We are all Journalists

It seems that the US Senate wants to redefine the term “journalist” with the so-called “Shield Law”.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/09/12/senate-panel-approves-media-shield-law/

Of course, this means excluding Julian Assange as a “journalist”:


http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/09/terrorists-and-julian-assange-arent-considered-journalists-senate/69355/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/media-shield-law_n_3912955.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

Whatever they say, with the power of the internet at our disposal, we are all journalists.

we are all journalists

Coders seek the truth

Why do you debug your code? Because you seek the truth.

What is the truth? Code that works.

It’s impossible for a coder not to want to seek the truth, otherwise why would they waste time writing code that doesn’t work? Code must work. That’s the point of it. Thus, coders seek the truth. When we debug and trace, and spend days in search of the cause of a bug in our code, we are seeking the truth.

It therefore becomes ingrained in the coder to seek the truth at all levels. Perhaps this explains why we have whistle blowers and hackers that want to expose wrongdoing – Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and many others. When you spend your time seeking the truth in code, why would you not seek it elsewhere?

These people are not “hacking”, nor “whistle-blowing”, they are debugging. They’ve found an issue, and filed a bug report with reproducible test cases.

This begs the question – if coders seek the truth, what about non-coders? For example, certain so-called “managers”, or “directors”. These people get to the top of the greasy pole by obfuscation and lies. They operate behind closed doors, wheeling and dealing, bigging themselves up, putting their name to work that others have done, and continue to protect themselves by concealing the truth.

In terms of coding, they publish phony APIs that serve as a bogus front to private, undocumented methods and frameworks. Consequently, the organisational program becomes hampered by bugs, and any attempt to debug it by those suffering the consequences leads to accusations of “whistle blowing”, or “trouble making”.

If the organisation we belong to can’t be debugged because we’re being fed phony data, we leave.

After all, we seek the truth.

what is truth

We can be Heroes, for ever and ever

Julian Assange
Bradley Chelsea Manning
Aaron Swartz
Kim Dotcom
Edward Snowden
Us

We can all play our part, however small. Every act, however small, adds up to a war of attrition. For example:

Use Mega to store your files
Use the latest TOR and TOR Browser
Don’t use GMail or Skype
Use PGP for email
Encrypt everything!

heroes

‘Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch’

Robert Graham of Errata Security reflecting on Aaron Swartz:

Besides taking the “civil liberty” angle, I’m trying to get to the “witchcraft” angle. As Arthur C Clarke puts it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Here is my corollary: “Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch”. People fear magic they don’t understand, and distrust those who wield that magic. Things that seem reasonable to technical geeks seem illegal to the non-technical.

I like that.

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