doesn't the quest for freedom often result in divorced form of tyranny to discuss that i'm knowledge joined by famous technologist and philosopher richard stallman dr spellman thank you very much for your time i know that you've been a very vocal advocate of freedom for many many years and you define freedom as having control and though having control of your own life exactly and i think that whenever we speak about the use of software or even about governance having control presupposes some sort of knowledge some sort of expertise and my question to you whether that makes a privilege something that you have to actually work for something that you have to earn and deserve rather than you know you know you disagree totally first of all we need to distinguish freedom from power freedom is having control of your own life but when power is when one person has control over another person's life and

freedom it's certainly not a privilege everyone's entitled to freedom. to the extent it is at all possible you just said everyone is entitled to freedom but my question to you is whether everyone can really use freedom of course you know even if you don't know all the details about how a computer system is implemented you can still exercise control over what that computer system does now this is an interesting point because when you're using a program freedom means having control over what that program does now there can be there's individual control one user at a time and then there's collective control groups of users up to the size of the whole world exercising control over that program but all of those are the opposite of power power is what happens with

a non free program where there's an entity that's the owner and that owner controls the program and the program controls the users so this is the injustice when there isn't freedom if you can transfer it see the political aspect of things i know that you've been involved in politics as well it's almost anathema in the western political thought to suggest that certain countries or people may not be qualified for freedom but i think it's a very interesting idea to ponder and let's let's take the example of libya i know that it caught your attention back in two thousand and eleven the year for a very vocal critic of god alfie you called him a butcher and. i think by now it's been valas stablished that the extent of that office pitcher 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 us as well delivered people up to his his. his dissidents dissidents from libya who had fled they were delivered up together fee 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. would like to 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 know 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 you can't tell except if 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 not wanting to respect human rights properly but it looks like they're going to have another free election that's sobering syria they

have at syria things have gone horribly in 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 well barack 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 if you were

a very vocal supporter of that revolution at least that was the 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 while 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 was a human though that i'd criticize that on all of the answers 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 try 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 later 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 can really be sure that you know the results of the that revolution if it ever happens won't be. hijacked by people who have it's a question arius and there's no 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 they have in digital life. what we see happening is a transition from non digital life in which people mostly have a lot of what tanami 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 an injustice 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 to 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 isn't spinal column on the other users how can we ensure that the intent is benevolent even though depending on other people in a society doesn't guarantee things who are 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 were is when you're depending on other users you've got a pretty good chance it's going to be more west 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 our love for it to be depend on other users rather than on somebody whose interest is to take advantage of users just a use there for a tyrant in a metaphorical sense i think i can also do. the same thing and use the same analogy that he wasn't 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 i believe each other that much and if they if they do they do if you go to their son 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 for it just how far 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 isn't the average yet it isn't over yet it in both the years that you have made it was the lesser of the two evils and i don't think so i don't think it was the lesser of the say it was anything you wanted i was an early 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 duffy i don't know what's going to happen was 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 tyrants i'm sorry because that guarantees tyranny now you're right that when i compared 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's for us of big tac minds keeps adding digits doesn't reach is still month risk becoming they don't get hold of the digital world that's coming up in a few moments on wilds apart. our

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to find out more visit our big. welcome back to the part where we're discussing digital freedom and oppression with richard stallman mr stallman you have a very interesting life the loss of fear you are 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 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 then you've 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 what that main tail but how can you really do that and. how do you not have a hold a phone it's not that hard when i need to. make a call i find somebody and say would you please let 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 for 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 they would in their person who has a family 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 surveillance 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 a fridge you can count again you can have a recount and i think in many of your ideas you really chide syria advocate these returns sort of pre-digital in the sense as israel where 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've 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 where do you stand on that issue of whether you believe that come for that convene we can't come 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 then 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 you just mentioned microsoft and facebook and other companies and in the first part of the program we

had a somewhat hit a 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 pasa fuser is a proprietary software. at least we know them motive that motive is to make as much money out of us and to keep us as consumers matter what we know their motive i think it matters because it allows us 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 are 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 there. well i don't know their hand on competition 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 were 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 agile 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 we'll be surveilling our own people so this is what i think of as the scandal 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 these 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 i think 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 is 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 you know 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 apply kubel 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 if you like the program please join us again same place same time and want apart.

as you know. everyone in my life that i cared about their government and then. i came to skin. i was a national champion in track and field and also was able to go in qualify for the olympic games. you know nine hundred eighty eight i started to experiment with that the drugs i had lost all the financial means that i. was really on the street. black large black kids. came to

a great. trip to. new york to london. the whole world is on the. streets of the original one a further one down the end of their phone the two hang up the corners 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 police false is mobilized against people who blend into the city doing the hobbit the city the more people trust electronic devices the more new front slows the. fear that it has a thousand on is on our t.v. .

coming up on our t. was still a convo we power grid under a tag a former federal regulator claims first shot up a power substation all the f.b.i. denies that it was an act of terror we'll have more details on that ahead and just one day. until the start of the sochi olympics athletes representing nations from around the world are warming up before the events begin a report from the resort city coming up and the birth rate in the u.s. continues to drop are americans in a romantic recession palantir that later in the show. it's thursday february sixth four pm in one.