Fitting the battle of life

Yes, terrorists are so rife within society these days - much more prevalent, much more organised, much better funded and equipped than the IRA ever was, of course -  that we need a draft of new legislation to protect us poor, vulnerable and innocent citizens from them, by which we mean giving up all our privacy and subjecting our private data to the security services so they can analyse our movements around London using Oyster cards to determine that we are indeed poor, vulnerable and innocent, not nasty horrible terrorists.

As for ‘cyber war’, surely they could come up with a better moniker than that? I’ve not heard the term cyberspace since reading Neuromancer, I swear.

Source: MI5 seeks powers to trawl records in new terror hunt

Before I start, let me just clarify: here I’m going to be talking about open source software, rather than any definition of ‘free’, i.e. simply software where the source code is available to look it (regardless of the cost of that software, and regardless of any limitations on the user to amend that code). This isn’t because of any disdain for the FSF or any other group, but simply because I don’t want to get drawn into a debate over whether you have a ‘right’ to do what you want with software you own/license/use (another time, perhaps).

Ok, so in this post I want to argue that we should be using open source software (i.e. OS, drivers, and any other applications we might think about using) in order better to protect our own rights, primarily the right to privacy, which comes under Article 8 of the ECHR.  My argument basically concerns ‘hidden’ functions of software - i.e. things software does that you don’t know it is doing/have no way of knowing (without incessantly watching your outgoing internet traffic, for instance) it is doing.

Let’s get rid of the ‘users should read the EULA’ argument as well, because it’s just rubbish to be frank. While yes, everyone who clicks the ‘Yes, I agree’ button declares that they have read the EULA and agree to be bound by its terms, the pragmatic view is that actually very few people do. Let’s take the worst case scenario: you’re setting up a new computer, installing all the software you want to use. How long would it take to read all those EULAs properly?

Secondly, software features shouldn’t be hidden in an EULA. If EULAs should exist at all, they should be there to say what you as a user may or may not do with the software, not to tell you in tiny writing what the software will be doing behind your back. Any gathering of statistical information about end-users should also be a transparent option for those end-users, not built into (and hidden in) a license agreement.  Software companies do not have a right to invade our privacy unless we make a clear and transparent (a tautology if ever I saw one) choice to give up some of your personal information.

So far I’ve been arguing against EULAs and ‘hidden’ features of software. Where does open source come into this, even if we installed laws to prevent the former?

I’m not one who has great belief in the kindness of humanity. There will always be people with malicious intent (whether intended maliciously or not, if that makes sense). We cannot rid ourselves of privacy-invading software so long as that software remains closed. Given that there have been some very worrying cases of closed software invading privacy (and doing so quite deceptively), we cannot trust closed software. Only open software guarantees our right to privacy, simply because we can see what it’s doing. Even if an end-user doesn’t have the requisite knowledge to read millions of lines of code that tell him what’s going on in his computer, someone somewhere does, and will be reading it.

We wouldn’t have faith in a closed judiciary, because we need to know that fundamental rights are being protected, and you can’t do that when trials happen behind closed doors. So why admit the possibility of rights infringements by using closed software?