the extent of that office picture was exaggerated greatly and maybe even purposefully i've not convinced i don't know if i've seen the estimates but i've certainly seen the gadhafi is was quite a butcher of course western countries such as the u.k. and maybe the u.s. as well delivered people up to his his. his dissidents dissidents from libya who had fled they were delivered up to feed to torture and punish so i'm not i don't at all regret that gaddafi was kicked out of power now bad things have happened in libya since then i don't know if it was possible to predict i didn't but my question to you is you know those people who sought to oust gadhafi and by no means. condone his leadership as well but the people who sought to replace him they were

calling for freedom they god that freed them and by now that freedom has been extended to freedom to kill something that even got out think well if they have time but there is there are factions armed factions in libya that are fighting i don't think that's a good outcome but what can you say should you support every dictator because maybe if you get rid of a dictator there might be a civil war why why should i don't have the choice between supporting or not supporting my question is the choice of the west was supporting gadhafi absolutely but my question to you is whether you think people off leiby at that point of time were ready for that freedom if they had a now how they were at how do you you can't tell except of to see what happens when they try and in neighboring tunisia. things are not perfect but they do seem to have a democracy it's the power party in power is islam ist which is

the means not respecting human rights not wanting to respect human rights properly but it looks like they're going to have another free election that's a sobering syria they have at syria things have gone horribly there we have iraq of course in iraq it wasn't because of a democratic revolution it was because of foreign conquest and occupation. the saddest case i'd say is egypt where it appears that they've gone back to the sort of military government that they had under mubarak just without mubarak but i don't know whether it's possible to predict these things and i question the idea that you can assert in a general sense these people are not ready for democracy maybe it's just that they haven't been able to win a democracy maybe they were thwarted in trying to set one up by various power

structures and foreign influence but i think what that. me attest to is that the quest for freedom is open to all sorts of manipulations and you were a very vocal supporter of that revolution at least it was one when it came to libya and media is your voice you are in an influential person many people listen to you you're also a very sophisticated user of media sometimes a very vocal critic of the media so even if you were somewhat misled about the you know the nature of that revolution because from the very beginning it wasn't that black and wyatt they were living under a tyranny and i could see that for myself when i was there i was there about two months before well i was there in march of two thousand and eleven when it was already happening and there's people who are armed and some some of those people were killing security officers were killing policemen so there isn't a human though i did criticize that on all of them circumstances but the point is

that you can't treat it as if somebody had the ability to predict all these things when you see masses of people protesting you've got to try to prevent them from being crushed and what we see is that in many countries in the middle east masses of protesters were crushed by violent force. waffen with the support of the u.s. or its allies as in for instance bahrain you can't be sure but people have to be able to troy now you know thomas carlyle a scottish philosopher and scholar of the french revolution said all the way back in the nineteenth century that revolutions are initiated by idealists they're carried out by fanatics and they're hijacked by scoundrels and i think this is

pretty much what they've seen in the arab world so far but my question is a little bit different you are now also pushing for a revolution of sorts with. the. free software movement and i wonder if you really sure that. you know the results of that revolution if it ever happens won't be. hijacked by people who have a question arius and the reason is that first of all. it's you're saying revolution but that's using the term in a figurative sense because if the users have control over their software that doesn't involve changing the organisation of the state so it's not a revolution literally speaking it simply means returning to users of computing the autonomy that's they have in non digital life what we see

happening is a transition from non digital life in which people mostly have a lot of what tommy of course there are exceptions there are slaves today but we consider that an injustice there shouldn't be slaves today there are countries which don't respect human rights but we call that in justice the point is that you should have human rights in your digital activities as well so we need to put an end to this in order to have affective democracy and in order and we need to change a lot of things about digital technology so that they're not surveillance engines but part of it is we need to use software that the users control even those of us who are not programmers and won't personally exercise the control if the users control the program and since most of the users don't want to be spied on each of us can count on the other users to make sure the program is and holland on the other users how can we ensure that the sound is benevolent even

though depending on other people in a society doesn't guarantee things were going to be ok being under the power of a tyrant pretty much guarantees it's going to be bad but and so with non free software you're the decisions about that program are all made by somebody whose interest is to exploit the users and you can pretty well expect the decisions to be bad for. the users words when you're depending on other users you've got a pretty good chance it's going to be more was good and so it's not all affection but you're making a mistake in saying unless we can find perfection it's all lousy i'm sorry i'm not for you to be depend on other users rather than on somebody whose interest is to take advantage of users he just used the word tyrant in a metaphorical sense i think i can also do the same thing and use the same analogy

that he was in the perfect leader for libya but that he was a horrible one who didn't respect human rights only absolutely i agree with you on that but he was the one who for some time prevented the libyan people from killing each other and prevent a deal with each other that much and if they if they do they do if you go to the violence i mean this is just a couple of weeks ago the prime minister of libya was abducted on the streets on the streets and if that could happen to a prime minister of a country then imagine what could happen to people who are that is there is in mexico for instance i hope well but i mean mexico. is a different case but my point was that it wasn't the best solution possible but it is the average yes it isn't over yet it is but also years that you have made and it was the lesser of the two evils i don't think so i don't think it was the lesser of this it was anything you wanted i was only beer is better than its range be and

