Civil Liberties Minute

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Upcoming talks

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Urgent action items

• US citizens: phone each of your senators and say this (in your own words).

  Stop the attacks on government agencies that Congress has established and the gutting of crucial programs that Congress has already funded.

  Congress sets the budget — not the president and not the hateful rich. I urge you to treat this like the constitutional crisis it is by stopping business as usual in the Senate until Trump and Musk back down.

  If no one picks up, please leave a message — it'll count!

  If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

• US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and call on them to protect FEMA from plans to abolish it or greatly cut its funding. Climatic disasters are increasing, and will continue to increase as long as we keep increasing greenhouse gases in the air. FEMA will need more funding than it needs now.

  If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

• US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the corrupter's inauguration fund.

  If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

• US citizens: phone our senators and call on them to stop Elon Musk's Coup. Call 202-688-0628.

  Free Press Action posted his campaign but did not include a URL for it, so I a copying the text here.

  ---

  Members of Free Press Action took part in protests across the nation’s capital this week as Elon Musk and his squad of sycophantic tech bros abruptly shuttered federal agencies.

  The richest man on the planet — and what we can only describe as the Elon Youth — invaded the Treasury Department’s Social Security and Medicare database and will exploit that access for the next step in their horrific autocratic scheme.

  Via his unconstrained "Department of Government Efficiency", Musk is blitzing major agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury, and the Departments of Education and Labor. He's forcing out civil servants with actual expertise to make room for his handpicked legion, literally reshaping our government to fit his deranged and dangerous plans.

  Free Press Action has sounded the alarm on Elon Musk for years: From reinstating thousands of neo-Nazis and other extremists on Twitter to gutting the platform’s content moderation rules to helping repressive regimes silence dissidents, Musk has a pattern of spreading hate and harassing critics. But now that he’s spent nearly $300 million to elect Trump — successfully buying his way into the highest echelon of the federal government — he is more dangerous than ever.

  This is a clear authoritarian power grab from a man who twice gave an apparent Nazi salute to cheers from an adoring inaugural crowd. No one elected this man. And yet he won’t take no for an answer.

  Elon is conducting a coup before our eyes and members of the Senate have an obligation to do everything in their power to stop him. Please call your senators at 202-688-0628 before it's too late.

  Here’s a sample script to get you started:

  -------------------

  Hello! My name is [First Name]. I'm a constituent and am calling to ask Sen. [Senator] to stop Elon Musk’s unelected takeover of the federal government.

  I urge you to vote "no" on all nominees and halt the Senate’s business while this power grab is underway, until the separation of powers is restored and you have answers.

  Stop Elon Musk’s coup immediately.
  -------------------

  Elon and his loyalists are running roughshod over the Constitution and our public servants — and everyday people like you will be the ones who pay the price. He's stealing your most sensitive data while threatening basic social services. It's far past time for our elected officials to protect us from this monstrous coup.

  In solidarity,

  All of us at Free Press Action

• *Call on Congress to protect Social Security and Medicare from the muskrat.*

  If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

• I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.

  The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.

  One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.

  If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.

• I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.

• Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.

Recording of Guantanamero

There Ought to Be a Law

• A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.

  Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.

  Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.

• The regulation of toxic chemicals in the US is hamstrung by laws that enable companies to keep their use and their presence in any place secret.

  The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.

  Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.

  But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.

  Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.

  Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.

• *China-owned British Steel said to have requested £600m of taxpayer support.*

  Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.

  These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.

  With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.

• California is proposing an interesting approach towards antisocial media platforms.

  It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)

  However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!

  If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.

  Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.

  AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.

Quotes

Here are some quotations that I particularly like.

Most recent Political Notes and News Items

You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.

Facebook VS Linux distros
14 February 2025

Users report that Facebook blocks posting about "Linux". That implicitly also blocks posting about GNU, when people erroneously treat GNU as part of "Linux".

I would like to see first-hand and journalistic reporting about this. I can't test it myself since I absolutely refuse to be used by Facebook in any fashion.

Extreme weather whiplashing, S. BRA
14 February 2025

*Intense heatwave in southern Brazil [Rio Grande do Sul] forces schools to suspend return.*

USAid food stewardship imperiled
14 February 2025

*Nearly $500m of food aid at risk of spoilage after [the wrecker's] USAid cuts.*

NSA blinding itself, deleting web pages
14 February 2025

The NSA is now blinding itself to concerns of justice and/or rational thought, by ordering the deletion of web pages that use the terms "injustice" or " This policy threatens to wipe discussions of whether policies are just or unjust, and discussions of whether certain arguments are valid or not.

The deletion campaign is intended to wipe anything that relates to the diversity movement, and recognizes that some occurrences of words on the target list may be legitimate even to the magat mind. But judging each of the occurrences individually is an enormous job, so there will be blanket deletion at least at first.

Imagine pages discussing the inclusion of certain words on the deletion list. Those discussions might get deleted because of the word "inclusion".

Urgent: Phone senators with this message
14 February 2025

US citizens: phone each of your senators and say this (in your own words).

Stop the attacks on government agencies that Congress has established and the gutting of crucial programs that Congress has already funded.

Congress sets the budget — not the president and not the hateful rich. I urge you to treat this like the constitutional crisis it is by stopping business as usual in the Senate until Trump and Musk back down.

If no one picks up, please leave a message — it'll count!

