Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

“Eben Moglen is usually an inspiring speaker, and his keynote at
FOSDEM 2011 did not disappoint. Free software remains, as always,
at the core of his talks, but he has adopted a wider political
vision and thinks that the community should do the same. Our
freedom, he said, depends on reengineering the network to replace
vulnerable, centralized services with alternatives which resist
government control.

“The publication of Larry Lessig’s Code, Eben said, drew our
attention to the fact that, in the world we live in, code
increasingly functions as law. Code does the work of the state, but
it can also serve revolution against the state. We are seeing an
enormous demonstration of the power of code now, he said. At the
same time, there is a lot of attention being paid to the
publication of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion, which makes the
claim that the net is being co-opted to control freedom worldwide.
The book is meant to be a warning to technology optimists. Eben is,
he said, one of those optimists. The lesson he draws from current
events is that the right net brings freedom, but the wrong net
brings tyranny.

“We have spent a lot of time making free software. In the
process, we have joined forces with other elements of the free
culture world. Those forces include people like Jimmy Wales, but
also people like Julian Assange. Wikipedia and Wikileaks, he said,
are two sides of the same coin. At FOSDEM, he said, one could see
“the third side” of the coin. We are all people who have organized
to change the world without creating new hierarchies in the
process. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks was seen mainly as a
criminal operation. Events in Tunisia changed that perception,
though. Wikileaks turns out to be an attempt to help people learn
about their world. Wikileaks, he said, is not destruction – it’s
freedom.”

Complete Story