#War & Treaty

[justaz]

i prefer happy ending bbc merlin where morgana becomes court sorceress and arthur becomes king and merlin remains as his servant (until they eventually marry) and lancelot lives and he and gwen marry but that damn game of thrones (?? probably idk) audio on tiktok that goes “i mean to fight this war and win it.” “good. to war then.” keeps giving me visions of king arthur of camelot on the verge of war with other kingdoms and his powerful court sorcerer merlin standing by his throne. arthur declares that he wishes to go to war and merlin (eager to bring about the united albion the prophecies speak of) supports arthur immediately and declares they’re going to war

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Every internet fight is a speech fight

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Hard (Sovereignty) Cases Make Bad (Internet) Law," an attempt to cut through the knots we tie ourselves in when speech and national sovereignty collide online:

https://locusmag.com/2024/11/cory-doctorow-hard-sovereignty-cases-make-bad-internet-law/

This happens all the time. Indeed, the precipitating incident for my writing this column was someone commenting on the short-lived Brazilian court order blocking Twitter, opining that this was purely a matter of national sovereignty, with no speech dimension.

This is just profoundly wrong. Of course any rules about blocking a communications medium will have a free-speech dimension – how could it not? And of course any dispute relating to globe-spanning medium will have a national sovereignty dimension.

How could it not?

So if every internet fight is a speech fight and a sovereignty fight, which side should we root for? Here's my proposal: we should root for human rights.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the US government was illegally wiretapping the whole world. They were able to do this because the world is dominated by US-based tech giants and they shipped all their data stateside for processing. These tech giants secretly colluded with the NSA to help them effect this illegal surveillance (the "Prism" program) – and then the NSA stabbed them in the back by running another program ("Upstream") where they spied on the tech giants without their knowledge.

After the Snowden revelations, countries around the world enacted "data localization" rules that required any company doing business within their borders to keep their residents' data on domestic servers. Obviously, this has a human rights dimension: keeping your people's data out of the hands of US spy agencies is an important way to defend their privacy rights. which are crucial to their speech rights (you can't speak freely if you're being spied on).

So when the EU, a largely democratic bloc, enacted data localization rules, they were harnessing national soveriegnty in service to human rights.

But the EU isn't the only place that enacted data-localization rules. Russia did the same thing. Once again, there's a strong national sovereignty case for doing this. Even in the 2010s, the US and Russia were hostile toward one another, and that hostility has only ramped up since. Russia didn't want its data stored on NSA-accessible servers for the same reason the USA wouldn't want all its' people's data stored in GRU-accessible servers.

But Russia has a significantly poorer human rights record than either the EU or the USA (note that none of these are paragons of respect for human rights). Russia's data-localization policy was motivated by a combination of legitimate national sovereignty concerns and the illegitimate desire to conduct domestic surveillance in order to identify and harass, jail, torture and murder dissidents.

When you put it this way, it's obvious that national sovereignty is important, but not as important as human rights, and when they come into conflict, we should side with human rights over sovereignty.

Some more examples: Thailand's lesse majeste rules prohibit criticism of their corrupt monarchy. Foreigners who help Thai people circumvent blocks on reportage of royal corruption are violating Thailand's national sovereignty, but they're upholding human rights:

https://www.vox.com/2020/1/24/21075149/king-thailand-maha-vajiralongkorn-facebook-video-tattoos

Saudi law prohibits criticism of the royal family; when foreigners help Saudi women's rights activists evade these prohibitions, we violate Saudi sovereignty, but uphold human rights:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55467414

In other words, "sovereignty, yes; but human rights even moreso."

Which brings me back to the precipitating incidents for the Locus column: the arrest of billionaire Telegram owner Pavel Durov in France, and the blocking of billionaire Elon Musk's Twitter in Brazil.

