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"Democracy is sick in the US, government monitors your Internet"

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    RT is sitting down with Richard Stallman, American software freedom activist
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    Thank you for sitting down with us today, you are the founder of the software freedom foundation
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    in the United States. What is free software, why is it important?
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    Free software is software that respects the users freedom, and the social solidarity of the users community.
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    specifically, it means you have four essential freedoms.
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    Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
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    There are proprietary programs that restrict the use of authorized copies even
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    and you have freedom one, which is the freedom to study the source code and then change it, to make the program to do as you wish.
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    This means you control it, instead of it controlling you
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    And you have freedom two, which is the freedom to help your neighbor
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    that is the freedom to redistribute exact copies, so you are free to share
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    free to republish, and you have freedom 3, which is the freedom to contribute to your community
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    that is the freedom to distribute copies of your modified version, so if you studied the source code and changed it,
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    to make something you like better, you can distribute that, give it away or sell it to others
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    so the result is, the users are in control, both individually and collectivly
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    You campaign against the extension of copyright laws in the united states
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    whats wrong with copyright law in the us?
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    copyright law in the US is far too strict, now in the case...software is a special case cause there is
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    many things that developers do to make software propreitary
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    and restrict the users.
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    copyright is just one, and not the main one
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    but for lots of other things, copyright is what stops users from fully utilizing the publish works they
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    have copies of. but theres a minimum freedom we must have, which is the freedom to non-commercially
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    share copies of any published works
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    and likewise, there are works of art and entertainment, which is different category serving society in a different way
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    but for those also, i think we must have that minimum freedom to non-commercially share
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    exact copies, and the copyright on art should expire in 10 years, and people should be free to
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    publish modified versions which are new works of art, and contribute to art
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    in your work, you come up with the notion of copyleft, what is that exactly?
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    copyleft is a way that i use copyright law, to guarantee freedom for all users for all versions of a work
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    i started using it on free software, i wanted to be able to write a free program
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    and hand out, give or sell copies to other people, and i wanted them to have the 4 freedoms
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    but what happens when they redistribute a copy to you?
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    what happens if john changes the programs a then, gives or sells you a copy?
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    do you get the 4 freedoms also?
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    i wanted to make sure you would get the 4 freedoms. so i wrote a copyright based license, to make sure you get the 4 freedoms
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    and that technique of writing licenses, that is copy left
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    lets talk about ACTA, the anti counterfeiting trade agreement, the US government is said to be working
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    on the agreement with a range of other countries in secrecy.
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    one of the things this act will allow the US government to to, is to go through peoples computers
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    how do you feel about this?
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    this is an assault on our freedom, and it demonstrates that we dont have real democracy. the US government
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    is on the side of the mega corporations that pay the congressman, and pay the presidents campaign
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    basically, they rule us. we have a corporatocracy
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    as long as business has more political power than people, democracy is sick
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    and you have to expect injustice as the result
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    lets talk about privacy of a computer, some people say theres basically no privacy
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    whatever you do on the Internet can be found out, it can be accessed, is this true?
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    its partly true and partly not, if you are using windows, microsoft can examine what you do
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    there are spy features known in windows
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    and whats more, Microsoft has the power to forcibly change the software without asking you, so anything
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    they are not spying on today they could put in a feature tomorrow to spy on that and they don't have to
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    ask your approval before they install it
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    similar problems exist in MacOS. i don't know of any existing spy features in MacOS, but it has a similar backdoor
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    allowing apple to forcible change the software at any time so if it doesn't spy today, it could start tomorrow
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    now, as a separate matter, a lot of Internet traffic is being monitored for instance by the us government.
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    and in Europe Internet service providers are required to keep records for two years of what websites someone contacts
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    and so on, so a lot of things are being monitored, but not necessarily everything
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    and in particular, the substance of what you are sending someone can be protected using encryption
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    and theres free software such as GNU privacy guard and SSH
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    which can be used to send encrypted files
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    or maintain an encrypted connection with another computer
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    they will know you are talking with another computer they will know you are sending email to a certain address
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    but they won't know what you said
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    one of the thing you talk about on your personal web site, is that you warn American citizens about
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    not buying printers that report their activities to the police, what exactly are you talking about there?
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    a lot of laser printers are designed so that they print little yellow dots that state which printer printed and when
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    and as i see that, thats an assault on peoples privacy
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    the stated reason for putting on those yellow dots is to stop people from using those printers from
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    counterfeiting money. i think that is a legitimate purpose
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    but they could very easy limit the yellow dots to thinks who look a little bit like a bank note
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    and thus avoid attacking our privacy for everything else
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    in your work you say copying and sharing material is not piracy, can you explain that?
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    Piracy is attacking ships, and it something very bad. but sharing with your neighbor is very good
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    so i refuse to smear sharing and cooperation using a propaganda term like "piracy"
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    now, you also often talk about the patriot act
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    in America, and its been causing alot of controversy over the last several years
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    how do you feel about it?
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    i refuse to call that law by the name that those...undemocratic and tyrannical legislators gave it
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    cause theres nothing patriotic in a country whos existence is based
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    the idea of freedom, in a law designed to attack peoples freedom
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    i call it the U-SAP-AT-RIOT ACT, which is the same initials, i just put spaces different places
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    instead of USAPATRIOT ACT i call it U-SAP-AT-RIOT ACT
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    but what is so bad about it? for one thing it gives the police the power to go to a business and say to the business
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    give us all their records about Richard Stallman or Anastasea or anyone else
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    without even getting a court order, they can collect all these records everyday.
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    they can go to the library and find out what books you borrowed without a court order
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    there are just no limits on what they can demand in information about you and me, that is tyranny
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    what should people do to make sure that, what they do with their personal computer and what they do in the Internet, remains private
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    is there anything one can do?
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    if you're not doing anything illegal, if your just getting your work done or researching information
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    or whatever it is, how can you ensure that whatever you do remains private
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    there are a number of things you have to do
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    one thing is make sure you're using a free operating system, because they have generally much better security
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    they have better security against unknown third parties
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    and in addition the proprietary operating systems have no security at all against the developer of the system
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    and as i explained before, those developers introduce a lot of malware into the systems they make
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    so your completely unsafe if you're using proprietary operating systems
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    you have to worry about governments who practice censorship
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    to the point where the even arrest people for what they read
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    like the government of Britain which arrested i believe 2 people at a university
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    because they downloaded a document from a US government website
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    they were studying terrorism, academically
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    they downloaded a document that al qaeda had published
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    and the us government put it up to show what al qaeda was saying, and these people in Britain downloaded it
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    they got arrested just for looking at it. Now people dealing with governments like that have to protect themselves
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    you gotta get out of the habit of thinking if i'm know doing anything wrong, i have nothing to fear
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    that might be true under some government that respected human rights
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    richard stallman thank you so much for sitting down
Title:
"Democracy is sick in the US, government monitors your Internet"
Video Language:
English
Duration:
10:22

English subtitles

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