Photo: swanksalot on Flickr. Original here.
For those that doesn’t know, the idea of market liberalism is that no market shall not be regulated and companies shall grow, shrink or fail, depending on the demands of their products.
The market liberals in the Swedish Government has now decided not to follow their own ideology and to limit the availability of free (as in freedom) culture and media through regulation. Their outspoken goal is to, by doing this, save the recording industry from going under in this new and networked world as they have been unable to adapt during the previous 10 years.
They have also decided to give away policing powers to these companies and their lobbying organizations, not only limited to filing suits. They’re also allowed to do raids on citizens homes and freeze bank accounts, with the help of the Swedish Enforcement Agency.
This is not a joke and it is not an overstatement.
So what they’re basically saying is that they do not give a rats as about what the voting public want them to do, that is to realize liberal markets, and also they do not care if twelve year old’s gets their parents houses raided by downloading Britney’s latest hit.
There goes the meaning of “due process”.
So, what can one do to protect himself from the government and the media companies?
First of, you might want to join some group that fights to limit this madness. Second, you should send e-mails, call or send regular mail to your political representatives explaining your views on the new digital world. If they do not know how many people want them to stop acting like idiots, they’ll never do.
Also, start scrutinizing your media consumption and do not pay the industry that limits you freedom. It’s very important to understand that without money, these companies don’t have any power to push any other idiotic legislation through our politicians. Use RIAA RADAR as a start, but do your research and you are recommended to actually call the record labels and ask what their stance on IPRED (for example) is. Do not pay to get your liberties shattered!
After doing this, first thing to do is to open your network, and get a shared or insecure wireless setup. You should set that up in a nice way, so that you do not expose your internal computers to any others connecting from the outside. Consider using WEP as encryption, as that isn’t hard to break but will keep most people away. You should do this to be able to question if any packets to or from your network is actually “yours”. Offering an open network is also in general a nice thing to do for you fellow man.
The next step is to encrypt all data. Not only the operating system partitions, but all disks in your computer. For both Windows and Linux this can be done in a secure way using TrueCrypt which is also free. The only downside to doing this is that you’ll have to enter your password(s) everytime you start the computer. The performance impact is not that hard and I use it on my gaming computer without any negative impact. Remember to use a long (preferably over 30 characters) passphrase. Use a sentence from a book for example.
Start encrypting your network traffic and hide your real IP-address when consuming “pirated” or remixed media. There are several services that can offer you this service today, and I’m not sure which one is the best. Some of the ones that seem the most serious are Relakks (PPTP tunnels) and PRQ (plain tunneling or IPSEC tunneling, swedish site). There are also services such as TorrentPrivacy, but I do not know who’s behind it or if you can trust their applications.
It feels kind of sick writing a guide on how you can protect yourself from the people that are supposed to protect you, but I can live with it. I’ve thought about doing this before, but never wanted to as I would also be teaching some potentially bad guys how to stay hidden. But when I’m backed into a corner I’m the kind of person that fights, not the kind that lies down and waits to get beaten. Soon enough we’ll be in this reality and then it’ll be too late.
