We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you
An article in the Washington Post reports moves against a couple of the larger ‘Hawala’ networks. Also: “Under the new anti-terrorism legislation passed by Congress last month, hawalas will be required by year-end to register with the Treasury Department and, like banks, to report suspicious activities, such as unusually large cash transfers.”
The idiots seem to completely miss the point about why people use hawala (or Chinese ‘Fei Qian’) to move money internationally. It is so that the state cannot see what they are doing. To demand hawalas register with the state and report ‘suspicious activities’ is rather like passing a law requiring bank robbers to register and file a report prior to conducting a robbery. Do terrorists use hawala? Probably. So do millions of other people. Will they manage to shut the system down (which has been around since the 11th Century in India, China and other parts of Asia)? My guess is they will be even less successful than that other triumph of the state’s excursion into international paramilitary policing, namely the ‘Drug War’. These hawalas occur within ethnically homogenous tight knit communities. It is going to be impossible to shut down more than a few of these dispersed, multiply redundant networks as they are semi-underground as it is and extremely easy to set up again by others if any given hawala is disrupted.
What is a hawala?
A hawala (or fei qian) is a simple network set up to transfur funds internationally, usually using a member of an extended family or personal friend on both sides of the network (though a few larger hawalas are almost like banks). Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to a hawala (typically a small back street office) in London (or Los Angeles or Paris or Toronto) and gives them a quantity of cash plus a small brokerage fee. He tells the hawala who he wants to collect the money in Calcutta (or Karachi or Cairo or Shanghai) and then leaves. The business is conducted with a handshake and trust. The hawala in London calls his contact in Calcutta (often a cousin or other family member) and tells him how much to disburse and to whom. This is often done on the phone but increasingly it is done by PGP encrypted e-mail. Next day, a relative of Vijay (or Abdul or Deng) goes to the hawala in Calcutta, identifies himself to the associated hawala there and collects his cash. The hawala run accounts with each other and periodically settle up the old fashioned way: a guy with a suitcase packed full of used 50 pound notes (or 100 dollar bills) gets on a plane in London, flies to Calcutta and settles the tab in cash. It is that simple!
In fact they are an excellent example of highly successful, completely unregulated, handshake based international capitalism. Hence is it hardly surprising so many people in government do not like these networks as it gives lie to all the smug claims about the supposed superiority of the West’s regulated international financial systems.
As usual, the state wants to see all and know all… of course it will still understand nothing. Wired magazine has a good article about the current state of play.
Remember boys and girls, when crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto. I have the greatest confidence we will always find new and innovative ways of keeping the state blind, deaf and dumb about things that are none of it’s damn business… namely our business.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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