Eben Moglen Executive Director of the Software Law Center, has a piece in the Guardian today entitled “Liberation by software”. This is the second piece in the Guardian’s “Democracy and digital media” series focusing on how the internet and other digital tools are changing the political balance of power around the world.

Excerpts:

The great promise of the Enlightenment is finally fulfilled: the greatest intellectual, political and moral revolution in the history of humanity.

If that’s the way the network behaves. But it can also be completely controlled, filtered, monitored and surveilled, giving power the most overwhelming conceivable advantage over freedom. Which way the network behaves is determined solely by the software that comprises it. Freedom of the press, freedom of information, freedom of thought itself are now “implemented” rather than “declared”, “protected” or “guaranteed”.

Read more

The newly created FreedomBox Foundation is getting some attention from the press today with a long piece in the New York Times entitled Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You by Jm Dwyer. The piece explores how the Freedom Box project fits in with the connection between network communication and political liberty.