Forgive me, this post is intended to be facetious.
My personal view is that the societal desire for and against privacy and human rights always trumps any technological barriers. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were able to do pretty bad things despite having relatively primitive technology. Examples date back to the dawn of recorded history. Even today, I can be tracked using my license plate number, fingerprints, DNA, etc. pretty handily. Where there is a will, there is a way. Fortunately, our society does not have the political will to do it--and, in fact, would likely find inappropriate tracking to be revolting.
In this respect I think Stallman is way off base. Fighting to make sure your phone runs OSS does little to ensure that the culture we live in values the right things and has an ideal political structure (representative democracy). I'd argue it's a dangerous distraction, in fact, because it promulgates the incorrect notion that if only we had open technology, we'd be free from criminals, dictators, and other bad things, and we'd live in a world of ponies and rainbows. Because this is not true, I fear this effort diverts attention from where it deserves to be. That said, RMS's scare tactics to help to some degree, by reminding people that our societal values will always need to be projected into the latest wave of technology. I think this tends to happen naturally and organically, but whatever.
Fortunately, the flipside is pretty good: given the right political environment, privacy and technological regulation can coexist peacefully. This is good because some amount of regulation of the commons is necessary and good, and this extends to new technologies (like the car, or the cell phone).
My personal view is that the societal desire for and against privacy and human rights always trumps any technological barriers. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were able to do pretty bad things despite having relatively primitive technology. Examples date back to the dawn of recorded history. Even today, I can be tracked using my license plate number, fingerprints, DNA, etc. pretty handily. Where there is a will, there is a way. Fortunately, our society does not have the political will to do it--and, in fact, would likely find inappropriate tracking to be revolting.
In this respect I think Stallman is way off base. Fighting to make sure your phone runs OSS does little to ensure that the culture we live in values the right things and has an ideal political structure (representative democracy). I'd argue it's a dangerous distraction, in fact, because it promulgates the incorrect notion that if only we had open technology, we'd be free from criminals, dictators, and other bad things, and we'd live in a world of ponies and rainbows. Because this is not true, I fear this effort diverts attention from where it deserves to be. That said, RMS's scare tactics to help to some degree, by reminding people that our societal values will always need to be projected into the latest wave of technology. I think this tends to happen naturally and organically, but whatever.
Fortunately, the flipside is pretty good: given the right political environment, privacy and technological regulation can coexist peacefully. This is good because some amount of regulation of the commons is necessary and good, and this extends to new technologies (like the car, or the cell phone).