it's not over in a few years there might be peace and some human rights in libya or it might go back to a tyranny more or less like a da feet i don't know what's going to happen is more still what you're saying argue your argument is basically never try to get rid of a tyranny because you don't know what's going to happen just accept the tyrant i'm sorry because that guarantees tyranny now you're right that when i compare. or the owner of a proprietary program to a tyrant yes it's an it's a metaphor it's because that owner doesn't have the power that a state has but that owner has power over the users and although that owner can't just put them in jail that owner can mistreat them in a lot of bad ways and that is what we escape from when we switch to free software that's us don't want to have to take a short break now but one of

a come back as that for us of big tack minds keeps adding digits doesn't richard stallman trees becoming the donkey hoti of the digital world that's coming up in a few moments on the wilds a part. of the playing. field the big spirit travels with the flame from its birthplace in greece. james brown for an elementary and a picture to the room and beyond. where

of art to. choose your language. killing the kid with oh if you're going to kill someone. it's good to consent to. choose the opinions that degrade to. choose the stories they didn't. choose to be sent off to.

london. on the. street another one. become. mobilized to. blend into the city the city. the.

economic. the fine. and the rest. if we all think. she looks like a. handful of people. the real king here is the polar bear and ice breaker. the russian nuclear powered fleet of ice breakers.

welcome back to worlds apart where we are discussing digital freedom and oppression with richard stallman mr stillman you have a very interesting life philosophy and you're a very interesting person you really are hard to miss in a room but i wonder if. you realize how different you are from the more conventional crowd people who may sympathize with your ideas but who find them extremely difficult to implement and that why encourage people to find more willpower by looking for it and many people have but for example i know that you've been you don't use a mobile phone and you have been advocating against the use of mobile phone phones because of all the tracking and with the recent n.s.a. scandal i think many people are very conscious of what that mean tale but how can

you really do that and. how can you not have a hold a phone it's not that hard when i need to make a call i find somebody and say could you please let's make a call for me or send a text for me but in any case what we what i'm doing personal resistance clearly is just a beginning it's a way of protecting myself from being part of the mistreatment it's not the solution i have in mind for society at the level of society what we want is to make the mobile phone companies not maintain a dasi about each person but what do you think there was in there a person who has a family who has kids for house. it's very unfortunate to have children and most people are now going to be scrambling for money desperately all their lives unless they're one of the richest few that's why i decided not to do that but still that

doesn't mean that they can't be concerned about. valence support campaigns to design systems not to surveil everyone and thus bring about political change in countries which do have some democracy left speaking about political change i know that you also advocated paper voting machine voting in elections insisting that there was a better chance for an accurate recount if there was some paper. ballot paper if there are papers you can count again you can have a recount and i think in many of your ideas you really tried to advocate these returns sort of pre-digital in the sense as if they're all you're mistaken when i say we should have. portable phones with only free software in them and that the system should be designed under legal requirement not to track anybody but court ordered investigation subjects that's not saying

go back to an innocent pre-digital world there are others who say using digital technology means total surveillance just surrender to it but since that's that surrender means no democracy anymore because whistleblowers who tell us what the state is really doing will be caught. and they have to flee to places like russia not on order not to be caught that means it's too much of a sacrifice we've got to keep our democracy and that means we've got to limit surveillance one of the things that technology hooks as upon is convenience this come forth and i know that you previously said that you are not going to trade your freedom for comfort but i think some people may also argue that comfort is a natural outcome of human progress and i wonder what do you stand on that issue of whether you believe that come for that convene we can. we can all tell us basically humans have been developing more comfort for thousands of years. to make

a general claim about what comfort will do to the human psyche is far beyond me and i suspect far beyond anyone i agree though that a lot of people have been taught to think more about short term convenience than about long term things such as how they want to live but what is the cause of that it's hard to be sure what the cause of that is maybe it's all the advertising that they're bombarded with which often says think about the short term microsoft had an ad campaign where do you want to go today so i said our question is how do you want to live in five or ten years very different set of values now you just mentioned microsoft and facebook and other companies and in the first part of the program we had a somewhat heated discussion about. you know you factor in the fairest motives of

some companies and possibly some of the digital volunteers and i think all those companies that are benefiting from users pass a few users of proprietary software at least we know them a lot of them motive is to make as much money out of us and to keep us ask consumers matter what we know their motive i think it matters because if a lousy a certain save guard it allows us to have some sort of strategy counter strategy because of the end of the day they're interested in keeping us as milking cows but you can never be sure what the motives of the digital volunteers that we may reliably check each other that's the whole point of the free software community that. the contributors to a free program they don't have power over anybody you can be one of the developers of a program and the other developers can accept you into the group so you start writing

