>However, I think a good case can be made for pseudonymous contributors >(I don't know, we may have them now). It supports the philosophy of >the project, and allows contributions from those who may not have the >safety and freedom to contribute to a project like this publically. >Contributions from NSA and CIA employees aren't even necessarily >ill-intentioned, although I think it would be best to not have people >who might have a conflict of interest in any leadership or critical >position in development. Can I add my tuppence worth to this important thread? I accepted that the FSF, in recommending I use gNewSense, was recommending a a totally free Linux distribution, because I believe (and still believe) that the endorsement by the FSF is a good measure of its integrity to be what it claims. That might have been naive of me, but I believe that to be the case with most people. If something is recommended by those in whom we have to trust, we generally trust that other "thing" by association. As a Brit, my interest in the Snowden Affair, was how much can we trust the UK government? We do not have explicit constitutional arrangements in which our government is supposed to act, instead we have implicit rules in which our government is supposed to act and the ways they get our state to act. I am not so naive to suppose that places like GCHQ do not exist, but I rely on our government to rein them in, and take responsibility for doing so, if they exceed the bounds of what is implicitly accepted. One role of government is to act in a way which we, as citizens, have implicitly allowed them. Also, it is the responsibility of me, as a citizen, to let the government know what those bounds should be, and to be reasonably sure that they will not overstep the limits. This is the essence of representative democracy, not just that organs of the State which could use mass surveillance of private digital information, but can we trust the government of our country not to allow it to be done. By extension, can we rely upon that trust in our government to make all States in which we have diplomatic relations to act in the same way, or to report to Parliament if they cannot? I do not need to know that MI5 and GCHQ have any particular interest in this information, just that the light of examination will be brought to bear on any activity that they indulge in, and that my trust in the government (of whichever hue) is not misplaced. Sometimes they get it right, on others they get it wrong. Churchill's decision to fight Hitler and German Fascism was right;Thatcher's decision to go to war against the National Union of Mineworkers was wrong. Can I still trust my government in the light of the Snowden revelations? I think not. We are still the subject of the greatest range of CCTV surveillance in the world, almost without the British public being asked. now, we are having our digital life screened and screened retroactively at that by the NSA, which is not even an office of our government, and doesn't answer to Parliament. My government, through the GCHQ, have asked the NSA for this information and it has been handed over. My state has no democratic control over the NSA; this is the type of "special arrangement" we do not want. Now we have to put our trust in the FSF, in GnuPG, in Tor and VPN tunnelling: but we should not have to do so. We should be able to trust our governments to due the right thing as soon as possible. ++ Graham Todd
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