#bernstein

[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/

[scherzokinn]

Things To Never Say To Someone Who Just Came Out - Composers Edition!

[the-spirit-of-yore]

Château du Bernstein, Alsace, France

[sixty-silver-wishes]

hi classical music tumblr. it has come to my attention that not enough of you are aware of the fact that leonard bernstein wrote poetry. specifically a poem called “life is juicy.” from 1947. and it’s. it’s really one of the poems ever

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.

- Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould plays Bach's Keyboard Concerto in D Minor. In 1960.

Glenn Gould made his television debut on CBS's Ford Presents "The Creative Performer" with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.

[senfonikankara]

Mozart | Piano Concerto No.17, Allegro (Bernstein)

[postcard-from-the-past]

Bernstein Monastery by Sulz am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

German vintage postcard

[allthedesiredusernamesaretaken]

" The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world. "

- Leonard Bernstein

📷 Ruth Orkin

[littleshopofhorrors-confessions]

If we're still talkin bout Sibling headcanons—I HC that Orin is half-siblings wit Mr. Bernstein, Mrs. Luce n Skip Snip cus I think it's funny.

Those three are all very competitive siblings, n why not throw a sadistic dentist into the mix?

I have a bit more information if anyone wants t' hear bout my headcanon more lol — the headcanon is mostly jus, projectin source memories n allat though. But I still think it's fun.

( - I decided I'll probably not be anonymous anymore when sendin in confessions or ask or whatnot, but we'll see how long that lasts 💀)

~~~

[victorlaby]

[jazzandother-blog]

When Miles Davis named the five geniuses of American music

(Credits: Far Out / Tom Palumbo)

Dale Maplethorpe (Far Out Magazine):

Miles Davis will go down as arguably one of the most honest musicians who ever became famous, perfectly personified by his attendance at an awards ceremony at the White House. When asked by someone he described as a “politician’s wife” why America is so keen on neglecting jazz, he answered, “Jazz is ignored here because the white man likes to win everything.”

The woman asked in retaliation, “What have you done that’s so important in your life?”, to which he responded, “Well, I’ve changed music five or six times.” 

He’s not wrong, either. The release of specific Miles Davis albums, from Birth of the Cool to Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew, are viewed less as good moments in musical history and instead as defining moments in American culture. He is the most influential trumpeter and one of the most influential musicians to ever take to the stage, with a sound and style that would shape how America – and subsequently the world – viewed the production of sound. 

His honest attitude towards himself and his music contributed to his success. He could critique himself to the extent that he could bring out the best in his music. He could also look at the music surrounding him to see what was missing and pick out what was wrong with the current musical landscape. That often led to him getting in trouble with some artists, but it also meant when we see the names of those he refers to as geniuses, we can take it at face value.

Davis had previously rubbed American composer Leonard Bernstein the wrong way when he refused to play anything from West Side Story, saying he thought it was “corny shit”. However, when he wrote to Bernstein on his 70th birthday, with decades to reflect on the music and see its impact on the world, he was willing to admit that Berstein was a genius. In doing so, he listed the five people who shaped American music, changing it for the better forever. 

Davis dismissed his previous comments in his letter, confessing West Side Story “turned out to be a classic.” He also noted that Bernstein is one of the great geniuses of American Music. “You are one of America’s true geniuses, along with Monk, Gillespie, Mingus and Parker,” he said.

There is no doubt, looking back, that Davis’s comments on Bernstein are correct. He was one of the first composers whose music expanded outside of America, leading to him cementing himself as one of the greats with a plethora of accolades attached to his name. The same can be said about Thelonious Monk, who worked with Davis previously and had a unique improvisational style that broke barriers and showed musicians how limitless their sounds could be.

The other musicians Davis refers to are Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker. All of them were musicians who had worked well with Davis in the past and helped contribute towards the musical landscape that eventually enveloped American culture. There is no doubt that Miles Davis changed music about five or six times, as he professed during that White House dinner, and Bernstein, Monk, Gillespie, Mingus and Parker are four or five musicians who helped him change it.

Credits: faroutmagazine.co.uk

[shosty-we-understand]

Fun fact! Did you know that Dmitri Shostakovich was nominated for two Grammy Awards during his career?

His Piano Concerto no. 2, Op. 102 (though the Grammy website lists it as op. 101) was nominated at the 2nd Annual Grammy Awards in 1960 for Best Musical Composition First Recorded And Released In 1959 (More Than 5 Minutes Duration), specifically the Leonard Bernstein recording; and his Symphony No. 4, op. 43 was nominated for Best Classical Composition By A Contemporary Composer at the 6th Annual Grammy Awards in 1966.

Unfortunately he didn't win either nomination.

Pictured above is Shostakovich smoking a cigarette with legendary conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein, during Bernstein's trip to Moscow with the New York Philharmonic in 1959, the same year as Bernstein and the Philharmonic's Grammy-nominated performance of Shostakovich's second piano concerto.

[orarosarium]

[the-spirit-of-yore]

Château du Bernstein, Alsace, France

[floraclinton1200]

In this video, Robert Bernstein and Marcia Eckerd discuss effective strategies for improving communication with your child. Learn how to create a situation where your child is more likely to open up and share their thoughts and experiences with you. Discover why so much of the conversation we have with our kids revolves around our agenda and how to shift the focus to their interests.

Find out how to create a sanctuary at home where your child feels accepted and appreciated. Explore the importance of showing genuine interest in what interests your child, whether it's collecting owl figures, makeup, video games, or skateboard tricks. Rob and Marcia also share a cognitive method that works for kids of any age, helping you connect with your child and have meaningful conversations. Watch this video to learn how to strengthen the bond with your child and create a positive and open line of communication.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning. . . without meaning, that is, except its own, a meaning in musical terms, not in terms of words, which inhabit an altogether different mental climate. . . If it could be told in words, then why would Chopin have found it necessary to tell it through notes in the first place?

- Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein at Frédéric Chopin's piano in Warsaw, Poland, 1959.