A few weeks ago, I sat in front of my computer reading about various new surveillance laws in Germany and the United States. Adding that to what I know is happening in China, Burma, Iran and similar places, in addition to the new controversial anti-terrorism law in Denmark (Allowing the police to monitor any telecommunications traffic they want to, in a few cases without a court order), I just got fed up with the whole thing, and got this interesting feeling of rebellion.
In countries like China, the websites of various political groups and human rights observers are censored. Wikipedia for example is blocked in China, and Google’s search results are censored. So with that in mind, I figured that for all I knew, China could be blocking the webpages of GnuPG, which the GNU project’s free implementation of OpenPGP, OpenBSD’s OpenSSH project could be censored as well. Also, the Danish government seems to believe that by subjecting every citizen to possible surveillance, they will automatically prevent terrorists from killing innocent people. Let me tell you something, the real terrorists out there, the ones you really have to be aware of, are smart enough to use stronger encryption than most banks use!! There’s an excellent, and famous (Rightly so) statement by American inventor, journalist, printer, diplomat, and statesman Benjamin Franklin, saying “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”. To me, freedom of speech and privacy are more than essential liberties, they’re human rights, and both are being violated by China, and now the government of Denmark, respectively mind you!
To sort of protest against both of these injustices, I decided to mirror a handful of programs for doing various sorts of cryptography operations. GnuPG for encrypting files, email, chat conversations etc. etc., OpenSSH for logging securely into remote systems (And also transferring files and doing authentication) and OpenSSL for embedding Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security into applications like web browsers and chat clients.
To everybody in countries like China, who might need encryption software, take a look at the “Encryption software” page in the menu to the right of this. It’s only the source code that I have mirrored, because it’s ONLY by having that, that you can be sure that your government is not embedding evil spy features behind your back.
) on the Internet, and wondering what the next 365 days, or year, is gonna be like. It’s really somewhat fascinating, when you sit down and think about it. Time is always an interesting thing, especially when we talk about time and space together, what do we have then? I say we have reality …. the reality that we, and our universe, exists in.