How do we make sense of these? Let's start with Durov. We still don't know exactly why the French government arrested him (legal systems descended from the Napoleonic Code are weird). But the arrest was at least partially motivated by a demand that Telegram conform with a French law requiring businesses to have a domestic agent to receive and act on takedown demands.

Not every takedown demand is good. When a lawyer for the Sackler family demanded that I take down criticism of his mass-murdering clients, that was illegitimate. But there is such a thing as a legitimate takedown: leaked financial information, child sex abuse material, nonconsensual pornography, true threats, etc, are all legitimate targets for takedown orders. Of course, it's not that simple. Even if we broadly agree that this stuff shouldn't be online, we don't necessarily agree whether something fits into one of these categories.

This is true even in categories with the brightest lines, like child sex abuse material:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/09/facebook-reinstates-napalm-girl-photo

And the other categories are far blurrier, like doxing:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-camp-worked-with-musks-x-to

But just because not every takedown is a just one, it doesn't follow that every takedown is unjust. The idea that companies should have domestic agents in the countries where they operate isn't necessarily oppressive. If people who sell hamburgers from a street-corner have to register a designated contact with a regulator, why not someone who operates a telecoms network with 900m global users?

Of course, requirements to have a domestic contact can also be used as a prelude to human rights abuses. Countries that insist on a domestic rep are also implicitly demanding that the company place one of its employees or agents within reach of its police-force.

Just as data localization can be a way to improve human rights (by keeping data out of the hands of another country's lawless spy agencies) or to erode them (by keeping data within reach of your own country's lawless spy agencies), so can a requirement for a local agent be a way to preserve the rule of law (by establishing a conduit for legitimate takedowns) or a way to subvert it (by giving the government hostages they can use as leverage against companies who stick up for their users' rights).

In the case of Durov and Telegram, these issues are especially muddy. Telegram bills itself as an encrypted messaging app, but that's only sort of true. Telegram does not encrypt its group-chats, and even the encryption in its person-to-person messaging facility is hard to use and of dubious quality.

This is relevant because France – among many other governments – has waged a decades-long war against encrypted messaging, which is a wholly illegitimate goal. There is no way to make an encrypted messaging tool that works against bad guys (identity thieves, stalkers, corporate and foreign spies) but not against good guys (cops with legitimate warrants). Any effort to weaken end-to-end encrypted messaging creates broad, significant danger for every user of the affected service, all over the world. What's more, bans on end-to-end encrypted messaging tools can't stand on their own – they also have to include blocks of much of the useful internet, mandatory spyware on computers and mobile devices, and even more app-store-like control over which software you can install:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

So when the French state seizes Durov's person and demands that he establish the (pretty reasonable) minimum national presence needed to coordinate takedown requests, it can seem like this is a case where national sovereignty and human rights are broadly in accord.

But when you consider that Durov operates a (nominally) encrypted messaging tool that bears some resemblance to the kinds of messaging tools the French state has been trying to sabotage for decades, and continues to rail against, the human rights picture gets rather dim.

That is only slightly mitigated by the fact that Telegram's encryption is suspect, difficult to use, and not applied to the vast majority of the communications it serves. So where do we net out on this? In the Locus column, I sum things up this way:

Telegram should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

Telegram should not backdoor its encryption, even if

the sovereign French state orders it to do so.

Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso.

What about Musk? As with Durov in France, the Brazilian government demanded that Musk appoint a Brazilian representative to handle official takedown requests. Despite a recent bout of democratic backsliding under the previous regime, Brazil's current government is broadly favorable to human rights. There's no indication that Brazil would use an in-country representative as a hostage, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with requiring foreign firms doing business in your country to have domestic representatives.

Musk's response was typical: a lawless, arrogant attack on the judge who issued the blocking order, including thinly veiled incitements to violence.

The Brazilian state's response was multi-pronged. There was a national blocking order, and a threat to penalize Brazilians who used VPNs to circumvent the block. Both measures have obvious human rights implications. For one thing, the vast majority of Brazilians who use Twitter are engaged in the legitimate exercise of speech, and they were collateral damage in the dispute between Musk and Brazil.

