Hi all:

Freedom of any sort is far much more important than authoritarian
mechanisms devised to stop some sort of cybercrime.

Having this said, we have to contemplate now the nature of online
freedom and cybercrime. It is not that these are in the same order of
magnitude as real life freedom and real life crime, the last case you
can ultimately loose your life and that of your loved ones. Yet these
are as important as any other, because ultimately, without online
freedom one cannot be free in the real world, while if one suffers
from cybercrime, it will suffer from crime nevertheless.

The balance we now have online (and some may argue that we have not)
is undoubtedly necessary, as it is our constant awareness to things
like the ones we saw recently Verisign attempting that keep this
balance as it is. No single actor should be given the power to disrupt
this balance. Cybercrime should be fought as real crime is: with
preventive measures at first and ultimately, and in proved cases with
force.

And this is where everything gets complicated. The concept of crime in
the cyberworld is fuzzy (it may differ from country to country), and
more so, the concept of what is adequate prevention and adequate
force. Finally, how do we prove that this person or this site has been
partner in a crime.

The Internet has faced us with many challenges, one of them being to
be able to handle a world wide structure of communications using the
very limited tools our local laws and local culture provide us.

As actors in the cyberworld, we know that we are allowed to engage in
behaviours that we would not have in the real world. In fact, for many
of us, the cyberworld may be perceived as some kind of psychological
and social escape.

All this to say that, the freedom in the real world is not comparable
to the freedom in the cyberworld, and true to the exposure of crime,
because in the cyberworld we lack the sort of inhibition mechanisms
that we have in the real world. And this has been perceived as a good
thing, a feature instead of a bug.

So, and I have said this previously in the list, we have to rely on
the base values that are common to all of us, and better expressed in
the charter of Human Rights, to defend the balance that we have now,
while we must also not cease to look for a better control stucture for
the Internet, one that does allow us to, safeguarding the base values,
be more efficient.

Best regards to all,

Nuno

On 15 October 2011 03:53, nhklein <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks, Dan.
>
> I would even re-phrase your sentence saying "we want to reduce cybercrime
> *while also* protecting free speech " - having some experience suffering
> from both, I would rather prefer to say: "we want to protect free speech
> reduce *while also* reducing cybercrime."
>
> Agreed about this sequence of priorities?
>
> Norbert
>
>
> On 10/15/2011 06:00 AM, Dan Krimm wrote:
>>
>> One may of course respect a diversity of views, but when a single policy
>> requires implementation according to the principles of a single view,
>> there needs to be some resolution of diversity to (if possible) a
>> consensus position.
>>
>> I guess then it would help to define what "as much as possible" means --
>> to me that sounded like "at any cost" (including the unfounded impugning
>> of innocents, since that inevitably will happen if you want to address
>> *all* malfeasance, however defined).
>>
>> If what you really meant was "as much as possible without stomping on the
>> rights of innocents without power" then I would begin to agree with you in
>> principle, though the devil is in the details because there is a trade-off
>> required here.
>>
>> The fundamental question is: how do we want to arrange that trade-off?
>> That is to say, we want to reduce cybercrime *while also* protecting free
>> speech.  To express only one half of this trade-off is to miss the real
>> issue before us, because we cannot have both in perfect degree.
>>
>> The fundamental difference of opinion here seems to be which goal has
>> priority, security or expression?  Ideally we would want "balance" here,
>> but until we can find that balance, how do we proceed in the near term?
>> Personally, I side with Wendy.
>>
>> Best,
>> Dan
>
> --
> A while ago, I started a new blog:
>
> ...thinking it over... after 21 years in Cambodia
> http://www.thinking21.org/
>
> continuing to share reports and comments from Cambodia.
>
> Norbert Klein
> [log in to unmask]
> Phnom Penh / Cambodia
>