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 >