Re: Let's get to work

[pj lilley <pj@tao.ca>]

[: hacktivism :]

> important, or else this huge wave of info will just wash past people.
> Translations are great. We should at least try to get a Spanish, Mandarin,
> Cantonese, Russian and Arabic translations of the call for action
> circulating before the day.  That would be great.

i suspect according to the designers of echelon, sending *any* messages in
mandarin, russian or arabic would be deserving of monitoring.

so if we're so hot to be international, why not translate something for
the anti-WTO movement.  seattle round coming up, and large portions of the
planet who speak the languages you mention are eager to expose
the gross human rights and environmental violations caused by the WTO
legal framework and IMF-imposed structural adjustment.  seems to me that
sort of translation work might have a bit more impact on stopping police
brutality than asking people to try to get themselves tracked.  

i think, like with the EDT, i may have fundamentally missed the point of
how sending some hot words is going to either help or hurt anti-police
brutality day.  and i almost laughed out loud that rdom calls
jam-echelon-day a "grassroots movement"... i was sooo curious as to the
def'n of such, after the vagueness of the def'n of hacktion here in the
first place.  but don't worry, stefan wray has cleared it up for me that
right and left don't really matter anyway, as long as it's all open!  
happy happy.  i really don't want any more e-mail on the jam day. info on
physicalities of echelon welcome, but again, i really don't see how we're
in much of a position to bring public pressure to bear, without aforesaid
_grassroots movement_.

i mean, i know where the defense department is in ottawa, but moving it
from making war to making --oh, say, housing, is a much larger political
task than just exposing it's war budget and weapons.

so far, i must say i think that this list is the very best thing yet that
i've seen for neo-liberal governments like the one over me to justify
increased budgets of surveillance and repression against, as they put it,
"non-profit groups fronting for cyber-terrorism".   how dreary and even
offensive.

-=pj=-


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