More serious is the prohibition on VPNs, which represents a broad attack on privacy-enhancing technology with implications far beyond the Twitter matter. Worse still, a VPN ban can only be enforced with extremely invasive network surveillance and blocking orders to app stores and ISPs to restrict access to VPN tools. This is wholly disproportionate and illegitimate.

But that wasn't the only tactic the Brazilian state used. Brazilian corporate law is markedly different from US law, with fewer protections for limited liability for business owners. The Brazilian state claimed the right to fine Musk's other companies for Twitter's failure to comply with orders to nominate a domestic representative. Faced with fines against Spacex and Tesla, Musk caved.

In other words, Brazil had a legitimate national sovereignty interest in ordering Twitter to nominate a domestic agent, and they used a mix of somewhat illegitimate tactics (blocking orders), extremely illegitimate tactics (threats against VPN users) and totally legitimate tactics (fining Musk's other companies) to achieve these goals.

As I put it in the column:

Twitter should have a mechanism to comply with lawful takedown orders; and

those orders should respect human rights and the rule of law; and

banning Twitter is bad for the free speech rights of Twitter users in Brazil; and

banning VPNs is bad for all Brazilian internet users; and

it’s hard to see how a Twitter ban will be effective without bans on VPNs.

There's no such thing as an internet policy fight that isn't about national sovereignty and speech, and when the two collide, we should side with human rights over sovereignty. Sovereignty isn't a good unto itself – it's only a good to the extent that is used to promote human rights.

In other words: "Sovereignty, sure, but human rights even moreso."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/06/brazilian-blowout/#sovereignty-sure-but-human-rights-even-moreso

Image: © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Border_Wall_at_Tijuana_and_San_Diego_Border.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[alwaysbewoke]

[fabuloustrash05]

I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but I dislike it when in modern Greek myth retellings nowadays there’s a side plot of Hera having an affair with one of Zeus’ brothers, Hades or Poseidon.

Webtoon’s Lore Olympus and Netflix’s series Kaos have both done this and I’m already tired of it.

[friedrich-2]

Friedrich Wilhelm III at the Treaty of Tilsit 1807, colorized.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

writing history be like

when i started actually writing i had about 3,000 MS word pages of research organized along chronological chapter lines.

the actual finished product will probably be around ~250 pages

it's a literal (metaphorical) iceberg.

also, my footnotes are CHONKY*

NEW FOLLOWERS NOTE: my ~debut~ work of narrative history, about female jewish resistance workers in poland during the holocaust, will be published by harpercollins next fall.

*and divided into endnotes for sourcing and feetnote for information that doesn't quite fit into the narrative but still needs to be there. those don't really figure into the iceberg metaphor tho

[howlerbat]

my scientific rendition of the Treaties of Tilsit

[wordsaficionado]

If you’re ever insecure about how often you use commas or how long your sentences are I IMPLORE you to read the Treaty of Paris (1783), specifically article two.

510 words.

2 periods.

FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN WORDS.

A GRAND TOTAL OF TWO SENTENCES!

SIGNED BY DOZENS OF PEOPLE TO SET UP A TREATY AND AUTHORIZE LAND!!

Like don’t worry babes your 3 commas and semi colon are NOTHING to the revolution era and that’s what truly matters.

[ciderbird]

was in Hermitage today and found this amazing composition

the exes reunited

[pratchettquotes]

"You thought the bunting and fireworks and handshakes and pledges after Koom Valley was signed and sealed was the end of it, yes? Personally, I have always considered this a mere interlude. In short, Margolotta, peace is what you have while incubating the next war. It is impossible to accommodate everyone and twice as impossible to please all dwarfs."

Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam

[vpofcookies]

Have y'all heard the story where hair was a symbol of peace because rulers would cut their hair when they declared war - so long hair represented a peaceful empire, a powerful group that no one dared to threaten, or a ruler that was slow to anger?

Consider: antarctic empire where philza's hair is short to show that he is constantly prepared to battle the threats around them with full military force vs Techno with long hair as a sign that the enemies around them will have no impact on the peace within the empire because the threat they pose is so insignificant he won't even acknowledge it. The threat would be gone before he would finish cutting his hair and so he doesn't.

[alwaysbewoke]

#Sudan #KeepEyesOnSudan

[xtruss]

Native Tribe To Get Back Land 160 Years After Largest Mass Hanging In US History

Upper Sioux Agency state park in Minnesota, where bodies of those killed after US-Dakota war are buried, to be transferred

— Associated Press | Sunday 3 September, 2023

The Upper Sioux Agency State Park near Granite Falls, Minnesota. Photograph: Trisha Ahmed/AP

Golden prairies and winding rivers of a Minnesota state park also hold the secret burial sites of Dakota people who died as the United States failed to fulfill treaties with Native Americans more than a century ago. Now their descendants are getting the land back.

The state is taking the rare step of transferring the park with a fraught history back to a Dakota tribe, trying to make amends for events that led to a war and the largest mass hanging in US history.

“It’s a place of holocaust. Our people starved to death there,” said Kevin Jensvold, chairman of the Upper Sioux Community, a small tribe with about 550 members just outside the park.

The Upper Sioux Agency state park in south-western Minnesota spans a little more than 2 sq miles (about 5 sq km) and includes the ruins of a federal complex where officers withheld supplies from Dakota people, leading to starvation and deaths.

Decades of tension exploded into the US-Dakota war of 1862 between settler-colonists and a faction of Dakota people, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. After the US won the war, the government hanged more people than in any other execution in the nation. A memorial honors the 38 Dakota men killed in Mankato, 110 miles (177km) from the park.

Jensvold said he has spent 18 years asking the state to return the park to his tribe. He began when a tribal elder told him it was unjust Dakota people at the time needed to pay a state fee for each visit to the graves of their ancestors there.

Native American tribe in Maine buys back Island taken 160 years ago! The Passamaquoddy’s purchase of Pine Island for $355,000 is the latest in a series of successful ‘land back’ campaigns for indigenous people in the US. Pine Island. Photograph: Courtesy the writer, Alice Hutton. Friday 4 June, 2021

Lawmakers finally authorized the transfer this year when Democrats took control of the house, senate and governor’s office for the first time in nearly a decade, said State Senator Mary Kunesh, a Democrat and descendant of the Standing Rock Nation.

Tribes speaking out about injustices have helped more people understand how lands were taken and treaties were often not upheld, Kunesh said, adding that people seem more interested now in “doing the right thing and getting lands back to tribes”.

But the transfer also would mean fewer tourists and less money for the nearby town of Granite Falls, said Mayor Dave Smiglewski. He and other opponents say recreational land and historic sites should be publicly owned, not given to a few people, though lawmakers set aside funding for the state to buy land to replace losses in the transfer.

The park is dotted with hiking trails, campsites, picnic tables, fishing access, snowmobiling and horseback riding routes and tall grasses with wildflowers that dance in hot summer winds.

“People that want to make things right with history’s injustices are compelled often to support action like this without thinking about other ramifications,” Smiglewski said. “A number, if not a majority, of state parks have similar sacred meaning to Indigenous tribes. So where would it stop?”

In recent years, some tribes in the US, Canada and Australia have gotten their rights to ancestral lands restored with the growth of the Land Back movement, which seeks to return lands to Indigenous people.

‘It’s a powerful feeling’: the Indigenous American tribe helping to bring back buffalo 🦬! Matt Krupnick in Wolakota Buffalo Range, South Dakota. Sunday 20 February, 2022. The Wolakota Buffalo Range in South Dakota has swelled to 750 bison with a goal of reaching 1,200. Photograph: Matt Krupnick

A National Park has never been transferred from the US government to a tribal nation, but a handful are Co-managed with Tribes, including Grand Portage National Nonument in northern Minnesota, Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona and Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles of the National Park Service said.

