"The new rule in the GOP-controlled House is that you can’t make mention of Donald Trump’s many civil and criminal trials, but you can simply insult the physical appearance of fellow members."
A reminder for those who sit on the fence regarding whether “code is speech” — global access to strong cryptography would not be where it is today without a 1997 project to publish — as a book — the entire source code of PGP 5.0i in an OCR-friendly format, in such a way as to emphatically subvert the US Government export controls on cryptography by the power of the 1st Amendment:
Interesting history is documented in the links below; I’m particularly taken with an observation from Ian Grigg in the first link:
The story has a sad ending. In the last months of 1999, the US government released the controls on exporting free and open cryptography. Hailed by all as a defeat, it was really a tactical withdrawal from ground that wasn’t sustainable. The cypherpunks lost more: with the departure of their clear enemy, they dispersed over time, and emerging security and financial cryptography entrepreneurs lost our coolness factor and ready supply of cryptoplumbers. Lots of crypto projects migrated back to the US, where control was found by other means. The industry drifted back to insecure-practice-by-fiat. Buyers stopped being aware of security, and they were setup for the next failure and the next and the next… Strategic victory went to the US government, which still maintains a policy of keeping the Internet insecure by suppressing crypto where and when it can. […]
“Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics in fields including politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.” #mccarthyism#palestine#IsraelWarCrimes#FreeSpeech#AcademicFreedom
#Privacy#TornadoCash#FreeSpeech#DigitalRights#Blockchain: "The conviction of Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev is sending ripple effects through the blockchain industry, which is bracing for a long-foreseen chilling effect.
This is likely to deter devs from building privacy and security enhancing digital tools, said Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco.
“Holding a developer of beneficial tools responsible for the wrongdoing of others is short-sighted and harms everyone’s privacy online,” Mackey told DL News."
“What I saw was students linking arms, hugging each other while being brutalized by the police. I think the only violence we saw that day was from the police.”
Remember all the times Elon Musk said Tesla is so amazing for the environment? The company is being sued for violating the Clean Air Act hundreds of times in recent years by emitting harmful pollutants from its Fremont factory into nearby neighborhoods.
@parismarx Don't forget the #pollution, I & #Spacex are creating by sending those rockets to pollute the stratosphere too & depositing all those junk satellites there just like I talk a lot about #FreeSpeech while @x keep censoring people all the time
“If you’re calling for the arrest of protesters who are simply engaging in First Amendment activities on public space, then you’re exposing yourself as a partisan ...”