as governments have produced means that governments are going too far and that “privacy rights,” if they exist at all, do not justly extend so far as this ruling implies.

In this specific case, the claim seems to be less one of privacy and more one of “intellectual property.” Gonzales doesn’t claim that Google peeked through his window and saw him writing down notice of that 1998 auction. He acknowledges that it was, at the time, a publicly reported event. He’s just claiming that now, 16 years later, he “owns” knowledge of that event and is entitled to control it, while Google doesn’t and isn’t.

We are at the point where efforts to protect privacy necessarily navigate between the perceived Scylla of “information wants to be free” and the Charybdis of state-created “intellectual property” monopolies. In my opinion, the idea of information freedom as Scylla is largely fantasy. The power of the state to compel “forgetfulness” is far more dangerous than any unintended or unwanted disclosure of truth could possibly be.

Lo stato brasiliano vuole acquisire i dati biometrici di oltre 140 milioni di elettori in modo da rendere le prossime elezioni “sicure”. Per arrivare a ciò si pensa che sia necessario catalogare le impronte digitali di tutte le dita, la fotografia e la firma di ogni persona. Il nuovo certificato elettorale riflette queste informazioni. Senza questo certificato, lo stato non può imporre l’embargo economico contro l’individuo, che a questo punto non potrà più richiedere un passaporto per scappare dal paese.

Il certificato elettorale non è che uno dei tanti strumenti di identificazione e sorveglianza nelle mani del governo brasiliano: la carta d’identità (che tutti dovrebbero portare sempre con sé), il CPF (il codice fiscale brasiliano), la patente di guida, il certificato che attesta il servizio militare o l’esenzione (obbligatorio per gli uomini), il libretto di lavoro, il passaporto, il certificato di nascita, il certificato di matrimonio…

Uno pensa che il governo ha già abbastanza informazioni sui suoi soggetti ma, apparentemente, il bisogno di rendere “sicura” la “celebrazione della democrazia” vuole che la gente dia informazioni ancora più personali alle autorità. Se occorrono tutte queste informazioni per rendere il voto sicuro, non è che le elezioni passate erano una frode? Chissà.

Ovviamente è tutta una finzione, una cortina di fumo che serve a nascondere l’ennesimo passo verso la concentrazione del potere totalitario nelle mani dello stato. La scusa relativamente innocua delle elezioni sicure è solo un precedente messo su per garantire allo stato un potere di controllo della popolazione ancora più ampio e, più in là, chiedere ulteriori informazioni private.

Niente di tutto ciò è necessario. Neanche l’obbligo di voto è necessario. Lo stato continua a far finta che l’obiettivo sia garantire elezioni esenti da frodi quando, in realtà, potrebbe benissimo abolire l’obbligo di voto e smetterla di punire chi non vota. Senza l’obbligo di voto, le ragioni alla base della schedatura degli elettori sono irrilevanti.

La più grande ironia è che il Brasile avrà, teoricamente, un sistema di identificazione sicurissimo e, allo stesso tempo, un sistema di voto elettronico immune da contestazioni. È praticamente impossibile sapere se la macchinetta elettorale non è soggetta a frode, visto che non esiste un sistema indipendente di verifica e revisione, né esiste una ricevuta per l’elettore. La macchinetta è una scatola nera, contestata solo da frange estreme dell’élite, come Leonel Brizola, deriso e disprezzato ogni volta che sollevava dubbi al proposito.

Questo è il sistema elettorale perfetto per la classe di governo: Combina il massimo della sorveglianza, l’obbligo di voto che garantisce un’affluenza altissima, e nessuna possibilità di verifica e conteggio indipendenti. Legittimità totale dello stato, dunque, e nessun dubbio sul suo potere.

Il sogno del totalitarismo tropicale morbido.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

The Brazilian state intends to acquire the biometric data from more than 140 million voters in order to make our next elections “secure.” For that goal, it is supposedly necessary to collect, from every person, the fingerprints from all fingers, their picture and signature. The new voter registration card is produced reflecting the newly collected information. Without this card, the state directs an economic embargo against the individual — who is no longer able to get a passport to flee from the country.

