Security quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 18, 2016 19:27 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377)
In reply to: Security quotes of the week by farnz
Parent article: Security quotes of the week

Exactly my point - if I engage in a particularly violent form of political speech, my freedom of speech isn't even considered as part of the court process (nor should it be - that way lies madness). Thus, there are limits to "Freedom of Speech", where you simply declare a form of speech "not speech" in order to escape the question.

Your choice of the word/phrase "_escaping_ the question" seems disingenuous to me. One could as easily and correctly characterize it as "_address_ the question". The problem I see with the status quo is that politicians and legislators and activists and speakers of all kinds would like to pretend their way out of this new equation-

A) The Internet facilitated an exponential grown in speech (via decrease in price/cost), much like the printing press did.

B) With that exponentially greater set of speech, an exponentially greater set of judicial overhead is necessary to maintain the same balance of correctly judged Free Speech versus Criminal Speech.

My perception is that a lot of politicians and businesspeople have been riding the wave of (A), while doing their best to ignore (B). Same basic equation as the (BS buzzword) IoT manufacturers trying to sell new forms of utility without bothering to consider the resulting new forms of (in)security. However I think that in an Ayn Randian sense, reality will continue to confront this problem in the form of unpleasant side effects.

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Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 8:13 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (12 responses)

I've taken an extreme case, because extremes force you to think about your reasoning. However, once you've said that something I do is enough to convert my speech into not-speech (in this case violence pushes that line), what else is an acceptable reason to convert my free speech into not-speech?

While I disagree fundamentally with mathstuf, he's espousing a consistent libertarian position, where the NAP is the core principle, and freedom of speech is merely one way in which the NAP manifests; thus, for him, there is no contradiction - there is no core belief in freedom of speech, it's just something that naturally falls out, complete with the common sense limits, as a consequence of following a much more important principle.

However, if you're trying to say that freedom of speech is a right, and then having to define things as "not-speech" in order to avoid invoking that right, then you get into a thorny mess - who gets to define what is and is not speech, and why them?

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 19:46 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (4 responses)

However, if you're trying to say that freedom of speech is a right, and then having to define things as "not-speech" in order to avoid invoking that right, then you get into a thorny mess - who gets to define what is and is not speech, and why them?

Judges. Because that is their job.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 19:54 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

OK, and then what legal guidance does a judge have such that they aren't just making decisions from the seat of their pants? Is it "not-speech" if it offends a thin-skinned person to the point of tears? Is it "not-speech" if your contract with your communications provider does not explicitly say it's speech? Is it "not-speech" if I'm richer than you and offended by your statements? Worse, is it "not-speech" if you're complaining to an ISP's abuse desk, but "speech" if an ISP's customer sends you data that you don't want?

The normal job of a judge is to take the law, and the situation before them, and to twist the two together such that any reasonable person would agree that they've correctly applied the law to the situation; however, if you have a right to freedom of speech, but things that are "bad" are not-speech, what stops the judge deciding that as a matter of law, running a server on a "residential" Internet link is "not-speech"?

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 20:28 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, and then what legal guidance does a judge have such that they aren't just making decisions from the seat of their pants? Is it "not-speech" if it offends a thin-skinned person to the point of tears?

I hate having to try to explain things as if to a small child in their first government/civics class, but... The obvious general answer is that most societies have fairly well laid out sets of guidance that judges must demonstrate a sufficient knowledge of before they are allowed to become judges. Law schools and so forth.

Each country and society has its own. In some societies, you'll get crucified for saying certain things. In other societies, you'll get beheaded for not saying certain things. In many societies, you will be punished for burning the local flag, but not a foreign flag. In some societies, you will be punished for burning certain books, but not punished for burning other books.

RFC-Garak1 was about forcing the automation to happen, with local official judicial settings being the ultimate bottom line of that automation. Because there just is no better way to go about it that I see. I will continue to spend as much effort as I can muster, to convince those around me, focusing on the local, extending to the global, galactic, and universal, that nobody should be punished for burning any book or flag that they own. And I won't accomplish that mission tomorrow, or next year, or in my own lifetime. That's just how I see it. $0.02...