If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121

Hostage release issues, ISR
14 February 2025

A few days ago, HAMAS accused Israel of violating the cease fire terms, and said it would delay the next release of hostages until Israel started complying.

The alleged violations are numerous and of many kinds. The details are described in this article, and some are independently confirmed.

A report attributed to HAMAS appears as two images in the article. If they do not appear, each image's space has a link to visit it,

The corrupter has done nothing to pressure Israel to keep its side of the agreement, but instead threatens HAMAS, demanding it disregard Israel's violations.

You can't expect a corrupt man to serve as an honest broker in making a deal, because he will not honestly insist that both sides keep the deal.

As we look at the horrible events of the war in Gaza, let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.

Iron Man film as propaganda
13 February 2025

How the Iron Man film of 2008 was designed as propaganda for the US military.

Donors of scapegoater used Mexican workers illegally
13 February 2025

*Major Donors [for the scapegoater] who complained of immigrant "invasion" used Mexican workers illegally, sources allege.*

It would not surprise me if they were hypocritical. Why wouldn't they be?

Falsified environmental reports by oil and gas firms
13 February 2025

*Oil and gas firms operating in Colorado falsified environmental impact reports.*

Is anyone threatened with prison for this?

I expect not — and that weakness of enforcement is why it happens so much. Millions of lives will depend in the future on how we enforce environmental regulations. Inadequate enforcement is as dangerous as inadequate rules.

Wrecker and muskrat misunderstandings of genetics
13 February 2025

The wrecker and the muskrat use two different naive misunderstandings of genetics to advocate eugenics.

Starmer one of Labour's most rightwing members
13 February 2025

*Keir Starmer is one of Labour's most rightwing members of parliament, according to a study of the political positions of the MPs from every major party.*

This gives some hope that a defeat could make the party replace him.

Misleading use of term "antisemitism"
13 February 2025

Various political camps weaponize the term "antisemitism" misleadingly, and that obstructs campaigning against the real wrong of bigotry against Jews.

Ukraine invasion used to influence the wrecker
13 February 2025

Historian Timothy Snyder argues that Putin invaded Ukraine as a way to use his influence with the wrecker, supposing the latter became president of the US.

He also explains the importance of refusing to "obey in advance". Even if bigger and richer people are bowing down and obeying, we must continue to refuse.

"It's particularly distressing that it's the billionaires who have the media outlets, so who are in some sense the most powerful. Like, what do you have to be afraid of? Why don’t you do something interesting that the historians will remember you for instead? But I also want to say it’s not surprising. The reason we have Lesson One of On Tyranny is because we can’t count on the non-regime-proximate oligarchs to do the right thing. Like the regime-proximate oligarchs, like Elon Musk, they're doing the wrong thing."

Infection by parasites in Mississippi Delta
13 February 2025

*Infrastructure neglect and poverty lead to [infection by] parasites in the Mississippi Delta.*

Frozen potato market in the US
13 February 2025

The frozen potato market in the US is dominated by just four companies, and the result (whether explicitly planned or not) is price fixing.

UK Chinese oppose mega-embassy, London
13 February 2025

Protesters in London opposed plans to allow China to build a large embassy, warning that it would be used for espionage and for punishing Chinese expats in the UK. It could even be used to imprison Chinese expats when they come in for an appointment, and perhaps even refugee dissidents.

Chinese embassies in various countries threaten residents Chinese people living in those countries, to stop them from criticizing China.

*China tops list of countries trying to silence exiled dissidents over past decade, study shows. Russia, Turkey and Egypt also among worst perpetrators of transnational repression around the globe.*

Art by generative systems contentious
13 February 2025

The LLM-excused copyright grab is advancing with a lawsuit against the sale of art generated using a generative video model.

Using generative systems to generate text that does not appear to be fiction has the problem that people believe it is truthful. Likewise using them to generate art that appears to be a photo.

That problem does not arise for text or visual art that is presented as, or appears to be, fiction or art.

Hints on fate of US payments systems
12 February 2025

*An internal email reviewed by WIRED calls DOGE staff's access to federal payments systems "the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced."*

A federal judge temporarily blocked the muskrat's men from accessing personal data held by the US Treasury.

The permanent decision will be made later.

Rulings on Treasury and on USAID
12 February 2025

*Federal judge blocks [the muskrat's men from] access to critical Treasury payment system.*

R/W access to Treasury payments system
12 February 2025

*[Engineer] Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.*

His "ties" with the muskrat are clearly active, because The only way he could have got this power is because the muskrat gave the command.

Elez resigned from the muskrat's employ after he was linked to flaming racist posting, but the muskrat now says he will rehire Elez.

After all, why would a Nazi sympathizer like the muskrat object to racism?

The four factors of the apocalypse:
   global heating, global hating,
   global eating, global mating.

Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.

E-books

Non-oppressive Commercial E-books

Don't use Facebook

Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.

Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.

Boycott Harry Potter Books, Movies, etc.

Internet Music EULAS

Business Supremacy Treaties

Countries to Stay Away From

No national identity cards

I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.

Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.

India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number in a grand act of oppression.

Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.

Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.

Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many services use this card to identify people.

Norway will impose a national biometric ID card.

Ireland - national ID card by stealth.

ACLU: the five dangers of national ID cards.

Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.

Borders

Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.

Flight connections

Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.

The Lifelong Activist

People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.

I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.

Disclosure: I am friends with the author.

Bob Chassell

Solidarity Economy and Free Software

Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.

Falkvinge articles

I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles. As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.