The voter card is but one of the many tools of identification and surveillance the Brazilian government possesses: ID (which should be carried at all times by every person), CPF (the registration to the federal revenue service), driver’s license, military enlisting or dispensation certificate (mandatory for men), employment record book, passport, birth certificate, marriage certificate …

One would think the government should have sufficient information about its subjects, but, apparently, the need to make voting “secure” for the “celebration of democracy” requires people to turn over even more of their private data to the authorities. If so much information is necessary for us to have secure voting, is it possible that our previous elections have been a fraud? We are left to wonder.

Of course, all of this is but a lie, a smokescreen designed to distract from the fact that this is another step towards total power concentration in the state. The relatively innocuous purpose of guaranteeing clean elections is just a precedent put in place so that the government can amass even more power to control the population and, down the line, demand even more private information.

None of this is necessary. It is also not necessary that voting should continue to be mandatory in Brazil. The state continues to pretend that its purpose is to guarantee elections free of fraud when, in fact, it could easily just end the obligation to vote and stop punishing those who do not. Without mandatory voting, the argument to relist the voting population is irrelevant.

The biggest Brazilian irony is that we will have, theoretically, an extremely safe identification system while, on the other hand, we have an electronic voting system immune to contestation. It is virtually impossible to know if the electronic ballot box is not prone to fraud, since there are no independent means of verification and auditing, and no physical voting receipts. The Brazilian electronic voting is a black box, whose only opponents are those on the fringes of the ruling elite, such as Leonel Brizola, who are promptly laughed at and scorned should they raise any doubts over it.

This is a perfect electoral system for the ruling class: It combines maximum surveillance, mandatory voting which guarantees very large turnout, and no possibility of independent verification and recounting. Therefore, we have total legitimacy for the state and no questioning of its power.

It is the dream of the gentle tropical totalitarianism.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Totalitarismo Identificativo.

Salon.com columnist Tom Watson, in an article on the upcoming “Stop Watching Us” rally in Washington, D.C., has excoriated all of his progressive friends for supporting something that libertarians — surprise! — also support.

He writes, “Some of the biggest names in civil liberties and digital freedom of information will be there, including the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FreePress and FreedomWorks. […] Yet I cannot support this coalition or the rally. It is fatally compromised by the prominent leadership and participation of the Libertarian Party and other libertarian student groups; their hard-core ideology stands in direct opposition to almost everything I believe in as a social democrat.”

This is like a child on the playground refusing to play with the other kids because “cooties.” Also, isn’t FreedomWorks supposed to be a Tea Party organization?

His main ideological disagreement with the “ickier” sponsors of the Stop Watching Us rally? “…[opposition to] all gun control laws and public healthcare, [support of] the government shutdown, [dismissal of] public education, [opposition to] organized labor, [and] favors the end of Social Security as we know it.”

Remember, this is an anti-surveillance rally we’re talking about here. These other issues, while absolutely argument-worthy in a variety of other contexts, really have nothing to do with the focus of the rally at all. Of course …

@onekade: To my libertarian friends: when we win and demolish the surveillance/police/military state, I will fight you on social welfare SO HARD.

Right back at you.

Anyway, Watson continues:

Going ‘all in’ with the libertarian purists is a fatal and unnecessary compromise; reform is clearly needed, but the presence of anti-government laissez-faire wingers at the beating heart of the privacy movement will surely sour the very political actors that movement desperately needs to make actual – and not symbolic, link bait – progress in its fight.

And to whom is he referring?

“I speak of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party, of course.”

Oh.

Perhaps, in other circles, Watson is currently being lauded for taking a fearless and surely unpopular stance against the evilest of evil Bad Guys in the land (yes, even more evil than the Republican Anarchists that definitely exist). Really, though, it just looks like he’s dueling with windmills.

At one point, Watson writes,

Political change requires choices and compromise, as well as action. If too many young organizers focus entirely on privacy and security and abandon the front lines on crucial economic issues, civil rights and inequality, the rights of workers, criminal justice reform, environmental regulation, and the pursuit social justice, their gains will be too little and society’s loss too great.

Or libertarianism itself will rise, and our loss of liberty will be greater still. That’s because libertarianism is a form of authoritarianism disguised in a narrow slice of civil liberties. In trumpeting the all-knowing, ever wise wonders of the totally free and unencumbered market, it bestows all the power on those with access to capital. You may say we’re there already, but under a pure libertarian system, things would get much worse.

What? “Libertarianism is a form of authoritarianism disguised in a narrow slice of civil liberties?” That’s rich coming from a proud member of a party that aims to break our legs so it can provide the crutches.