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 20:34 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

It's clear that you didn't pay attention in civics. The point of law school and the like is to make it easier for the judge to correctly apply law to the cases in front of them, such that (in general) it doesn't matter which judge you end up in front of, they'll all make the same decisions given the same set of facts. Then, for the cases where a mistake is made by a judge, you have an appeals process, which (ultimately) compares the law to the decision, and either confirms that the judge was right in their application of law to the case, or that they made a human mistake.

If you're saying "free speech, but only speech, not speech-like things", you need a legal definition of "speech" that judges around the country can apply. Otherwise, there's a simple way to define it for RFC-Garak1 - "speech" is spoken words transmitted by sound waves, while anything electronic is not speech; et voilà! we have today's situation unchanged.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 20, 2016 12:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Judges. Because that is their job.

And what freedom do Judges have to JUDGE?

I don't know if or how the case has been resolved, but I gather it's very recent - a man who everyone KNEW COULDN'T HAVE DONE THE CRIME was due to be executed, and nobody would step in and do anything about it, because as far as the American system was concerned, "he had had due process". The fact that it was a clear and blatant miscarriage of justice didn't enter in to the equation.

For all his faults, that was one thing that was admirable about our Judge Denning - if he thought something was wrong, he would do something about it, law or no law. As the bible says, the job of the Judge is to protect the weak and powerless!

Cheers,
Wol

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 20:19 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (6 responses)

While I disagree fundamentally with mathstuf, he's espousing a consistent libertarian position, where the NAP is the core principle, and freedom of speech is merely one way in which the NAP manifests; thus, for him, there is no contradiction - there is no core belief in freedom of speech, it's just something that naturally falls out, complete with the common sense limits, as a consequence of following a much more important principle.

However, if you're trying to say that freedom of speech is a right,

I think you misconstrue the debate. Nobody is arguing for freedom of speech as so much of a right that mobs can form and rule the countryside via a sufficient number of death threats. Nobody is arguing for that. That necessary and pedantic debate is very, very old. I'll admit that it would be legitimate to throw that same sentiment at RFC-Garak1, except that there, the debate I'm trying to have is only very very old in Internet Years. In human years, it's still fairly young IMHO.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 20:23 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

In which case, please define which definition of freedom of speech you're working to - under the NAP derived version, you don't have freedom of speech on the Internet, full-stop, as to do so would require that you forced someone else to carry your bits.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 20:35 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (4 responses)

please stop pretending like you are debating my points with me in good faith. You are trying to derail the debate down pedantic rabbit holes. I clearly have an above ground goal (to be able to run my own email server like Hillary Clinton without paying a lexus lane 'business class / server allowed' tax to my ISP)

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 21:29 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

You have a strange fixation on email servers, that's for sure. Never mind that you can get a month of VPS subscription for less than the cost of a latte.

But anyway, you seem to be under impression that freedom of speech entitles you to get heard. That's simply not true.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 19, 2016 23:01 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Never mind that you can get a month of VPS subscription for less than the cost of a latte.

In all fairness, a VPS beefy enough to handle proper spam filtering will cost about two lattes per month.

(Which in turn is costs less than the single static IP added on my "business-class" connection)

Meh. Comcast.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 20, 2016 13:26 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And how much did it cost for the hardware to defeat the DoS on Krebs's post?

My thing about rights is nice and simple - THERE AREN'T ANY. It's my DUTY to protect free speech for others, so I can get to enjoy it too.

So all these IoT botnets and stuff clearly fall foul :-)

At the end of the day we have a DUTY not to be malicious or negligent - everything else can flow from that.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 20, 2016 9:41 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I am debating in good faith - if all you're after is a fully Neutral Network, where you're not restricted from operating "servers" on your home line just because it's "residential" service, not "business" service, then say so. You've brought in a whole pile of deeply difficult issues (freedom of speech, abuse handling in the face of malicious actors) that I've got experience of from the hard side of the problem, and I'm discussing those in good faith.

I agree that "server" restrictions on "residential" lines are nonsense; not least because I have bought consumer devices that act in some senses as a server (games consoles can, as can my VoIP handset and my Slingbox), but which no residential provider would restrict due to the consumer blowback of restricting devices. However, that's entirely orthogonal to the issues you've brought into play of abuse handling and freedom of speech, which apply whether you run "servers" or not.