Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

“The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it” was a very motivating tagline during my early forays into the internet. Having grown up in Apartheid-era South Africa, where government control suppressed the free flow of ideas and information, I was inspired by the idea of connecting with people all over the world to explore the cutting edge of science and technology. Today, people connect with peers and fellow explorers all over the world not just for science but also for arts, culture, friendship, relationships and more. The Internet is the glue that is turning us into a super-organism, for better or worse. And yes, there are dark sides to that easy exchange – internet comments alone will make you cry. But we should remember that the brain is smart even if individual brain cells are dumb, and negative, nasty elements on the Internet are just part of a healthy whole. There’s no Department of Morals I would trust to weed ’em out or protect me or mine from them.

Today, the pendulum is swinging back to government control of speech, most notably on the net. First, it became clear that total surveillance is the norm even amongst Western democratic governments (the “total information act” reborn).  Now we hear the UK government wants to be able to ban organisations without any evidence of involvement in illegal activities because they might “poison young minds”. Well, nonsense. Frustrated young minds will go off to Syria precisely BECAUSE they feel their avenues for discourse and debate are being shut down by an unfair and unrepresentative government – you couldn’t ask for a more compelling motivation for the next generation of home-grown anti-Western jihadists than to clamp down on discussion without recourse to due process. And yet, at the same time this is happening in the UK, protesters in Hong Kong are moving to peer-to-peer mechanisms to organise their protests precisely because of central control of the flow of information.

One of the reasons I picked the certificate and security business back in the 1990’s was because I wanted to be part of letting people communicate privately and securely, for business and pleasure. I’m saddened now at the extent to which the promise of that security has been undermined by state pressure and bad actors in the business of trust.

So I think it’s time that those of us who invest time, effort and money in the underpinnings of technology focus attention on the defensibility of the core freedoms at the heart of the internet.

There are many efforts to fix this under way. The IETF is slowly become more conscious of the ways in which ideals can be undermined and the central role it can play in setting standards which are robust in the face of such inevitable pressure. But we can do more, and I’m writing now to invite applications for Fellowships at the Shuttleworth Foundation by leaders that are focused on these problems. TSF already has Fellows working on privacy in personal communications; we are interested in generalising that to the foundations of all communications. We already have a range of applications in this regard, I would welcome more. And I’d like to call attention to the Edgenet effort (distributing network capabilities, based on zero-mq) which is holding a sprint in Brussels October 30-31.

20 years ago, “Clipper” (a proposed mandatory US government back door, supported by the NSA) died on the vine thanks to a concerted effort by industry to show the risks inherent to such schemes. For two decades we’ve had the tide on the side of those who believe it’s more important for individuals and companies to be able to protect information than it is for security agencies to be able to monitor it. I’m glad that today, you are more likely to get into trouble if you don’t encrypt sensitive information in transit on your laptop than if you do. I believe that’s the right side to fight for and the right side for all of our security in the long term, too. But with mandatory back doors back on the table we can take nothing for granted – regulatory regimes can and do change, as often for the worse as for the better. If you care about these issues, please take action of one form or another.

Law enforcement is important. There are huge dividends to a society in which people to make long term plans, which depends on their confidence in security and safety as much as their confidence in economic fairness and opportunity. But the agencies in whom we place this authority are human and tend over time, like any institution, to be more forceful in defending their own existence and privileges than they are in providing for the needs of others. There has never been an institution in history which has managed to avoid this cycle. For that reason, it’s important to ensure that law enforcement is done by due process; there are no short cuts which will not be abused sooner rather than later. Checks and balances are more important than knee-jerk responses to the last attack. Every society, even today’s modern Western society, is prone to abusive governance. We should fear our own darknesses more than we fear others.

A fair society is one where laws are clear and crimes are punished in a way that is deemed fair. It is not one where thinking about crime is criminal, or one where talking about things that are unpalatable is criminal, or one where everybody is notionally protected from the arbitrary and the capricious. Over the past 20 years life has become safer, not more risky, for people living in an Internet-connected West. That’s no thanks to the listeners; it’s thanks to living in a period when the youth (the source of most trouble in the world) feel they have access to opportunity and ideas on a world-wide basis. We are pretty much certain to have hard challenges ahead in that regard. So for all the scaremongering about Chinese cyber-espionage and Russian cyber-warfare and criminal activity in darknets, we are better off keeping the Internet as a free-flowing and confidential medium than we are entrusting an agency with the job of monitoring us for inappropriate and dangerous ideas. And that’s something we’ll have to work for.

Quick question – we have Cloud Foundry in private beta now, is there anyone in the Ubuntu community who would like to use a Cloud Foundry instance if we were to operate that for Ubuntu members?

Be careful of headlines, they appeal to our sense of the obvious and the familiar, they entrench rather than challenge established stereotypes and memes. What one doesn’t read about every day is usually more interesting than what’s in the headlines. And in the current round of global unease, what’s not being said – what we’ve failed to admit about our Western selves and our local allies – is central to the problems at hand.

Both Iraq and Ukraine, under Western tutelage, failed to create states which welcome diversity. Both Iraq and the Ukraine aggressively marginalised significant communities, with the full knowledge and in some cases support of their Western benefactors. And in both cases, those disenfranchised communities have rallied their cause into wars of aggression.

Reading the Western media one would think it’s clear who the aggressors are in both cases: Islamic State and Russia are “obvious bad actors” who’s behaviour needs to be met with stern action. Russia clearly has no business arming rebels with guns they use irresponsibly to tragic effect, and the Islamic State are clearly “a barbaric, evil force”. If those gross simplifications, reinforced in the Western media, define our debate and discussion on the subject then we are destined pursue some painful paths with little but frustration to show for the effort, and nasty thorns that fester indefinitely. If that sounds familiar it’s because yes, this is the same thing happening all over again. In a prior generation, only a decade ago, anger and frustration at 9/11 crowded out calm deliberation and a focus on the crimes in favour of shock and awe. Today, out of a lack of insight into the root cause of Ukrainian separatism and Islamic State’s attractiveness to a growing number across the Middle East and North Africa, we are about to compound our problems by slugging our way into a fight we should understand before we join.

This is in no way to say that the behaviour of Islamic State or Russia are acceptable in modern society. They are not. But we must take responsibility for our own behaviour first and foremost; time and history are the best judges of the behaviour of others.

In the case of the Ukraine, it’s important to know how miserable it has become for native Russian speakers born and raised in the Ukraine. People who have spent their entire lives as citizens of the Ukraine who happen to speak in Russian at home, at work, in church and at social events have found themselves discriminated against by official decree from Kiev. Friends of mine with family in Odessa tell me that there have been systematic attempts to undermine and disenfranchise Russian speaking in the Ukraine. “You may not speak in your home language in this school”. “This market can only be conducted in Ukrainian, not Russian”. It’s important to appreciate that being a Russian speaker in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mean one is not perfectly happy to be a Ukranian. It just means that the Ukraine is a diverse cultural nation and has been throughout our lifetimes. This is a classic story of discrimination. Friends of mine who grew up in parts of Greece tell a similar story about the Macedonian culture being suppressed – schools being forced to punish Macedonian language spoken on the playground.

What we need to recognise is that countries – nations – political structures – which adopt ethnic and cultural purity as a central idea, are dangerous breeding grounds for dissent, revolt and violence. It matters not if the government in question is an ally or a foe. Those lines get drawn and redrawn all the time (witness the dance currently under way to recruit Kurdish and Iranian assistance in dealing with IS, who would have thought!) based on marriages of convenience and hot button issues of the day. Turning a blind eye to thuggery and stupidity on the part of your allies is just as bad as making sure you’re hanging with the cool kids on the playground even if it happens that they are thugs and bullies –  stupid and shameful short-sightedness.

In Iraq, the government installed and propped up with US money and materials (and the occasional slap on the back from Britain) took a pointedly sectarian approach to governance. People of particular religious communities were removed from positions of authority, disqualified from leadership, hunted and imprisoned and tortured. The US knew that leading figures in their Iraqi government were behaving in this way, but chose to continue supporting the government which protected these thugs because they were “our people”. That was a terrible mistake, because it is those very communities which have morphed into Islamic State.

The modern nation states we call Iraq and the Ukraine – both with borders drawn in our modern lifetimes – are intrinsically diverse, intrinsically complex, intrinsically multi-cultural parts of the world. We should know that a failure to create governments of that diversity, for that diversity, will result in murderous resentment. And yet, now that the lines for that resentment are drawn, we are quick to choose sides, precisely the wrong position to take.

What makes this so sad is that we know better and demand better for ourselves. The UK and the US are both countries who have diversity as a central tenet of their existence. Freedom of religion, freedom of expression, the right to a career and to leadership on the basis of competence rather than race or creed are major parts of our own identity. And yet we prop up states who take precisely the opposite approach, and wonder why they fail, again and again. We came to these values through blood and pain, we hold on to these values because we know first hand how miserable and how wasteful life becomes if we let human tribalism tear our communities apart. There are doors to universities in the UK on which have hung the bodies of religious dissidents, and we will never allow that to happen again at home, yet we prop up governments for whom that is the norm.

The Irish Troubles was a war nobody could win. It was resolved through dialogue. South African terrorism in the 80’s was a war nobody could win. It was resolved through dialogue and the establishment of a state for everybody. Time and time again, “terrorism” and “barbarism” are words used to describe fractious movements by secure, distant seats of power, and in most of those cases, allowing that language to dominate our thinking leads to wars that nobody can win.

Russia made a very grave error in arming Russian-speaking Ukranian separatists. But unless the West holds Kiev to account for its governance, unless it demands an open society free of discrimination, the misery there will continue. IS will gain nothing but contempt from its demonstrations of murder – there is no glory in violence on the defenceless and the innocent – but unless the West bends its might to the establishment of societies in Syria and Iraq in which these religious groups are welcome and free to pursue their ambitions, murder will be the only outlet for their frustration. Politicians think they have a new “clean” way to exert force – drones and airstrikes without “boots on the ground”. Believe me, that’s false. Remote control warfare will come home to fester on our streets.