What’s sad here is that Watson is so misinformed regarding libertarianism in general (we won’t even get into left- or thick libertarianism here) that he has no idea that there are in fact libertarian writers and thinkers and activists talking about the issues he mentions — people like Radley Balko, Stephan Kinsella, Kevin Carson, Cathy Reisenwitz, Anna Morgenstern and Angela Keaton.

And let’s not forget that many people connected to this event that Watson admires — such as Glenn Greenwald — have written for, say, the oft-maligned Cato Unbound, and have been asked to speak at libertarian events before. Needless to say, their standing in the broader progressive community, and even among the radical left, has not been tarnished. His concern, while touching, is probably pretty unfounded.

Watson is right, though, on at least one thing: The “I’ve got mine,” borderline-nihilist attitude he displays at any prospect of working with people he might dislike for six hours has no place in a burgeoning movement that aims — at the very least — to stop the government from using its power to spy on us.

As the investigation into how Snowden’s acts of rebellion were carried out, the NSA has reportedly uncovered that he accessed the documents via an internal website of the agency itself. The documents were posted to the internal website, and Snowden was able to access them easily with his security clearance. Under the radar of his supervisor he easily made digital copies of what he found.

Since the NSA data was leaked by Snowden the agency has apparently taken steps to limit employee options for storing data in an effort to avoid future leaks. The question, of course, is whether or not such efforts will truly have an effect. If they do stop leakers, will they serve to inhibit the overall communication process between what is already a mess of bureaucratic agencies? In other words, are their systems permanently disrupted no matter what they do?

Perhaps it goes even deeper, into something that has become pervasive. Kevin Carson’s Two, Three, Many Snowdens! has us look at an ever growing class of workers that are rebellious, anti-authoritarian hackers, and who happen to be getting jobs in government security.

On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after some aspect of my security. To do its job the firm may need some information about me that I don’t readily give out. It’s up to me to decide if I like the trade-off. Nothing wrong there. In a freed market, firms would compete for my business, and competition would pressure firms to ask only for information required for  their services. As a result, a minimum amount of information would be requested. If I thought even that was too much, I would be free to choose to look after my security myself. If I did business with a firm that violated the terms of our contract, I would have recourse. At the very least I could terminate the relationship and strike up another or none at all.

In other words, in the freed market I would find the right “balance” for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn’t be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the “balance” differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Actually, we can say that there would be no trade-off between privacy and security at all, because the information would be voluntarily disclosed by each individual on mutually acceptable terms. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to call what the firm does an “intrusion.”

But that sort of situation is not what Barack Obama, Mike Rogers, Peter King, and their ilk mean when they tell us that “we” need to find the right balance between security and privacy. They mean they will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the “security” side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That’s how these things work. (See “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.”) Unlike in a freed market, what the government does is intrusive, because it is done without our consent and often without our knowledge. (I hope no one will say that voting or continuing to live in the United States constitutes consent to invasions of privacy.)

Of course, our rulers can’t really set things to the security side of the spectrum because the game is rigged. When we give up privacy — or, rather, when our rulers take it — we don’t get security in return; we get a more intrusive state, which means we get more insecurity. Roderick Long made a similar point on his blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire:

In the wake of the recent NSA revelations, there’s increased talk about the need to “balance” freedom against security. I even see people recycling Larry Niven’s law that freedom + security = a constant.

Nonsense. What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with — by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?

You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.

Likewise, where the state is concerned, you can’t trade off privacy against security becausethey’re exactly the same thing. Anyone who reads dystopian novels knows that government access to personal information about people serves to inhibit and control them. That’s insecurity.

Now it will no doubt be said that while in one respect we are more insecure when “our” government spies on us (the scare quotes are to indicate that I think the U.S. government is an occupying power), in return we gain security against threats from others, say, al-Qaeda. But I see no prima facie case for favoring official domestic threats over freelance foreign threats. I’m reminded of what Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, says in The Patriot: “Would you tell me please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.”

Some foreigners might want to come here and kill Americans, but the U.S. government has been no slouch in that department. How many Americans who were sent by “their” government to fight in foreign wars never came back? How many came back with their lives shattered? The number dwarfs the number of casualties from terrorism.

Throw in the fact that some foreigners want to kill Americans only because Obama’s government (like George W. Bush’s and others before it) is killing them, and the phony nature of this alleged protection is clear.

