What do your politics have to do with your computer? For some,
who question conventional wisdom and large institutions, the answer
is an unashamed “everything.” Going down a list of some of the
worst recent privacy abuses, from weapon-sniffing scanners to the
seemingly innocuous TiVO, Dennis E. Powell addresses the ironies
inherent in a computing community intent on maintaining its
firewalls while personal privacy vanishes. “Say hello to Big
Brother,” says Dennis:
“The terms, of course, are different, but the effect is
the same. Pick up a copy and read it and see if you don’t find a
parallel today for just about everything there. Winston Smith would
find today’s world a very familiar place indeed. And it is all big
versus little, the authoritarian versus the individual. By “big,” I
of course mean big government, but I also mean big businesses —
and big movements of many sorts, when they seek some (usually
ill-defined and amorphous) societal good at the price of personal
freedom. This is often, in as good an example of modern newspeak as
can be had and no matter the source, in the name of security. Whose
security? Certainly not yours and mine. And in any case we oughtn’t
forget Benjamin Franklin: “They that can give up essential liberty
to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety.” Yet that is precisely what is happening — we’re tending
our firewalls while any shred of privacy is disappearing by other
means.This unhappy trend is what led me, and I suspect many others, to
Linux. It is different not just for the sake of being different or
in some superficial way, but in a very fundamental, very important
way. It speaks in a lot of ways to a broad — and to my mind
entirely healthy — suspicion of big institutions and conventional
wisdom. Indeed, the whole idea of Linux speaks more of people who
pushed northward not just for discovery but actually to live there
than it does of the vast body of 20th-century technological
development. (There are exceptions, of course — the Wright
brothers did it on their own; Fleming recognized the significance
of penicillium by himself; a guy named Molt Taylor had a vision of
an automobile that could fly, and, by himself, built the prototype
from scratch and actually flew the thing, and went on to produce a
few, most of which are still flying now, 50 years later; and in
1987 Dr. Michael Zasloff, working after hours and on his own,
discovered the miraculous magainins, wonderful antibiotic
polypeptides found in the skins of frogs. These people were not
content with the conventional wisdom, because the conventional
wisdom was that all of them would fail.)So there is a political aspect to Linux, and there ought to be.
While not everyone using Linux does so because their world view so
demands, enough are that it oughtn’t be overlooked. Nor apologized
for.This is tied, too, to what to observers probably seems like an
obsession with security. We take the security of our machines to be
our responsibility, not trusting someone else’s binary code to be
safe (when all too often it has proved otherwise). This is not
remarkably different from those of us who support and like the fire
department, but keep a supply of water and hoses and fire
extinguishers on hand just in case, or those of us who obey the law
and support the police department, but do not overlook the fact
that we’re responsible for our own physical security. (Yes, the
implements for protecting one’s home and family can be and
sometimes are abused. And knowledge of computer security can be
used to rob people blind. Your point?)The last piece of George Orwell’s totalitarian vision is a
recent arrival. But now it’s here. Say hello to Big Brother.”