This will be the first time Minnesota transfers a state park to a Native American community, said Ann Pierce, director of Minnesota State Parks and trails at the natural resources department.

Minnesota’s transfer, expected to take years to finish, is tucked into several large bills covering several issues. The bills allocate more than $6m to facilitate the transfer by 2033. The money can be used to buy land with recreational opportunities and pay for appraisals, road and bridge demolition and other engineering.

Chris Swedzinski and Gary Dahms, the Republican lawmakers representing the portion of the state encompassing the park, declined through their aides to comment about their stances on the transfer.

— The Guardian USA

[jamisonwritestf2trash]

Medic and Archimedes:

[jessicas-pi]

hear me out on this ok. ROTS AU where Anakin still turns to the dark side but that's Palpatine's problem.

So, Palpatine decides last minute that ehhhh maybe dooku could come in handy later and he doesn't encourage Anakin to kill him, and Dooku gets arrested and imprisoned in the Jedi Temple awaiting trial. (Also he didn't get his hands cut off because of uhh plot reasons?)

Fast forward.

Palpatine is encouraging Anakin towards the Dark side, tells him about Plagueis the Wise, etc. etc. But see, the thing is, Anakin is at the end of his tether, probably hasn't slept more than three hours over the past week, and has no remaining impulse control or inhibitions, and upon hearing that the Dark Side can save people from death, his first thought is, "wait a sec, we've got a Sith Lord in-house at the moment!" and he sprints out of the space opera and books it back to the temple.

Now, Dooku has been calmly waiting in Temple custody, confident that Darth Sidious will arrange his escape. But THEN Anakin barges into the cell like OMG THE CHANCELLOR TOLD ME THE SITH KNOW HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM DYING AND I'M HAVING DREAMS ABOUT SOMEONE DYING AND I NEED YOUR HELP TO SAVE THEM

At which point, Dooku realizes Palpatine's plan. He's going to tempt Skywalker to the Dark side and REPLACE DOOKU. this is totally uncool.

So he's like "...who are you dreaming about, exactly?"

Anakin freezes. He can't admit it's Padme because their relationship is top-secret and he can't admit how important she is to him so he tries to think of a good fib and goes "uhhhh OBI-WAN! Obi-Wan, it's Obi-Wan, I'm dreaming about Obi-Wan dying-" and he just throws himself into the drama because now he IS imagining obi-wan dying because Obi-Wan is fighting grievous at the moment and he MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE and that's in addition to Padme dying and he's totally spiraling at this point- "pleasepleaseplease you gotta help me he's like the only father i've ever known I don't know what i'll do without obi-wan I have to save him YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHAT TO DO I'LL DO ANYTHING--"

Dooku begins to smile.

(Would stealing Skywalker out from under his Master's nose be petty? Oh, yeah.)

(But it would also be very, very satisfying.)

---

Obi-Wan calls in to a council meeting to report his defeat of Grievous, but before he can say so, Mace announces that Dooku has escaped and the Sith Master has been killed.

Silence falls between the eleven councilmembers (eleven, not twelve, because their newest one is conspicuously absent. Obi-Wan wonders just what Anakin's up to now. Honestly, that boy will be the death of him.)

Obi-Wan clears his throat.

"...indeed," he says, trying to handle the shocking news with composure. "Well... at least we're down to one Sith, now."

Another awkward pause.

"Yeah, about that--" Mace begins.

[empirearchives]

I like that there are two dudes having a moment in the background during the signing of the treaty of Amiens.

(Also, it’s not clear if the dude in the front left is Joseph or Napoleon)

Painting: The Peace of Amiens by Jules-Claude Ziegler