Obama & Co. say they welcome a public debate about calibrating the trade-off between security and privacy. No, they don’t. They wouldn’t even be going through the motions had it not been for the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom they are determined to lock away for life — if they catch him. A true debate is the last thing they want. What they want is a simulated debate in order to quiet public concern about spying.

As Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic points out, Obama’s new directive creating the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is charged with “accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.” Unlike his public statement, the official directive says nothing about preventing violations of privacy and related abuses.

Friedersdorf comments,

What happened to those goals? The closest the Monday directive comes to them is an instruction to remember “our need to maintain the public trust” as one of many policy considerations.

Forget whether abuses are happening, or whether privacy rights are in fact being protected. [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper need only probe the perception of trust. Remember, this is a man with a demonstrated willingness to tell lies under oath when he decides doing so serves the greater good.

We should reject the phony debate, the phony trade-off, and the phony “balance” that will be struck. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between the American people and the U.S. government. The sooner we learn that, the safer we’ll be.

1) Within days, if not hours, of  Google Glass‘s release to the general public, hackers will “jailbreak” the hardware, allowing it to run any “Glassware” users desire and can create or find online; and

2) An independent developer community will emerge to create those applications , whether Google wants them to or not.

As a matter of fact, I’ll double down and assert that both of these predictions are already in the process of coming true, even while Glass is in its “Explorer Program” phase, and that Google’s announcements  this week that it won’t allow facial recognition apps or “adult” fare for Glass will only add fuel to the fire.

Porn, of course, is any device’s “killer app.” Enough people want it, and want it badly enough, that they’ll either have it from their devices or get OTHER devices to have it from. Above and beyond the usual — pedestrian porting of dirty pictures to Glass format, just like they were ported from print magazine to computer monitor way back when — I can’t imagine that more than a year will go by before there’s Glassware to predictively, imaginatively, visually undress whomever the user happens to be looking at on the street, on the dance floor, etc.

We don’t have to like it. It’s going to happen whether we like it or not, and whether Google likes it or not.

Similarly, facial recognition is the Glass-specific “killer app.” It’s the one thing that the device is so obviously useful for and that people will so obviously want to use it for that there’s just not going to be any stopping it.

The most benign and universal applications are obvious:

You meet someone, you get his or her name, you say “OK, Glass, this is John Doe.” You’ll never have to worry about forgetting a name again.

You want to introduce two people, but can’t be present. “OK, Glass, send John Doe’s facial profile to Joe Smith, with a message to meet him in the food court at noon.”

And so on, and so forth.

Are there more sinister uses for facial recognition? Of course there are. But facial recognition is coming.

Again: We don’t have to like it. It’s coming whether we like it or not, and whether Google likes it or not.

If by some chance Google is able to effectively darken Glass such that it can’t fulfill users’ desire for porn and facial recognition, then something else will come along with clearer vision. You’ll be able to pick up a Google Glass unit at Dollar Tree, like one of those little headphone-radio sets that people buy because they’re going to the beach and don’t want to risk getting sand in their REAL personal stereos.

The press is filled with nods — from Google itself, and from opponents of facial recognition tech — to something called “privacy.”

But privacy, as David Brin has been pointing out for years, just ain’t what it used to be. Absent complete technological collapse, it’s never going to be what it used to be again. If you show yourself in public, the assistive tech to identify you is going to be available. Period. And soon.

Instead of obsessing over the steady advancement of technology and attempting to thwart its potential at the development level, we should direct our efforts toward abolishing institutions which necessarily and murderously abuse that potential.

Technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, and more and more useful.

Political government is getting more and more expensive and less and less tolerable.

One of the two needs to go. And it’s pretty clear which one.

With the ever expanding surveillance systems being employed in the United States and around the world, the ability to use the internet anonymously is becoming increasingly important, especially for activists, or anyone who is not okay with your Search Engine provider, ISP (Internet Service Provider) and your government knowing everything about your internet use. Here, I will go into brief detail about the technical aspects of Tor, give reasons why you should use Tor and finally guide you through the installation of the Tor browser and how to contribute to the network by setting up a relay.

What is Tor?

