In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

People need to take more responsibility for themselves and stop asking the Government to solve all their problems. They are only inviting trouble down the road as the Government gets bigger, more controlling and has more power over the population. All of that makes it harder to change the status quo, too.

Isn't this a little bit like saying "You can't claim to be against governments spying on their own citizens if you ever go outside. By going outside they can trace where you are, and who you visit."

I don't want to live in a world where I have to not do things to avoid privacy invasion, I want to live in one which doesn't allow privacy invasion.

Obviously it's not a simple issue, you can't just sign up to twitter and tick the "no privacy invasion please" checkbox, but if we're going to aim for something, how about we reach for the stars not the dogshit.

Somewhat unrelated but I've always wondered how many passwords you could crack by making a word dictionary attack out of a user's status updates and comments. The assumption being that most users have a narrow vocabulary and would naturally pull from it to choose their passwords.

None the less it seems like every time you publish on the net with an association to your identity in any form you do willingly degrade some aspect of your own privacy. Truthfully just from analyzing a couple sentences you probably have a pretty good shot at guessing all kinds of things about the person.

Moglen is of course correct about the problems of privacy and corporate ownership of social networks -- but then goes on to take an absolutist position which is both strategically indefensible and ethically bankrupt.

First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are required to create higher-order freedoms. The archetypal example of this is the law which arbitrarily restricts you from driving on one side of the road. This is a small loss of freedom, but when applied universally, it creates the far greater freedom to drive for long distances without substantial risk of a head-on collision.

Now, with social networks and the like, freedoms are created and freedoms are taken away. The problem which Moglen identifies -- and is absolutely correct to call out -- is that there is absolutely no legitimate reason to abrogate the freedoms that are being abrogated. Where he goes wrong is in denying the reality of the freedoms that are being created: namely the most powerful one-to-many communications platforms in history. The citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are categorically not less free because they used Facebook to organise their revolutions. Whatever freedoms they lose on account of Facebook, pale in significance to the freedoms Facebook has allowed them to create.

Whether this calculation holds true in other societies is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate; where Moglen goes wrong is in denying that it's a debatable subject whatsoever.

I had the same problem with Richard Stallman, when I recently attended one of his boilerplate talks. While I greatly respect what he has accomplished and agree with the majority of his opinions, he had absolutely no concept that there could possibly be greater freedoms outside of his narrow domain. It was all too easy to picture him castigating, say, Syrian activists for distributing videos of atrocities using non-free codecs, captured by camera phones with non-free firmware. Stallman's position would seem to be that if you can't document an atrocity with fully free software and hardware, then you shouldn't document it at all. This is where he -- and Moglen -- take a swan dive from the moral high ground into the swamp of ethical bankruptcy in which all true zealots swim.

The bottom line is that there are greater freedoms and lessor freedoms. The world has collectively decided that the freedoms created by one-to-many communications networks are greater than the freedoms that are (unnecessarily) being lost in the process. Sometimes this decision is clearly correct (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.); other times it probably isn't. What's certain is that asking people to forego what they (often correctly) perceive as the greater freedom, in order to fix an unnecessary abrogation of the lesser freedom, is not an ethically defensible position to take.

Please don't get me wrong: unlike road-direction restrictions, there's no reason why social networks need to be compromising our freedoms the way that they are. I'd much rather see social networks created by open-standard distributed protocols rather than centralised corporate systems, just as I'd much rather see mobile phones with fully free firmware that encode video with free codecs. I think it's absolutely worth trying to create all of those things. But simply ignoring the genuine freedoms that are created despite the faults of these platforms is not ethically legitimate.

Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?

I don't dispute that Facebook played some part in the revolution, just whether the people whose revolution it was actually call it a Facebook Revolution.

Related anecdatum: I live in an ex-Soviet Republic. It is rare for someone here to actually say "The Foo Revolution"; instead people talk about "the early 90s" or "after independence".

(Also: your quote is taken from an interview with one of those foreign media organisations who had already decided that Facebook was the hook they were going to hang the story on.)