changes but other people are looking at the changes you write and if you start trying to take it in a direction they don't like they'll say we don't want you in our project go make your own version if you want to so the point is none of the contributors has the kind of power that every proprietary software developer has over the program's users but they are also operating under the market forces so i suppose that there is some competition and they're. well i don't know their hand on how petition but not in the same sense you know if there were two different versions of the same program ain't developed by different groups of people they may compete trying to attract the users but because their core their source code is available to everyone other people who are looking at it and if either group put in something nasty it would be seen and they would be likely to lose

a lot of the. patronage of the users and someone will make a modified version that doesn't have that nasty thing and this is what the users can do because they've got control so this doesn't mean that every contributor is an angel. it does mean however that none of the contributors faces the same kind of temptation to abuse power that a proprietary developer faces because none of them has that kind of power now speaking about have used power in the united states has significant technological add over the rest of the wild and it is now using that. on the rest of the world and one factor that contributes to that is of course the attack people the. geeks and the technological crowd that allows that to happen people who are like yourself tend to be a bit more idealistic they usually have

a reputation for non-conformists why do you think there are so ready to collaborate well for money obviously they're getting paid to work in these jobs but. i want to distinguish between government spying on other governments which is something that governments have been doing plenty we just read how the russian government gave people attending a summit meeting spy devices to take home but you know that's just what governments do to each other for me that's not the scandal the scandal is not spying on other governments and their activities it's spying on all the citizens and of course there are countries that work together to spy on the citizens of these countries so we just found out that spain was helping the u.s. spy on everybody in spain. and of course then there was the deal between the u.s.

and england where u.s. spy agencies couldn't spy on people in the u.s. but british spy agencies could spy on people in the u.s. so the two governments said alright each of us will spy on the other's citizens and then we'll trade and that way will be surveilling our own people so this is what i think of as the scandal did do you still feel yourself that in this tech crowd as one of the tribesman or more of that outsider these days i feel largely an outsider because most of them are developing services to be available over the net that are going to collect data about their users and i wouldn't use them. after all if we look at u.s. government surveillance of the people it's mostly not the u.s. government directly looking at everyone know it's businesses various companies that

collect data about people and then the u.s. government gets it from them the systems that these companies run have to be designed so that they don't collect any data about most people only about those for whom there's a court order to investigate and they have been trying to fire that system for many many years do what we know this is a a rather new thing. thirty years ago when i started the free software movement this wasn't an issue really. even fifteen years ago there wasn't the technology to keep track of everybody's internet contacts that's known as the deep packet inspection i believe and it's something that has been put into place since then. and of course is used by many governments for moral west if arius purposes thirty years ago we had phones but they weren't in general being monitored there there

wasn't a list of everybody's phone calls but now there is and now the u.s. government is collecting that all the time and in spain as well with the help of the spanish government so now we have to address that issue as well now since you just mentioned spain that leads me to my last question i compared you to the donkey hole to do things that. first that metaphor really stands to see any similarities not at all the first of all don quixote it was sort of an allegorical satire. condemnation of the nobles and their old fashioned ideas of chivalry which were not able to the modern world in the fifteen under it's but the other thing is that the character don quixote was living in

a fantasy world with the monsters he fought weren't real you know they were windmills say. well. thanks to snowden we know a lot of the facts about digital surveillance so check for yourself whether the monster i'm fighting is imaginary check for yourself whether there's a real free software that really does useful things. it's a pleasure to have you on the show and. please join us again same place same time and once a part of. new

york london. the whole world is on the. computer of the original one the one on the end of their phone the two hang up the corner that building at the end of the street another one the more transparent society gets the money or the public tears become we see military and state and police forces mobilized against people who blend into the city hobbit the city the more people trust electronic devices the more defenseless the. fear that it is a thousand days on our t.v. .

the g. twenty fourteen promises we call tonight an exhilarating winter in our team a team you still need and use in no way i'm a criminal in the rest of our lives take news team for sochi twenty four take. all odds. i think great thing about saatchi is that it's see you need it it was most listed here we are at the seashore here it's always really warm but in krasnaya polyana which is just forty six kilometers from here there's plenty of fresh powder to be stooped so. this is very convenient there is going to have snow in the end everybody's comfortable. absolute circumglobal fans are comfortable well that's what makes you so choose so unique. because why it's it is

perfect at least for the winter olympics. i mean were else do you have this. is obviously more for the ladies because it's pink. when they wanted to avoid rape they really needed to buy guns to learn how to use them i. am sure this is the one that i want to go with someone to give us the feel that. women are definitely a target of the gun loving one you don't want to kill them i'm going to kill me money but if somebody would do this with her. i know to say more and more if that's really scary marketing tactics which implies that women have some sort of moral obligation to guns to protect their family and young girls shoot out here too so we do have a pink or. more kids young kids choke on food than are killed by firearms if

being armed made us safer in america we should be the safest nation on earth we're clearly not the safest. the lead the in the of. the of. the in the the a. little. the olympic fever sweeping sochi is the game is why.