2013/12/30 Binand Sethumadhavan binand@gmail.com:
On 30 December 2013 12:40, Praveen A pravi.a@gmail.com wrote:
social media [...] is a powerful and critical tool for political organizing
I wrote out a fairly detailed response, but I eventually realized that what I want to say sums up to this:
A message that goes, "I have this super-private social network for you, use it, find a political cause and organize yourselves" does not seem right to me. IMO, the approach needs to work the other way - build up outrage within the people and then channelize that outrage, using the right online and offline tools.
Well, that has been the way people did things. Where you just depended on the available tools. The time has come where such critical tools can't be trusted with a few corporations only looking for profits.
Watch this talk by Eben https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BSLBvwyUEs
Text https://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-fosdem-keynote.htm...
"Software is what the 21st century is made of. What steel was to the economy of the 20th century, what steel was to the power of the 20th century, what steel was to the politics of the 20th century, software is now. It is the crucial building block, the component out of which everything else is made, and, when I speak of everything else, I mean of course freedom, as well as tyranny, as well as business as usual, as well as spying on everybody for free all the time.
In other words, the very composition of social life, the way it works or doesn’t work for us, the way it works or doesn’t work for those who own, the way it works or doesn’t work for those who oppress, all now depends on software."
You can either wish for the right tools to appear from nowhere or set out to build it yourself. This choice is with everyone.
As for encryption, yes I do. My public key dates from '01, and I have had an email certificate (mostly for professional purposes) for at least 8 years now. Just that I don't find many of my emails worth encrypting. :-)
But how many percentage of your emails are encrypted? If we take a poll in this user group, how many would even know how to encrypt their emails if they need to?
Binand