Tor, formally an acronym for “The Onion Router“, is a distributed proxy network designed to provide anonymity on the web. Much like a VPN (Virtual Private Networks). Tor encrypts your traffic and bounces it through a number of relays before arriving at it’s destination. Preventing third parties from being able to see what you are sending through the network, and where your traffic initially came from. Tor can also be used for servers, to anonymize the physical location of websites, and those who visit them.

How does it work?

There are a number of very in depth resources that explain in a lot of detail how the network works, this is not that. This is a brief guide to introduce you to the concept of onion routing, and if you wish to learn further, there will be a number of links included.

When you attempt to contact a website using the Tor Browser, the Tor client randomly selects 3 nodes from the network. The client then encrypts a message to be sent to the final recipient (e.g a website you want to visit). The encrypted message is sent to the first node, the first node then peels off an initial layer of encryption, revealing where to send the message to the second node, this process is repeated until it reaches the third and final node, also known as the “exit relay”, where the message is unencrypted and sent to the final recipient. The effect of this is to obscure your IP address from the destination server by providing multiple barriers between you and the server. Keep in mind however, personal information that you choose to give to a website, such as in a sign up form, is treated like any other data by the website, it can be looked at by an administrator, or subpoenaed by Law Enforcement, Tor works most effectively if you keep your information private as well as anonymous.

Why should you use it?

Increasingly, governments around the world have become preoccupied with what is known as Total Information Awareness, the ability to track every piece of digital information that we create: financial transactions, instant messages, email, web history, etc. This information can be used to intimidate, harass, or even jail dissidents, journalists and those who may pose some form of nuisance to the government. Many nations have strong controls on what people can search for and view on the internet. Tor allows for the bypassing of these filters, and has been especially useful in Iran, a nation which enjoys extremely high usage of the Tor network.

In the short term, there is little we can do to stop this encroaching surveillance state. But we are able to protect ourselves and others by obscuring as much data as possible. Tor is one such solution. The more people who use Tor, among other things, to browse the web, when they feel it necessary, the less useful our data will be to the government. The more of us who run relays for the Tor network, the faster the system will function for those who need to use it.

Setup

In recent times, attention has been paid to making the use of Tor extremely easy for the less technically proficient, with minimal setup required. The Tor browser bundle can be downloaded from here:

• https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en

This will install the components needed to use the Tor network, including a modified version of Firefox specifically configured for Tor and Vidalia, a graphical front-end that will allow you to configure your Tor settings, including setting up a relay to contribute to the network.

If you do not feel the need to use the Tor browser on your system, but wish to set up a Tor relay, the package can be downloaded by following this link, choosing your operating system, then choosing the Tor Relay Bundle. This will be especially useful on desktop computers, or dedicated computers that run constantly. While a temporary relay does not harm the network, a permanent one is much more useful. When you run a relay from your system, you will be making the Tor network larger and faster. By adding a node, you make the network more distributed, providing for more robust anonymity. You are also spreading the traffic load, increasing the speed of the network.

The Tor Relay bundle can be downloaded from here:

• https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en – Choose your operating system, then “Tor Relay Bundle”.

Setting up the browser is simple, just download the file, extract it to the folder of your choice, then click the “Start Tor Browser” in the folder. Vidalia should start to run, and once it is connected to the network, the browser will open and will notify you if you are successfully running Tor.

If you wish to run a relay along with the browser, go to “set up relay” in Vidalia and check “relay traffic inside the Tor network (non exit relay)”, set how much bandwidth you wish to donate and you are good to go.

If you have installed the relay bundle, the relaying option should be set up automatically, and Vidalia will attempt to run whenever you boot your computer. You may wish to run as an exit relay, but do so at your own risk. If you run as an exit relay, your IP will be what the destination websites see when someone uses your relay, the traffic runs unencrypted from your connection to the destination, and if someone is using Tor for less than savory purposes; spamming, Wikipedia vandalism, child pornography, etc. You run the risk of having your IP banned from many websites due to actions of others, have your computer seized or even be arrested by law enforcement. If you wish to run an exit node, please follow this guide from the Tor Project to mitigate the risks involved. I must emphasize however, these are not issues if you run a relay inside the network, as all traffic you send and receive will be encrypted.

I hope this guide has been useful and convinced those not already using Tor to give it a try. If you do set up a relay, please let us know in the comments section.

There are further resources available for a more in depth look at:

• https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en
• https://www.torproject.org/dist/manual/short-user-manual_en.xhtml
• https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki