Why free software is useless when it comes to privacy

Time to go all the way with freedom.

In my previous article, Towards an analog world, I wrote:

no matter how much “librism” we put into IT, we will never be able to solve the problem of access to the materials composing the computers and thus the problem of hardware backdoors

To give some more information about what kind of backdoors I am talking about, I checked all the references given by a quite famous video on the subject.

You will find below the relevant Wikipedia links talking about what the video explained in a short way:

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software)

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_and_Internet_Protocol_Address_Verifier

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Investigative_Technique

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-on-the-side_attack

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Surveillance_Program

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

These links can easily lead you, if you are curious enough, to countless other programs and projects designed to spy on people in general.

In the vast majority of these examples, software and operating systems are not involved at all, hardware is.

Our dependency to microchips, for instance, automatically renders null and void any attempt from free/libre software developers to protect our privacy for sure and for good.

A half truth is a whole lie, and free software advocates that pretend that using free software protects our privacy are indeed lying: it is not enough, in fact, it will never be enough. It is actually a huge effort for a teeny-tiny result (hiding a dependency to computers bigger than the taste of freedom).

There is only two real solutions to this problem:

• use necessarily simple analog designs we know and control entirely

• recreate IT hardware from A to Z, in a way that ensures the same amount of control than over analog designs (that is, let us be honest, very hypothetical and requires first to get rid of the need of using rare materials to avoid a too high concentration of power that could lead to the exact same problem we face nowadays)

In the meantime, it is important to consider our electronic devices (smartphones, computers, TVs, cars, etc.) as public terminals, not private nor secure ones.

Even better, we should really consider them as potential threats to our freedom since even small amounts of apparently innocuous data can be used to better design instruments of surveillance, control and manipulation (social engineering, in short).

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Reminder: the notion of privacy is not directly linked to the synergy of a design, it is however one of the most common characteristics of such design, since it serves freedom, both tending to answer to the criteria of transparency, predictability, reversibility and contentment.

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